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This paper examined the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on people, place, product and services in Jamaican academic libraries. It also compares the Jamaican academic library’s COVID-19 experience with US academic library’s COVID-19 preliminary experience.

The local academic libraries in higher education in Jamaica (also referred to in this paper as university libraries) were surveyed.

Government mandates, university mandates and the absence of a vaccine influenced academic library response. The measures implemented, though unplanned and developed on-the-go, constituted a behavioural change model (BCM). COVID-19 has had a positive-negative impact on library people, place, product and services and has created a new normal for Jamaican academic libraries.

This paper captures the preliminary response of Jamaican academic libraries to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on library people, place, product and services. As such, a follow-up survey on changes, challenges, strengths, impact, lessons and plans would be a useful complement to this paper. As COVID-19 information is rapidly evolving, this preliminary response of Jamaica is neither the final nor complete response to the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a gap in the literature on disaster management generally and pandemic management in particular, and on the management of health disasters in academic libraries; this paper seeks to fill this gap, albeit incrementally, through Jamaica's preliminary response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper gives voice to the Caribbean academic library’s COVID-19 experience, through the voice of Jamaica. It is the first scholarly paper on the impact of COVID-19 on university libraries in the Jamaican / English-speaking Caribbean, and so presents the elements of the BCM implemented by Jamaica, which provides an important guide to Caribbean academic library leaders. The findings can also inform the Latin American and Caribbean section of international library papers on COVID-19 impact on academic libraries globally.

As technical barriers gradually become the important tools of trade protection, it is important to understand whether intensified enforcement of border controls is adopted as a hidden tool of trade protectionism and differs across periods and industries.

This article applies a panel structural vector autoregression (PSVAR) model to investigate the potential role of trade protectionism motives in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) import refusals on China's agricultural exports, utilizing newly constructed monthly data at the industry level.

The results show that import refusal is mainly driven by the inspection history, highlighting the importance of the intrinsic product quality and maintaining an excellent inspection history in border inspection. The novel finding is that US employment contractions would also lead to a small increase in FDA import refusals, especially those taking place within ten months and made without sampling tests. Such an association is driven by industry-specific employment shocks and becomes stronger after the financial crisis. It is also more evident in industries where the US lacks competitiveness against China, being manufactured without mandatory safety regulations, and with negative skewness of employment growth.

This research is one of the preliminary attempts to understand whether the de facto border controls are worked as a hidden tool of protectionism to agricultural products, and what the specific trajectory and duration of the impacts at the monthly level. This study provides empirical evidence showing the role of protectionism motives in FDA import refusals and is heterogeneous across industries, which generate new insights and policy implications to predict and cope with additional barriers on agricultural trade.

The purpose of this study is to examine the types of information that were shared by the institution, and faculty/staff responses to the information shared, with the goal of providing recommendations for other institutions facing concurrent crises.

This mixed-methods case study examines a public university's experiences managing the Covid-19 pandemic crisis while simultaneously navigating financial challenges that had been building over time. Using data from university-wide mediated communications and a survey of on-campus stakeholders during the Covid-19 pandemic and university retrenchment process, this paper explores institutional communication, stakeholder response to organizational communication and faculty/staff reactions to information in the midst of concurrent crises.

The study found that the university used instructing and advising information within its messages from its top administrator but fell short of incorporating empathy for its stakeholders in its initial responses.

Using the situational crisis communication theory (Coombs, 2019), which recommends the use of an ethical base response to crises, implications are provided for other organizations facing concurrent crises during the Covid-19 pandemic, to also incorporate empathy in their messages to stakeholders whose livelihoods are being affected, across multiple platforms.

Weathering the Covid-19 pandemic and long-term financial pitfalls have proven to be a disruptive phenomenon for higher education institutions. This research expands understanding of institutional communication and stakeholder reactions in a higher education institution facing both the Covid-19 crisis and a retrenchment.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-09-2020-0415.

