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The purpose of this study is to investigate the physical, ultraviolet (UV), colour appearance and colour fastness properties of selected fabrics dyed with natural dyes from Daboya and Ntonso communities of Ghana. The study further highlights the rich cultural heritage of traditional dyeing from these two communities. Craftsmen in West Africa especially Ghana, have sustained the traditional dyeing methods to produce textile products for consumers.

In this study, two sample fabrics were purchased from craftsmen at Ntonso and Daboya communities in Ghana. These fabrics were analysed at the laboratory under standard test methods for their physical, UV, colour appearance and colour fastness properties.

Results showed that all the sample fabrics have good UV shielding performance (ratings above 50+). Daboya sample fabrics (dyed with indigo dyes) produced more colour stains than the sample fabrics from Ntonso (dyed with black “kuntunkuni” dyes). The K/S_sum value or colour yield reduced after washing but that alternatively increased the calculated ultraviolet protection factor.

Findings from this study exposed the unique UV performance of dyed traditional fabrics (using natural dyes) from Ntonso and Daboya communities in Ghana. This inspires and enforces the need for craftsmen to improve their production cycle to produce these fabrics in different sizes which provides the necessary UV shielding abilities for consumers in the wake of climate changes.

This study demonstrated that the natural dyeing process at the two communities produced relatively good UV and colour fastness properties of the sample fabrics. These eco-friendly dyeing practices have survived over time to maintain and promote the concept of sustainability within the textile and fashion industry in Ghana.

This study aims to explore factors that affect gendered consumption (male and female), willingness to pay (economic attributes) and the socio-cultural context of Gen-Z consumers towards specialty coffee as compared to other types in Taiwan.

Samoggia and Riedel’s (2018) theoretical framework is adopted to examine the concepts of interest. A mixed method approach comprising interviews and experimental taste tests was used to collect data from Gen-Z specialty coffee consumers in a purposive sampling manner.

The findings suggested the effect of price elasticity of demand where specialty coffee was perceived as an expensive commodity by young consumers, and hence, not a regularly purchased item. Nevertheless, specialty coffee was linked to health benefits, and a signal for conspicuous consumption – where café experiences facilitated self-promotion on sites like Instagram and Facebook. Finally, the findings alluded to a potential gender effect, with more female young consumers likely to consume specialty coffee as compared to their male counterparts.

This study is located within the context of Taiwan, which has been a tea-dominated consumption landscape for numerous decades. The use of an experimental design also presents a unique angle to elucidate sensory elements surrounding specialty coffee as a research design for Gen-Z research projects. The study points to the relevance of social context in the consumers’ behavioural patterns, which has been largely implicit within consumer behaviour scholarship.

Online customer reviews is an important information resource for product innovation. This study aims to investigate the impact of online customer reviews on iterative innovation of software products and the moderating roles of product complexity in the process of online reviews influencing product iterative innovation.

To empirically test the hypotheses, this paper built a panel data of 500 software products from 2019 to 2021 and applied Poisson regression analysis.

Empirically results reveal that both sentiment and quantity of online customer reviews have positive effects on iteration innovation of software products. In addition, the authors find that product complexity negatively moderates the relationship between online reviews and iterative innovation.

This study suggests that firms can acquire valuable information from customers’ online reviews for product iterative innovation and improvement. However, for high-complexity products, it may be difficult for enterprises to obtain useful information for iterative innovation from online reviews. On the other hand, this study provides a reference for firms to choose more useful online reviews from the perspective of sentiment.

This paper provides a new finding that there is a positive relationship between online customer reviews and iterative innovation of software products. Moreover, the authors also provide a deeper understanding of how online customer reviews affects iterative innovation by examining the moderating roles of product complexity.

The non-fungible token (NFT) market has been multiplying in recent years. NFTs are tokens stored on a blockchain network based on smart contract technology that can be used to represent ownership of digital assets and cannot be changed like-for-like. With NFTs, all recorded digital properties can be freely traded and stored with values, making them possible to increase content transactions' privacy and security. In addition, NFTs engender new ways to organize, consume, share and store digital content. Despite the rapid growth of the NFT market, related consumer behaviors have yet to be well-known and relevant academic research results are very scarce. This study aims to explain how NFT fits with blockchain and cryptocurrency and how consumers accept it. This paper also develops a structured causal model with multiple paths to explain the antecedents and attitude variables for NFT acceptance.

The data collection was conducted from 542 young consumers in Korea via an online survey. The structural equation modeling method was used to analyze the hypotheses.

Attitudes toward technology and assets positively affect NFT purchase behavioral intentions. Additionally, symbolic driver affects behavioral intention directly.

The results expanded the understanding of the NFT market and consumers, which are still in their early stages. They also provide valuable insights for establishing future market strategies for NFT.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

Gender and geographical imbalance in production and impact levels is a pressing issue in global knowledge production. Within Health Sciences, while some studies found stark gender and geographical biases and inequalities, others found little empirical evidence of this marginalization. The purpose of the study is to clear the ambiguity concerning the topic.

Based on a comprehensive and systematic analysis of Health Sciences research data downloaded from the Scival (Scopus/Scimago) database from 2017 to 2020 (n = 7,990), this study first compares gender representation in research productivity, as well as differences in terms of citation per document, citations per document view and view per document scores according to geographical location. Additionally, the study clarifies whether there is a geographic bias in productivity and impact measures (i.e. citation per document, citations per document view and view per document) moderated by gender.

Results indicate that gender inequalities in productivity are systematic at the overall disciplinary, as well as the subfield levels. Findings also suggest statistically significant geographical differences in citation per document, citations per document view, and view per document scores, and interaction effect of gender over the relation between geography and (1) the number of citations per view and (2) the number of views per document.

This study contributes to scientometric studies in health sciences by providing insightful findings about the geographical and gender bias in productivity and impact across world regions.