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Extant literature provides insights about consumers’ purchase intentions (PI) and willingness to pay for reconstructed products but does not capture cross-cultural differences. The purpose of this paper is to understand consumers’ PI for reconstructed products in a cross-cultural setting for the development of circular economy.

The sample includes consumers from two diverse societies (India and the USA). The authors conduct two sets of analyses in this paper. The first analysis attempts to identify the difference between the Indian and US consumers’ PI for reconstructed products, who are residing permanently in their home countries. In the second analysis, the authors investigate the impact of socio-cultural norms on PI, for reconstructed products, of the Indian (USA) consumers relocated to the USA (India). In-depth interviews are conducted for data collection. Subsequently, data analysis was carried out using thematic analysis approach.

The results indicate that US consumers: possess altruistic buying behavior; are eco-centric toward waste disposal; strictly follow the regulations and socio-cultural norms; and have harmony orientation toward nature. In contrast, Indian consumers: possess utilitarian buying behavior; demonstrate anthropocentric attitude toward waste disposal; do not necessarily follow the regulations; and have mastery orientation toward nature.

At policy level, government in emerging economies should formulate regulations that promote the use of reconstructed products. At firm level, firms should exploit promotional and advertisement efforts to enhance awareness about reconstructed products.

The study is an early attempt in the literature to capture cross-cultural differences for reconstructed products.

Describes a number of ways in which fluorescent dyes have been used to investigate different construction problems, highlighting in particular the areas of stone cladding cracking, moisture prevention in cavity walls and microscopical and reconstructed stone testing. Concludes that good observation, coupled with careful consideration of the problems in hand, is essential to ensure that the appropriate methods are used and the right conclusions drawn.

Research has shown that there are different dimensions of price knowledge. But it is still not clear what consumers can remember upon price exposure and what can be retrieved later and why. This research aims to focus on the influence of encoding conditions as well as price characteristics on later price recall or evaluation.

Two controlled experiments using student subjects were conducted. Participants' encoding objectives and relative price difference between paired products were manipulated and their influence on price recall and evaluation examined.

The research showed that there is usually a memory distortion of the original product price information upon retrieval. The degree of distortion is influenced by the characteristics of the prices as well as the focus of attention at encoding and the direction of distortion was influenced by consumers' beliefs of pricing norms.

In this research, price difference instead of individual price was manipulated so the interpretation of individual price recall accuracy is constrained. Future research should also examine under what conditions consumers apply a certain type of encoding objective and the effects of memory distortions on consumer choice behaviors.

Results suggest that, for marketers to clearly communicate the price information to consumers and ensure that consumers remember and use the price information as the marketers intended, it is important to examine the compatibility between price exposure environment and form of price information that consumers are likely to retrieve from memory.

The results shed further lights on understanding of consumer price information processing and retrieval.

The purpose of this paper is to present topological derivatives-based reconstruction algorithms to solve an inverse scattering problem for penetrable obstacles.

The method consists in rewriting the inverse reconstruction problem as a topology optimization problem and then to use the concept of topological derivatives to seek a higher-order asymptotic expansion for the topologically perturbed cost functional. Such expansion is truncated and then minimized with respect to the parameters under consideration, which leads to noniterative second-order reconstruction algorithms.

In this paper, the authors develop two different classes of noniterative second-order reconstruction algorithms that are able to accurately recover the unknown penetrable obstacles from partial measurements of a field generated by incident waves.

The current paper is a pioneer work in developing a reconstruction method entirely based on topological derivatives for solving an inverse scattering problem with penetrable obstacles. Both algorithms proposed here are able to return the number, location and size of multiple hidden and unknown obstacles in just one step. In summary, the main features of these algorithms lie in the fact that they are noniterative and thus, very robust with respect to noisy data as well as independent of initial guesses.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how to develop a global brand through examining the case of MUJI.

To build a global brand, a company is required to develop a repeatable business model that turns the source of differentiation into activity systems. So, from this hypothesis, the paper examines how the MUJI strategy worked and failed in the process of rapid growth.

