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This paper aims to address the imperative of establishing adaptive sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) within the context of export food supply chains (EFSC) in Jordan, with potential global applicability. The research introduces a new conceptual framework validated through the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), prioritizing critical factors based on five expert opinions. The practical and managerial outcomes emphasize achieving sustainable supply chain performance through quality-driven sustainability (QDS), encapsulated in a practical framework (SSCQM). Employing the concept of QDS, this study aims to develop a novel decision framework for Sustainable Supply Chain Quality Management (SSCQM).

Conducted as an empirical qualitative study in Jordan, the research employs a systematic literature review to identify research gaps and establish the initial conceptual framework. A pilot case is subsequently conducted to refine the framework, followed by Case Studies of four Triads, elucidating network relationships between suppliers, manufacturers and customers. A total of 32 semi-structured interviews, complemented by observations, tours and document analysis, individually explored each case during the exploratory stage. Cross-analysis of the four cases at the explanatory stage provides empirical insights, and data triangulation, literature review and validation using NVivo enhance the robustness of the findings.

The amalgamation of the three perspectives, when treated individually, results in the integrated category of QDS influencing sustainability (SUST) performance, evident in economic, environmental and social dimensions. Various sustainable initiatives have emerged through the relationships within the Triad, comprising a company, supplier and customer in the supply chain and its broader environment, including society, aiming for enhanced sustainable development and SUST performance. Recognizing the urgency of Supply Chain Management (SCM) in the Middle East, where global supply chains are susceptible to disruptions leading to food shortages and insecurity, this research investigates the state of EFSC in the export food industry in Jordan. The novel decision (SSCQM) framework equips managers and policymakers with knowledge and practices applicable to focal actors in Triads within their EFSCs, particularly in developing countries, thereby contributing to enhancing the export food industry’s sustainability.

This research provides empirical and contextual justifications for the supply chain-quality model (SSCQM) that advocates for business organizations how a desirable, sizeable and significant outcome/shock can be triggered via embedding quality elements in an international supply chain specifically in Jordan. The research also offers significant implications for practising supply chain experts in terms of how they can effectively utilize the supply chain quality to align other players in the supply chain, revenue potential, customer retainability and employee retention to achieve superior organizational performance. The research selectively encompasses three key perspectives of supply chain networks (SCN), total quality management (TQM) and SUST to elucidate the essence of SCM.

This research contributes towards filling the gap as a lack of empirical research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of demand information sharing on products’ greening levels with downstream competition. Specifically, this study examine two types of green products, “development-intensive” (DI) and “marginal-cost intensive” (MI), in a two-echelon supply chain where the manufacturer produces substitutable products, and competing retailers operate in a market with uncertain demand.

The authors adopt the manufacturer-led Stackelberg game-theoretic framework and consider a multistage game. This study consider how retailers receive private signals about uncertain demand and decide whether to share this information with the manufacturer, who then decides whether to acquire this information at a certain given cost. This paper considers backward induction and Bayesian Nash equilibrium to solve the model.

The authors find that in the absence of competition, information sharing is the only equilibrium and improves the greening level under DI, whereas no-information sharing is the only equilibrium and improves the greening level under MI, an increase in downstream competition drives higher investment in greening efforts by the manufacturer in both DI and MI and the manufacturer needs to offer a payment to the retailers to obtain demand information under both simultaneous and sequential contract schemes.

This paper contributes to the literature by examining how the nature of products (margin intensive green product or development intensive green product) influences green supply chain decisions under information asymmetry and downstream competition.

An increasing number of Danish municipalities wish to minimize tax avoidance due to profit shifting in their public procurement. To facilitate this effort, this study aims to develop a firm-level indicator to assess the potential risk of profit shifting (PS-risk) from Danish subsidiaries of multinational corporations to subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions.

Drawing from previous research, PS-risk is assumed to depend on the maximum difference in the effective corporate tax rate between the Danish subsidiary and other subsidiaries under the global ultimate owner, in conjunction with the tax regulations relevant to profit shifting. The top 400 contractors in Danish municipalities from 2017 to 2019 are identified and their relative PS-risk is estimated by combining information about corporate ownership structure with country-specific information on corporate tax rates, tax regulations and profit shifting from three independent data sets.

The PS-risk estimates are highly significantly positively correlated across the data sets and show that 17%–23% of the total procurement sum of the Danish municipalities has been spent on contracts with corporations having a medium to high PS-risk. On average, PS-risk is highest for large non-Scandinavian multinational contractors in sectors such as construction, health and information processing.

Danish public procurers may use the indicator to screen potential suppliers and, if procurement regulations permit, to ensure high-PS-risk bidders document their tax practices.

