Search results

The e-commerce boom presents new challenges for last-mile delivery (LMD), which may be mitigated by new delivery technologies. This paper evaluates the impact of mobile parcel lockers (MPL) on costs and CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e) emissions in existing LMD networks, which include home delivery and shipments to stationary parcel lockers.

To describe customers’ preferences, we design a multinomial logit model based on recipients’ travel distance to pick-up locations and availability at home. Based on route cost estimation, we define the operating costs for MPLs. We devise a mathematical model with binary decision variables to optimize the location of MPLs.

Our study demonstrates that integrating MPLs leads to additional cost savings of 8.7% and extra CO₂e emissions savings of up to 5.4%. Our analysis of several regional clusters suggests that MPLs yield benefits in highly populous cities but may result in additional emissions in more rural areas where recipients drive longer distances to pick-ups.

This paper designs a suitable operating model for MPLs and demonstrates environmental and economic savings. Moreover, it adds recipients’ availability at home to receive parcels improving the accuracy of stochastic demand. In addition, MPLs are evaluated in the context of several regional clusters ranging from large cities to rural areas. Thus, we provide managerial guidance to logistics service providers how and where to deploy MPLs.

The purpose of this research is to further the understanding of how to implement gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) systems. The author explores whether GRB reforms might benefit from integration into a performance-oriented budgetary structure and whether GRB's equity orientation is linked to additional implementation challenges.

This research follows a qualitative case study of South Korea guided by a predetermined research framework and built from extensive documentation, archival records and expert interviews.

GRB’s integration into a performance framework can be burdensome, and the equity orientation of GRB results in additional implementation challenges, such as higher vulnerability to the political context and active resistance from public officials.

This research shows that integrating GRB with performance systems may require overcoming significant administrative obstacles. Also, GRB’s equity orientation is linked to a higher vulnerability to the political cycle and active resistance from civil servants.

The proposed model aims to consider the flying hours as a criterion to initiate maintenance operation. Based on this condition, aircraft must be checked before flying hours threshold is met. After receiving maintenance service, the model ignores previous flying hours and the aircraft can keep on flying until the threshold value is reached again. Moreover, the model considers aircraft age and efficiency to assign them to flights.

The aircraft maintenance routing problem (AMRP), as one of the most important problems in the aviation industry, determines the optimal route for each aircraft along with meeting maintenance requirements. This paper presents a bi-objective mixed-integer programming model for AMRP in which several criteria such as aircraft efficiency and ferrying flights are considered.

As the solution approaches, epsilon-constraint method and a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), including a new initializing algorithm, are used. To verify the efficiency of NSGA-II, 31 test problems in different scales are solved using NSGA-II and GAMS. The results show that the optimality gap in NSGA-II is less than 0.06%. Finally, the model was solved based on real data of American Eagle Airlines extracted from Kaggle datasets.

The authors confirm that it is an original paper, has not been published elsewhere and is not currently under consideration of any other journal.

This study aims to assess the alignment of South Korea’s government-certified social enterprises (GCSEs) with prevailing social enterprise (SE) models, notably the entrepreneurial nonprofit, social cooperative and social business models delineated in the “Emergence of Social Enterprises in Europe” (Defourny and Nyssens, 2012, 2017a, 2017b) and the “principle of interest” frameworks (Defourny et al., 2021). Thereby, it seeks to situate these enterprises within recognized frameworks and elucidate their hybrid identities.

Analyzing panel data from 2016 to 2020 for 259 GCSEs, this study uses tslearn for k-means clustering with dynamic time warping to assess their developmental trajectories and alignment with established SE models, which echoes the approach of Defourny et al. (2021). We probe the “fluid” identities of semi-public sector SEs, integrating Gordon’s (2013) notion that they tend to blend various SE traditions as opposed to existing in isolation.

Results indicate that GCSEs do align with prevalent SE frameworks. Furthermore, they represent a spectrum of SE models, suggesting the versatility of the public sector in fostering diverse types of SEs.

The concept of a semi-public sector SE model has been relatively uncharted, even though it holds significance for research on SE typologies and public sector entrepreneurship literature. This study bridges this gap by presenting empirical evidence of semi-public SEs and delineating the potential paths these enterprises might take as they amalgamate various SE traditions.

Many studies have investigated dynamic positions and their importance, but there is less attention paid to how to enter more central positions. Interorganizational relationships are an important factor in network structural change. In Chinese society, firms allocate significant human, financial and material resources towards cultivating guanxi. The purpose of this study is to explore whether and how the three aspects of guanxi, namely renqing, ganqing and xinyong, can make firms more central, and to examine the mediating role of interaction.

The study used a mixed method to collect data from 256 Chinese Cops (complex product systems) firms. And, hypotheses were tested using SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 26.0.

The results indicate that renqing, ganqing and xinyong have significant positive effects on the increase in centrality, but with varying magnitudes. Additionally, the interaction was found to mediate the relationship between the three aspects of guanxi (renqing, ganqing and xinyong) and the increase in centrality.

The study provides new insights to help firms become more central by combining guanxi (renqing, ganqing and xinyong) with change in centrality, enriching the literature on network dynamics and guanxi-related research. Moreover, the study provides managers with a clear understanding of how to use guanxi to make the firm more central in situations with limited resources.

This paper aims to propose a simulation-based performance evaluation model for the drone-based delivery of aid items to disaster-affected areas. The objective of the model is to perform analytical studies, evaluate the performance of drone delivery systems for humanitarian logistics and can support the decision-making on the operational design of the system – on where to locate drone take-off points and on assignment and scheduling of delivery tasks to drones.