MUJI succeeded in differentiation by proposing attractive value, developing products embodying its value and establishing its brand image through its stores. However, its rapid growth seriously damaged and diluted its brand image; and MUJI did not build a rational management system to respond to its expansion; consequently, MUJI’s business performance deteriorated. To revitalize its brand, MUJI reconstructed its product and store development and introduced a low-cost operating system through learning from another company.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The case study of MUJI suggests that building a global brand is required to integrate its value communication into product and store development and to develop a business model to sustain its business globally.

In recent years, principal component analysis (PCA) has attracted great attention in dimension reduction. However, since a very large transformation matrix must be used for reconstructing the original data, PCA has not been successfully applied to image compression. To solve this problem, this paper aims to propose a new technique called k‐PCA.

Actually, k‐PCA is a combination of vector quantization (VQ) and PCA. The basic idea is to divide the problem space into k clusters using VQ, and then find a PCA encoder for each cluster. The point is that if the k‐PCA encoder is obtained using data containing enough information, it can be used as a semi‐universal encoder to compress all images in a given domain.

Although a k‐PCA encoder is more complex than a single PCA encoder, the compression ratio can be much higher because the transformation matrices can be excluded from the encoded data. The performance of the k‐PCA encoder can be improved further through learning. For this purpose, this paper‐proposes an extended LBG algorithm.

The effectiveness of the k‐PCA is demonstrated through experiments with several well‐known test images.

Supply chain flexibility is crucial for firms to respond to uncertain circumstances caused by environmental factors, such as the diversity of customer demands, problems of product safety, and adjustments of industrial policies. To investigate the approach to enhance supply chain flexibility, the purpose of this paper is to propose that both internal and external information integration contribute to reactive and proactive supply chain flexibilities, which elicit high operational performance.

Using a sample of 84 food companies that have been listed three years in China and content analysis based on their annual reports, evidence was collected to test the hypotheses through hierarchical regressions.

The results reveal that external information integration results in both reactive and proactive flexibilities, which further improve operational performance. Internal information integration positively affects both reactive and proactive flexibilities, but its mediating role was not determined in the study.

The research provides insights into how supply chain flexibility mediates the effect of supply chain information integration on operational performance in the context of the Chinese food industry.

The literature provides evidence of consumers’ willingness to purchase (WTP) refurbished products. However, the studies focusing on young consumers’ (18–24 years) purchasing behaviour of refurbished products from online platforms/stores are limited. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to conduct a qualitative study to identify the key attributes/factors that influence young consumers’ WTP refurbished products.

Two qualitative techniques, focus group discussion (FGD) and depth interviews (DI), are used for data collection. Criterion sampling is used for sample selection. Consequently, 37 participants (20 for FGD and 17 for DI) from India were recruited.

The study’s findings indicate six broad attributes/factors (purchase attributes, product attributes, credibility, reviews/support, refurbishment process and ecological factors) that influence young consumers’ WTP refurbished products. In each attribute, some characteristics are unique (for example, greater trust in online platforms/stores, preference for video reviews and historical information of the product) to young consumers.

The current study integrates three literature streams: consumer behaviour in the online/offline context, young consumers’ inclination towards an online purchase and WTP refurbished products. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to do it.

The need for firms to become more innovative has probably never been greater. Today concepts such as the new economy, new technologies, hyper‐competition and clock speed are used to explain that the dynamics of competition and markets has never been greater. Thus, there is a large focus on the concept of innovation management in firms. Discusses innovation management, understood as being the activities that firms undertake in order to yield new solutions within products, production and administration. The main contribution is a discussion of how a general framework for innovation management can be tailored to individual situations/different firms.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new way for identification of products/parts and their tracking during the whole life cycle, from the manufacture and assembly phase to the disassembly phase.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is applied on a chosen product, an in‐mould labelling (IML) robot.

This paper discusses a case study that highlights the use of RFID as automatic identification technology, especially in the processes of assembly/disassembly of the IML robot. The application can be expanded onto any kind of product, with the exception of some life cycle phases that are specific for a particular product.

The paper gives an example of how RFID technology can actually be realized in the case of the IML robot to improve the quality of tracking its main components.

The users have the possibilities to access and analyze information about the products/parts during their cycle.