The PS-risk indicator is novel, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the analysis provides the first estimate of PS-risk in Danish public procurement.

The importance of service firms cooperating with digital platforms is widely acknowledged. The authors study three contractual relationships (fixed-cost, cost-sharing, and profit-sharing) between service firms (specifically hotels) and digital platforms in a highly fragmented service supply chain to examine which of these contract types optimizes profits.

The authors extend prior models analyzing the optimal expected total profit from the travel service firm (hotel)–digital platform relationship, providing new insights into each contract type’s ability to coordinate decentralized systems and optimize profits for both parties.

This study finds that fixed cost contracts cannot coordinate the decentralized system. Cost-sharing contracts can coordinate the decentralized system but only allow one channel profit split. In contrast, profit-sharing contracts may not always perfectly coordinate the decentralized system but support alternative profit allocations. Practically, both profit-sharing and cost-sharing contracts are preferable to fixed-cost contracts.

The paper includes implications for travel service firm managers to consider when structuring contracts with digital platforms to focus on profit optimization. Profit-sharing contracts are most preferable when cost and revenue data are fully shared between parties, while cost-sharing contracts are preferable over fixed-cost contracts.

This study extends prior investigations into the utility of different contract types on the optimal profit of a travel service firm (hotel)-digital platform provider relationship. The research fills a gap in the literature concerning the contracts used in these relationship types.

There is widespread belief that intermediaries in African agri-food value chains have disproportionate market power. In this paper, the authors examine this belief by uncovering the purchasing and selling prices, costs and profit margins by farmers, intermediaries and retailers in the matooke (cooking banana) value chain in Uganda, and by analysing the prevailing value chain and market structures, seasonal entry and exit dynamics and the trading relationships in the chain.

Data for this study were collected along the trading routes from the main matooke producing districts in South-West Uganda (Kabarole, Bunyangabo, Bushenyi, Isingiro and Mbarara) to the main urban markets around the capital Kampala. A structured survey was administered with 383 producers, 172 collectors and wholesalers and 71 retailers. In addition, key informant interviews and focus group discussions were held.

The authors find that price mark-ups by intermediaries (selling prices minus purchasing prices) vary with the type of intermediary, season and location but generally reflect the costs of moving matooke down the value chain to the urban consumer. The authors do not find evidence for disproportionate market power among the intermediaries in the chain. Intermediaries enter and exit the market in peak and off-peak season, such that profits are kept in check. This seasonality does imply a small shift in market power in favour of farmers in off-peak season and in favour of intermediaries in the peak season.

The investigation concentrated on an important and relatively homogenous staple crop along its main trade route. More remote areas, where there is less of an abundance of matooke, might still be characterised by local monopsonies where intermediaries have more market power due to high search and transport costs. Similarly, (local) monopsonies might exist for products for which there is a smaller market (segment), for products with a stronger seasonal variation in supply and for more perishable products.

While there is an important literature on the role of intermediaries in African agri-food value chains, the evidence on intermediary market power is scant. Beliefs on intermediary market power are largely based on anecdotal evidence from farmers or inferred from observed prices or market structures. The paper contributes in addressing this important knowledge gap by studying the matooke value chain in Uganda.

This paper aims to investigate the trading behavior of insider investors before and after information releases, identifying information-based manipulation in the stock market and the characteristics of companies whose stock prices are manipulated.

This paper employs logit regression method and an event study approach, utilizing hand-collected data from 2010 to 2022, with information categorized into negative and positive types.

The results show no evidence of insider trading or negative information-based manipulation in both high and low transparency firms. However, in highly transparent companies, the Board of Directors (BOD) avoids direct manipulation by using relatives to evade market supervisors. In low transparency companies, both the BOD and family members (FM) exploit positive information to benefit personally by buying shares before releasing favorable news, causing a sharp stock increase, and selling afterward. Continued buying by the BOD and FM also suggests likely positive news announcements.

The characteristics of information-based manipulation in companies, as provided by this study, help individual investors avoid investing in stocks that are highly susceptible to manipulation.

Empirical research on information-based manipulation is scarce due to limited secondary data. Our study uses transaction data from insider investors in a frontier market with low transparency and high information asymmetry. This enables us to analyze information-based stock price manipulation. We identify manipulation by comparing insiders' trading behavior with their market information releases, resulting in stock price fluctuations greater than 5%.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected economic activity both globally and nationally, which also has an impact to banking sector and Islamic banking is no exception. This study aims to see how the impact of Islamic bank financing in seven sectors affected by the COVID-19 to the credit risk of Indonesian Islamic banks. In addition, this study also tries to see whether the proportion of mudharabah-musharaka or profit-loss sharing (PLS) financing also affects credit risk in Indonesian Islamic banks.