This simulation model captures the dynamics and variabilities of the drone-based delivery system, including demand rates, location of demand points, time-dependent parameters and possible failures of drones’ operations. An optimization model integrated with the simulation system can update the optimality of drones’ schedules and delivery assignments.

An extensive set of experiments was performed to evaluate alternative strategies to demonstrate the effectiveness for the proposed optimization/simulation system. In the first set of experiments, the authors use the simulation-based evaluation tool for a case study for Central Florida. The goal of this set of experiments is to show how the proposed system can be used for decision-making and decision-support. The second set of experiments presents a series of numerical studies for a set of randomly generated instances.

The goal is to develop a simulation system that can allow one to evaluate performance of drone-based delivery systems, accounting for the uncertainties through simulations of real-life drone delivery flights. The proposed simulation model captures the variations in different system parameters, including interval of updating the system after receiving new information, demand parameters: the demand rate and their spatial distribution (i.e. their locations), service time parameters: travel times, setup and loading times, payload drop-off times and repair times and drone energy level: battery’s energy is impacted and requires battery change/recharging while flying.

This study aims to determine the influence of the role of hospital leaders, the COVID-19 budget and health service facilities at regional general hospitals (RSUDs) to Indonesia on hospital responses in overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic, moderated by hospital class level.

This research was designed as quantitative research using partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test hypotheses.

Using a sample of 185 RSUDs, it was found that the role of hospital leaders, the COVID-19 budget and health service facilities in RSUDs had a positive and significant effect on the hospital's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show that the role of hospital leaders, in this case, the RSUD director, is essential in improving health services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 budget and health service facilities at RSUD can run effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic if the RSUD director issues appropriate policies during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

This study is the first to determine the influence of hospital leaders, the health budget for COVID-19 and hospital health service facilities simultaneously on the hospital's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also provides empirical evidence regarding the idea of stewardship theory, which suggests the role of leaders in supervising organizations to achieve organizational goals effectively in times of crisis.

This study provides new insights into the relationship between the heterogeneity of institutional investors (IIs) and corporate tax avoidance (CTA). It also investigates whether family ownership moderates this relationship.

Based on a sample of 200 French-listed firms from 2008 to 2017, we use the generalized method of moment (GMM) estimator proposed by Arellano and Bover (1995) and developed by Blundell and Bond (1998) to address endogeneity and omitted variable concerns.

The results show that passive IIs are associated with an increase in the level of tax avoidance. However, active ones significantly decrease the levels of tax avoidance practices. Moreover, we show that institutional activism is not sufficient to control managerial actions, particularly in the context of controlled family businesses. The results suggest that families may expropriate the rights of minority shareholders through a controlling coalition with passive IIs.

This study has several practical implications. First, the results are useful for policymakers who should constrain passive IIs to provide only one service (asset management). Second, this study may sensitize family owners to the need to cooperate with active IIs that are effective in monitoring the firm. In particular, families should be willing to sacrifice some of their socioemotional wealth to promote a balanced ownership structure, which is important for responsible and effective corporate governance.

This paper extends previous research by investigating the heterogeneity of IIs in terms of horizon, ownership and control. In addition, this paper sheds a new light on how family firms behave regarding tax avoidance practices in the presence of active and passive IIs.

This study aims to examine the underlying emotional process that explains how context-specific stimuli involved in virtual reality (VR) destinations translate into presence perceptions and behavioral intentions.

In total, 403 potential tourists participated in a self-administered online survey after they watched a randomly assigned VR tour. The Lavaan package in R software was used to conduct structural equation analysis and examine the proposed theoretical framework.

The results reveal that media content consisting of informativeness, aesthetics and novelty was positively related to users’ sense of presence in a VR tour. The effect of media content on presence was partially mediated by emotional arousal.

Managers and VR designers can create an emotive virtual tour that contributes to the user’s sense of presence to promote attraction to the target destination. The VR content needs to be informative, aesthetic and novel, which can excite users during the VR tour, portray virtual destinations clearly and eventually influence potential tourists’ visit intentions.

Research on the emotional mechanism to generate presence is still in its infancy. This study integrates presence theory into a conceptual framework to explore how media content influences presence and decision-making through the emotional mechanism.

This study examines the theoretical and empirical relationships between LM&SS, human resource management (HRM), climate for LM&SS and outcomes (employee well-being and performance) in hospitals. As part of this research, the authors examine the interplay between “hard” and “soft” practices for LM&SS and “soft” HR practices.

A cross-sectional, multisite survey study covering all internal service units at all eight Dutch university hospitals was conducted (42 units, N = 218 supervisors, N = 1,668 employees), and multivariate multilevel regression analyses were performed.

A systems approach involving “soft” LM&SS practices that are specifically HR-related has a positive effect (β is 0.46) on a climate for LM&SS. A climate for LM&SS is not related to perceived performance or employee health. It is, however, positively related to employee happiness and trusting relationships (both βs are 0.33). We did not find that a climate for LM&SS had a mediating effect.

This study shows that a balanced approach involving both “hard” and “soft” factors is crucial to achieving the desired breadth and depth of LM&SS adoption at the macro, meso, and micro levels. The authors found that a climate for LM&SS positively affects employee well-being in hospitals.

In their attempt to create mutual gains for both their organization and their employees, hospitals that adopt LM&SS should foster a climate for LM&SS by embracing a balanced approach consisting of both “hard” and “soft” practices, thereby internalizing LM&SS at the macro, meso, and micro levels.

This is one of the first studies to examine in-depth the impact of “hard” and “soft” LM&SS on both employee well-being (subdivided into different components) and performance in healthcare, as well as the role of “soft” HRM in this relationship. Linking LM&SS, HRM and outcomes to a climate for LM&SS is relatively a new approach and has led to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the internalization of LM&SS in healthcare.