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The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of sports sponsorship on brand equity using two managerially related outcomes: price premium and market share.

This study uses a best–worst discrete choice experiment (BWDCE) and compares the outcome with that of the purchase intention scale, an established probabilistic measure of purchase intention. The total sample consists of 409 fans of three soccer teams sponsored by three different competing brands: Nike, Adidas and Puma.

With sports sponsorship, fans were willing to pay more for the sponsor’s product, with the sponsoring brand obtaining the highest market share. Prominent brands generally performed better than less prominent brands. The best–worst scaling method was also 35% more accurate in predicting brand choice than a purchase intention scale.

Future research could use the same method to study other types of sponsors, such as title sponsors or other product categories.

Sponsorship managers can use this methodology to assess the return on investment in sponsorship engagement.

Prior sponsorship studies on brand equity tend to ignore market share or fans’ willingness to pay a price premium for a sponsor’s goods and services. However, these two measures are crucial in assessing the effectiveness of sponsorship. This study demonstrates how to conduct such an assessment using the BWDCE method. It provides a clearer picture of sponsorship in terms of its economic value, which is more managerially useful.

This study aims to delve into the lived experiences, challenges and visions of women entrepreneurs in Jordan, placing a magnifying glass on those spearheading or co-pioneering start-ups. It aims to understand the myriad factors that influence their entrepreneurial journey, from motivation to the future of their niche.

Adopting a qualitative lens, this study is anchored in semi-structured interviews encompassing 20 Jordanian women entrepreneurs. Following this, thematic analysis was deployed to dissect and categorize the garnered insights into ten salient themes.

The study reveals that personal experiences and challenges are pivotal in directing these women towards niche markets, aligning with the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). Tools such as digital instruments, customer feedback and innovative strategies like storytelling and augmented reality are integral to their entrepreneurial success, resonating with the resource-based view (RBV). Additionally, challenges like cultural barriers and infrastructural limitations are navigated through adaptive strategies, reflecting the resilience inherent in these entrepreneurs. Networking, mentorship, embracing technological advancements and implementing sustainable practices are highlighted as crucial elements underpinned by the social identity theory (SIT).

Contrary to the extant body of research, this study provides new insights into the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in Jordan, highlighting the practical relevance of theories like TPB, RBV and SIT for both policymakers and the start-up community in niche markets.

Although earlier research suggests a positive relationship exists between engaging in entrepreneurial marketing activities and firm performance, there may be contingent issues that impact the association. This investigation unpacks the relationship between entrepreneurial marketing behaviour and firm performance under the moderating role of coopetition, in an immediate post-COVID-19 period.

A resource-based theoretical lens, alongside an outside-in perspective, underpins this study. Following 20 field interviews, survey responses via an online survey were obtained from 306 small, passive exporting wine producers with a domestic market focus in the United States. The data passed all major robustness checks.

The statistical findings indicated that entrepreneurial marketing activities positively and significantly influenced firm performance, while coopetition provided a non-significant moderation effect. Field interviews suggested that entrepreneurs’ attemps to scale up from passive to more active export activities in an immediate post-pandemic period helped explain the findings. Owner-managers rejoined trustworthy and complementary pre-pandemic coopetition partners in the immediate aftermath of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) for domestic market activities. In contrast, they had to minimise risks from dark-side/opportunistic behaviour when joining coopetition networks with partners while attempting to scale up export market activities.

Unique insights emerge to unpack the entrepreneurial marketing–performance relationship via the moderation effect of coopetition, namely, with the temporal setting of an immediate post-COVID-19 period. Firstly, new support arises regarding the likely performance-enhancing impact of owner-managers’ engagement in entrepreneurial marketing practices. Secondly, novel findings emerge in respect of the contrasting role of coopetition in both domestic and export market activities. Thirdly, new evidence arises in relation to a resource-based theoretical lens alongside an outside-in perspective, whereby, strategic flexibility in pivoting facets of a firm’s business model needs effective management following a crisis.

This study aims to explore the use of knowledge sharing (KS) in delivering open social innovation (OSI) solutions for sustainable development in the context of economically marginalized, rural societies in India.

The study is guided by an exploratory, qualitative approach using an embedded case study design with four social enterprises. The study approaches the use of KS in three stages of OSI: (1) the stages of ideating and prototyping, (2) the initial stages of experimenting and business development and (3) the more current and future-oriented stages of organizations’ strategies for expanding market opportunities for maximizing impact.