This study uses fixed effect panel data regression over the period 2011–2020.

The results of this study show that wholesale and retail trade financing will increase credit risk in Indonesian Islamic banks as a policy implication. In terms of the proportion of PLS financing, it shows that a larger share of PLS financing will reduce credit risk in Islamic banks.

This paper demonstrates that despite the industry’s perception of PLS as riskier than murabaha-based instruments. According to the research, PLS financing will lower credit risk in Islamic banks. This study found that PLS contributes to overall economic stability by shifting the function of Islamic banks from a simple lending body to an active market catalyst/manager/consultant to market players seeking financial aid.

This paper aims to explore the promotion decisions of heterogeneous sellers on a decentralized platform under competitive conditions and analyze how seller behaviors impact platform profit, seller revenue, buyer surplus and social welfare.

This paper considers a Cournot model consisting of a platform charging a commission rate and two sellers with different conversion rates and browsing costs. Promotion efforts by sellers can increase traffic, but they also incur promotion costs for sellers. The sellers decide on promotion effort by weighing these two effects. The authors also explore the equilibrium when the platform charges a fixed usage fee.

The seller’s profit improves as its conversion rate increases and worsens as browsing costs increase. Also, increasing the commission rate charged by the platform makes the seller invest less in promotional efforts. Therefore, the platform must consider this trade-off to determine an optimal rate. The analysis shows that the seller with a high conversion rate and high browsing cost plays a greater role in generating more overall revenue. When the market favors such a seller, the platform tends to charge less in order not to impair its profitability.

This paper incorporates conversion rate, buyer’s browsing cost, unit promotion cost and the fee charged by the platform into the model to study sellers’ promotion decisions on decentralized platforms.

Foreign subsidiaries of multinational enterprises (MNEs) operate in complex and competitive international environments, implement market and non-market strategies, manage resources and value-added activities and contribute to the overall performance of their parent firms. Thus, the research question on the determinants of MNE foreign subsidiaries’ performance is of interest to managers and academic researchers. The empirical literature has flourished over the recent decades; however, the domains are fragmented, and the findings are inclusive. The purpose of this study is to systematically review, analyse and synthesize the empirical articles in this area, identify research gaps and suggest a future research agenda.

This study uses the qualitative content analysis method in reviewing and analysing 150 articles published in 24 scholarly journals during the period 2000–2023.

The literature uses a variety of theoretical perspectives to examine the key determinants of subsidiary performance which can be grouped into six major domains, namely, home- and host country-level factors; distance between home and host countries; the characteristics of parent firms and of subsidiaries; and governance mechanisms (the establishment modes and ownership strategy, subsidiary autonomy and the use of home country expatriates for transferring knowledge from the headquarters and controlling foreign subsidiaries). A range of objective and subjective indicators are used to measure subsidiary performance. Yet, the research shows a lack of broader integration of theories and presents inconsistent theoretical predictions, inconclusive empirical findings and estimation bias, which hinder our understanding of how the determinants independently and jointly shape the performance of foreign subsidiaries.

This study provides a comprehensive, nuanced and systematic review that synthesizes and clarifies the determinants of subsidiary performance, offers deeper insights from both theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects and proposes some promising avenues for future research directions.

Heterogeneous risk disclosure has been proven to improve the efficiency of new stock issuance, but excessive risk disclosure during the IPO may lead to irrational underestimation of the company, which is different from the original intention of management's detailed disclosure. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of IPO heterogeneous risk disclosure on earnings management motivations from the information transfer perspective of earnings management.

The sample includes 2,000 listed companies listed firms on Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2007 to 2022. This study uses the pretrained ERNIE model to measure text similarity in the prospectus to measure the heterogeneity of IPO risk disclosure.

This study empirically finds that heterogeneous IPO risk disclosure suppresses the opportunistic motivation of earnings management because managers tend to use earnings management to leverage information transmission functions. Such an effect is more pronounced in firms with higher analyst attention, lower marketization levels and non-state-owned. And heterogeneous risk disclosure may inhibit management’s over-investment behavior, thereby reducing the possibility of management engaging in opportunistic earnings management. Besides, price discounts are used to distinguish opportunistic and non-opportunistic earnings management and carry out a quasi-natural experimental design to demonstrate that marketization can enhance the relationship between heterogeneous risk disclosure and earnings management.

This study contributes evidence regarding the economic consequences of managerial earnings management behavior related to heterogeneous IPO risk disclosure. It supports highlighted firms in the IPO risk information disclosure to mitigate potential adverse outcomes through earnings management. This contributes to the literature and enhances information transparency in the capital market, fostering the healthy development of China’s capital market.