The customer retail experience is frequently interrupted by disturbances such as ringing phones and other people. Employees must be able to respond to retail disturbances effectively to ensure that customers have a satisfactory experience in the retailer. Using Affective Events Theory as a framework, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model for understanding how retail disturbances affect customers outcomes and how retail employee response mitigates the negative impact of retail disturbances.

The model was tested using a pre-study of retail managers and consumers, a survey study and four experimental studies.

Retail disturbances reduce interactional justice and customer positive emotions. Customers pay attention to how employees address retail disturbances, even when they are not directly involved.

The research experiments focus on sound-based disturbances. Other stimuli (e.g. olfactory or visual) should be examined in more detail.

Employees can mitigate the negative effects of retail disturbances on customers with a positive response to the disturbance and to customers. Employee responses influence customers currently receiving service and nearby shoppers.

The findings demonstrate the deleterious effect of solicitation calls on small retailers and provide recommendations for reducing solicitation calls.

This research shows that retail disturbances reduce customer outcomes, employee response becomes part of the disturbance event, and that it is possible for employees to address a group of nearby customers indirectly through unintentional observation.

Due to their very different contexts, the responses made by property hosts to online reviews can differ from those posted by hotel managers. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of the responding behavior of hosts on peer-to-peer property rental platforms.

This study applied a comprehensive framework based on the theory of planned behavior. Empirical models are constructed based on 89,967 guest reviews with their associated responses to reveal the responding pattern of property hosts.

Unlike hotel managers, property hosts are more likely to reply to positive than to negative reviews; moreover, when they do choose to respond to negative reviews, they are likely to do so negatively, in a “tit-for-tat” way. This study also finds that one reason for the difference of responding patterns between property hosts and hotel managers is the hosts’ lack of experience of consumer relationship management and service recovery.

This study provides a good start point for future theoretical development regarding effective responding strategy on peer-to-peer property rental platforms, as well as some useful implications for practitioners.

This study is an early attempt to analyze the impact of the particularity of emerging platforms on the responding behavior of service providers based on a comprehensive conceptual framework and empirical model thus provides a good starting point for the further investigation of effective response strategies on these emerging platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method integrating fault tree analysis and optimization model to allocate response budget from the preventive and protective perspectives.

The proposed method consists of two main steps. The first step is to analyze and calculate the probability and the loss of the risk. The second step is to build an optimization model for allocating response budget.

First, there exists an optimal response budget. Second, risk protection is preferred to risk prevention when the total budget is limited. Third, the protective budget should be first invested for the consequence event with greatest expected loss. Fourth, the preventive budget should be first allocated to the risk cause with highest occurrence probability that belongs to the OR set in the fault tree.

Managerially, our results indicate that project managers (PMs) should make a tradeoff between the budget invested for risk response and reduced expected loss of the risk. Then, in the case of inadequate response budget, PMs should pay more attention to risk protection and cope with the event that can cause severe loss. In addition, under this circumstance, PMs had to better allocate the risk preventive budget in proper order.

Project risk response is a critical issue in project risk management as PMs can take actions actively to cope with project risks in this phase. Effective risk response, in general, requires financial support in practice, and reasonable allocation of the total budget among risk response strategies can produce better response effects.

Two studies investigate how different structural properties of images – symmetry (vertical and horizontal) and image contrast – affect social media marketing outcomes of consumer liking and engagement.

In Study 1’s experiment, 361 participants responded to social media marketing images that varied in vertical or horizontal symmetry and level of image contrast. Study 2 analyzes field data on 610 Instagram posts.

Study 1 demonstrates that vertical or horizontal symmetry and high image contrast increase consumer liking of social media marketing images, and that processing fluency and aesthetic response mediate these relationships. Study 2 reveals that symmetry and high image contrast improve consumer engagement on social media (number of “likes” and comments).

These studies extend theory regarding processing fluency’s and aesthetic response’s roles in consumer outcomes within social media marketing. Image posts’ structural properties affect processing fluency and aesthetic response without altering brand information or advertising content.