The first stage used KS for collaborative efforts among diverse stakeholders to recognize the needs of marginalized people and ideate suitable ecological solutions. The social enterprises acted as orchestrators in this stage. The second stage involved a more dynamic role of KS in the refinement of social enterprises’ market offerings, generating additional innovations and value propositions, which diversified the scope of the social enterprises. This was facilitated by enterprises’ ability to be open systems, which change and evolve through OSI processes and KS. In the third stage, social enterprises’ use of KS was shifted towards future business development by expanding market opportunities with solutions that tackle complex societal and ecological problems, thereby contributing to sustainable development goals.

The present study contributes to studies on OSI, focusing on sustainable development and the role played by social enterprises operating in rural, economically marginalized areas, which have been an understudied phenomenon in the open innovation literature.

This paper extends the authors’ previous research work investigating resilience for municipal infrastructure from an asset management perspective. Therefore, this paper aims to formulate a pavement resilience index while incorporating asset management and the associated resilience indicators from the authors’ previous research work.

This paper introduces a set of holistic-based key indicators that reflect municipal infrastructure resiliency. Thenceforth, the indicators were integrated using the weighted sum mean method to form the proposed resilience index. Resilience indicators weights were determined using principal components analysis (PCA) via IBM SPSS®. The developed framework for the PCA was built based on an optimization model output to generate the required weights for the desired resilience index. The output optimization data were adjusted using the standardization method before performing PCA.

This paper offers a mathematical approach to generating a resilience index for municipal infrastructure. The statistical tests conducted throughout the study showed a high significance level. Therefore, using PCA was proper for the resilience indicators data. The proposed framework is beneficial for asset management experts, where introducing the proposed index will provide ease of use to decision-makers regarding pavement network maintenance planning.

The resilience indicators used need to be updated beyond what is mentioned in this paper to include asset redundancy and structural asset capacity. Using clustering as a validation tool is an excellent opportunity for other researchers to examine the resilience index for each pavement corridor individually pertaining to the resulting clusters.

This paper provides a unique example of integrating resilience and asset management concepts and serves as a vital step toward a comprehensive integration approach between the two concepts. The used PCA framework offers dynamic resilience indicators weights and, therefore, a dynamic resilience index. Resiliency is a dynamic feature for infrastructure systems. It differs during their life cycle with the change in maintenance and rehabilitation plans, systems retrofit and the occurring disruptive events throughout their life cycle. Therefore, the PCA technique was the preferred method used where it is data-based oriented and eliminates the subjectivity while driving indicators weights.

Many believe that any social media harms kids because of frequent use. This study aims to examine these assumptions. It proposes and tests a model that considers two alternative pathways – one negative and one positive – through which social media affects teens’ self-reported subjective well-being.

This research used Preacher and Hayes process modeling to conduct path analysis on data collected on 585 teenagers from across the USA.

Results showed that along a negative pathway, frequent social media use leads to greater risky social media engagement that ultimately diminishes adolescent’s sense of well-being. Also, and perhaps simultaneously, frequent social media use leads to socially-connected social media use that enhances adolescent’s sense of well-being.

The research recommends ways parents, policymakers and platforms can encourage teens to use social media to connect with friends while guiding them away from pathways exposing them to risky behaviors.

Findings show more social media use is not necessarily harmful, but more of some types is bad, while more of others is good.

The development of information technologies has led to a considerable transformation in human resource management from conventional or commonly known as personnel management to modern one. Data mining technology, which has been widely used in several applications, including those that function on the web, includes clustering algorithms as a key component. Web intelligence is a recent academic field that calls for sophisticated analytics and machine learning techniques to facilitate information discovery, particularly on the web. Human resource data gathered from the web are typically enormous, highly complex, dynamic, and unstructured. Traditional clustering methods need to be upgraded because they are ineffective. Standard clustering algorithms are enhanced and expanded with optimization capabilities to address this difficulty by swarm intelligence, a subset of nature-inspired computing. We collect the initial raw human resource data and preprocess the data wherein data cleaning, data normalization, and data integration takes place. The proposed K-C-means-data driven cuckoo bat optimization algorithm (KCM-DCBOA) is used for clustering of the human resource data. The feature extraction is done using principal component analysis (PCA) and the classification of human resource data is done using support vector machine (SVM). Other approaches from the literature were contrasted with the suggested approach. According to the experimental findings, the suggested technique has extremely promising features in terms of the quality of clustering and execution time.