Because consumer liking of marketing communications (e.g. social media posts) predicts persuasion and sales, results should help marketers design more effective posts and achieve brand-building and behavioral objectives. Based on the results, marketers are urged to consider the processing fluency and aesthetic response associated with any image developed for social media marketing.

Addressing the lack of empirical investigations in the existing literature, the reported studies demonstrate that effects of symmetry and image contrast in generating liking are driven by processing fluency and aesthetic response. Additionally, these studies establish novel effects of images’ structural properties on consumer engagement with brand-based social media marketing communications.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analytical model to decide between cash-based and in-kind distributions during emergency responses considering the needs of beneficiaries and market conditions. To allow the switch between modalities, a preparedness framework for humanitarian organizations (HOs) is provided.

A mathematical model is proposed to help humanitarian responders make quantitative decisions on the type of programs to implement in emergency responses. The model was applied to a field response by an international HO during the COVID-19 emergency in Colombia.

Cash-based and in-kind distributions are not mutually exclusive response modalities during emergencies, and the real needs of beneficiaries and market effects should be included in the modality selection decision to improve program effectiveness.

The research is focused on short-term immediate response to emergencies; the proposed model assumes favorable market conditions and limits the aid options to direct in-kind and multipurpose cash assistance, excluding other types of cash transfers.

The research outlines practical preconditions to operationalize switching between programs during an emergency. The study provides evidence that HOs should consider dynamics decision tools to select aid modalities and evaluate their response depending on market conditions.

Considering aid modality as a dynamic decision and including the needs from beneficiaries in the choice can have profound impact in the dignifying of humanitarian response to emergencies.

The quantitative model to decide between aid modalities is a novel approach to include beneficiaries' needs and market dynamics into humanitarian supply chain research. The preparedness framework closes the gap between the emergency preparedness literature and the operational constraints that organizations face for fast program implementation.

This article presents an application of survey non-response theory to a specific population with disabilities. From 1994 to 1997 the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) did a special, two-phase study of disability. This survey format allowed for response patterns of the disabled population to be operationalized into contact, cooperation and proxy/assisted versus self-response categories. Using these data, the authors investigated the effects of severity of activity limitation at first interview on response patterns at second interview, with statistical controls for other characteristics related to the response outcome. The statistical results of the study show that respondents with moderate or severe activity limitation are more likely than those with mild activity limitation to be contacted and to cooperate, yielding higher response rates. However, respondents with a higher degree of activity limitation are also more likely to have proxy/assisted responses at re-interview. Barriers to self-response in household surveys are discussed in the concluding remarks.

Many studies only take into account the ply stacking sequence as the design variable to determine the optimal ply drop-off location; however, it is necessary to optimize other parameters that have a direct influence on the ply drop-off site such as which plies should be dropped and in which longitudinal direction. That way, the purpose of this study is to find the most significant design variables relative to the drop-off location considering the transversal and longitudinal positions, seeking to achieve the optimal combination of ply drop-off locations that provides excellent performance for the laminate plate.

This study aims to determine the optimal drop-off location in a laminate plate using the finite element method and an approach statistical with design of experiments (DOE).

The optimization strategy using DOE revealed to be satisfactory for analyzing laminate structures with ply drop-offs, demonstrating that not all design factors influence the response variability. The failure criterion response variable revealed a poor fit, with an adjusted coefficient of determination lower than 60%, thus demonstrating that the response did not vary with the ply drop-off location. Already the strain and natural frequency response variables presented high significance. Finally, the optimization strategy revealed that the optimal drop-off location that minimizes the strain and maximizes the natural frequency is the ply drop-off located of the end plate.

It was also noted that many researchers prefer evolutionary algorithms for optimizing composite structures with ply drop-offs, being scarce to the literature studies involving optimization strategies using response surface methodology. In addition, many studies only take into account the ply stacking sequence as the design variable to determine the optimal ply drop-off location; however, in this study, the authors investigated other important parameters that have direct influence on the ply drop-off site such as which plies should be dropped and in which longitudinal direction.