Polymer laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB/P) is an additive manufacturing technology that is sustainable due to the possibility of recycling the powder multiple times and allowing the fabrication of gears without the aid of support structures and subsequent assembly. However, there are constraints in the process that negatively affect its adoption compared to other additive technologies such as material extrusion to produce gears. This study aims to demonstrate that it is possible to overcome the problems due to the physics of the process to produce accurate mechanism.

Technological aspects such as orientation, wheel-shaft thicknesses and degree of powder recycling were examined. Furthermore, the evolving tooth profile was considered as a design parameter to provide a manufacturability map of gear-based mechanisms.

Results show that there are some differences in the functioning of the gear depending on the type of powder used, 100% virgin or 50% virgin and 50% recycled for five cycles. The application of a groove on a gear produced with 100% virgin powder allows the mechanism to be easily unlocked regardless of the orientation and wheel-shaft thicknesses. The application of a specific evolutionary profile independent of the diameter of the reference circle on vertically oriented gears guarantees rotation continuity while preserving the functionality of the assembled mechanism.

In the literature, there are various studies on material aging and reuse in the PBF-LB/P process, mainly focused on the powder deterioration mechanism, powder fluidity, microstructure and mechanical properties of the parts and process parameters. This study, instead, was focused on the functioning of gears, which represent one of the applications in which this technology can have great success, by analyzing the two main effects that can compromise it: recycled powder and vertical orientation during construction.

The main aim of this study is to characterise and identify specific chemo-sensory profiles of ciders from the Canary Islands (Spain).

Commercial samples of Canary ciders were compared to ciders from the Basque Country and Asturias. In total, 18 samples were studied, six for each region. The analysis comprised their sensory profiling and chemical characterisation of their polyphenolic profile, volatile composition, conventional chemical parameters and CIELAB colour coordinates. In parallel, the sensory profile of the samples from the Canary Islands was first compared with their Basque and Asturian counterparts by labelled sorting task. Then, their specific aroma profile was characterised by flash profile. Further quantification of sensory-active compounds was performed by GC–MS and GC-FID to identify the volatile compounds involved in their aroma profile.

Results show that Canary ciders present a specific chemical profile characterised by higher levels of ethanol, and hydroxycinnamic acids, mainly t-ferulic, t-coumaric and neochologenic acids, and lower levels of volatile and total acidity than their Asturian and Basque counterparts. They also present a specific aroma profile characterised by fruity aroma, mainly fruit in syrup and confectionary, and sweet flavours related to their highest levels of vinylphenols formed by transformation of hydroxycinnamic acids.

An integrated strategy to explore the typicity of the currently existing Canary ciders in the market was developed. The results are important in that they will help other regions to identify specific typical chemo-sensory profiles and to promote the creation of certifications supporting regional typicity.

The purpose of the article is to identify relevant criteria for decision support in the implementation of waste-to-energy (WtE)-based systems.

The methodology is a simple case study with a qualitative approach. Five experts involved in the project of a thermoelectric power plant qualitatively evaluated, on a Likert scale, a decision model with 15 indicators derived from recent studies. The research object was the first stage of a project to implement a thermoelectric plant employing municipal solid waste (MSW) in southern Brazil.

The study identified 15 criteria supporting the decision-making process regarding WtE implementation for MSW in a mid-sized city in southern Brazil. The study identified that compliance with MSW legislation, compliance with energy legislation, initial investment and public health impact are the most influential criteria. The study offered two models for decision processes: a simplified one and a complete one, with ten and fifteen indicators, respectively.

The study concerns mid-sized municipalities in southern Brazil.

Municipal public managers have now a methodology based on qualitative evaluation that admits multiple perspectives, such as technical, economic, environmental and social, to support decision-making processes on WtE technologies for MSW.

MSW management initiatives can yield jobs and revenues for vulnerable populations and provide a correct destination for MSW, mainly in developing countries.

The main originality is that now municipal public decision-makers have a structured model based on four constructs (technical, economic, environmental and social) deployed in 15 indicators to support decision-making processes involving WtE and MSW management.