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In the age of nine-figure transfer fees and football stars building their own brands and follower base, a shift in fan identification in football appears to be taking place as athletes can build strong connections with their followers. This paper examines the level of identification shown by football fans towards both their favourite team and their favourite player, in connection with the concept of fan loyalty.

A total of 4,707 international respondents participated in an online survey to examine the relationship between fan identification and fan loyalty, and to measure the impact of variables like country, player, club, on fan identification using multi-regression analyses.

The results underline the strong presence of team identification compared to identification of single players. Results have also revealed that the relationship between a fan's favourite team and player has a significant impact on identification levels towards both actors. Fans supporting a foreign club were found to show significantly stronger team identification than those who support a club from their own country or region.

This research contributes to the growing body of publications in the field of sports consumer research and underlines the importance of understanding the quality of relationships and thus the identification of fans with clubs and individual players for the stakeholders involved. International sports marketing is becoming increasingly important and an understanding of fan interests is essential for effective marketing, as information on trends in fan interests enables a more tailored strategy for clubs and sponsors.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Organizations and other entities that achieve digital transformation (DT) become better positioned to meet emerging challenges in the digital age. Different organizational capabilities that include an appropriate organizational culture, a workforce equipped with digital skills, modern ICT infrastructure, effective knowledge management and strong leadership support are critical if DT is to prove successful.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The space discretization of eddy‐current problems in the magnetic vector potential formulation leads to a system of differential‐algebraic equations. They are typically time discretized by an implicit method. This requires the solution of large linear systems in the Newton iterations. The authors seek to speed up this procedure. In most relevant applications, several materials are non‐conducting and behave linearly, e.g. air and insulation materials. The corresponding matrix system parts remain constant but are repeatedly solved during Newton iterations and time‐stepping routines. The paper aims to exploit invariant matrix parts to accelerate the system solution.

Following the principle “reduce, reuse, recycle”, the paper proposes a Schur complement method to precompute a factorization of the linear parts. In 3D models this decomposition requires a regularization in non‐conductive regions. Therefore, the grad‐div regularization is revisited and tailored such that it takes anisotropies into account.

The reduced problem exhibits a decreased effective condition number. Thus, fewer preconditioned conjugate gradient iterations are necessary. Numerical examples show a decrease of the overall simulation time, if the step size is small enough. 3D simulations with large time step sizes might not benefit from this approach, because the better condition does not compensate for the computational costs of the direct solvers used for the Schur complement. The combination of the Schur approach with other more sophisticated preconditioners or multigrid solvers is subject to current research.

The Schur complement method is adapted for the eddy‐current problem. Therefore, a new partitioning approach into linear/non‐linear and static/dynamic domains is proposed. Furthermore, a new variant of the grad‐div gauging is introduced that allows for anisotropies and enables the Schur complement method in 3D.

German, Austrian and Swiss utilities are confronted with radical changes in the European energy sector. A dialogue between the utility companies and their various groups of stakeholders is gaining importance. Increasingly, utilities create their own Facebook presence enabling such a dialogue. Still, to the best of the author’s knowledge there exists no research which explicitly focuses the stakeholder dialogue of German, Austrian or Swiss utilities on Facebook. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyse Facebook as an instrument for dialogic communication in the energy sector.

An online survey was distributed to 1,280 German, Austrian and Swiss utilities, and 14 per cent of the utilities completed the survey, including 130 German, 19 Austrian and 25 Swiss companies. The participating utilities are primarily in public ownership.

The Facebook conversation of utility companies and their stakeholders meets the basic requirements of a virtual stakeholder dialogue. Nevertheless, less than half of the companies perceive their current stakeholder conversation on Facebook as truly interactive. Therefore, even if the basic requirements of a dialogue are met, most companies still do not seem to fully use the dialogue potential of Facebook.

This study provides first insights into virtual stakeholder dialogues in the energy sector. A suggestion to operationalise such a virtual dialogue is provided. Both operationalisation as well as the empirical results help researchers and practitioners to better understand virtual stakeholder dialogues.

Entomophagy (i.e. human insect consumption) is seen as one promising route to substantially reduce food-related carbon footprints as insects can be produced at a fraction of the carbon emitted by traditional Western meat production (e.g. beef, pork, poultry). In this light, the purpose of this paper is to address how prices may affect preferences for insects as food.

Drawing on consumer research on “positive” functions of prices (e.g. the widely held belief that price and quality are positively correlated), the authors present two behavioural experiments that manipulated price cues to estimate the effect on expectations, eating behaviour and willingness-to-pay as central preference indicators.

Consistent with the predictions, high prices as initial anchors positively affect food preferences. Furthermore, they incur a positive spill-over effect to subsequent consumption of insects that are unprocessed (i.e. truffles in which mealworms are visible in their entity) and for which no price information is available. Additionally, the authors show that the positive effects of high prices on preferences are muted if prices are artificially lowered (e.g. by means of government subsidies, Experiment 2).

Taken together, the authors show that preferences for novel foods such as insects can be promoted by systematically taking into account behavioural economic theories. This suggests that behavioural theory can be used to reap environmental benefits of entomophagy.

This research links behavioural economics with the actual consumption of insects and therefore complements survey research on behavioural intentions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of earnings management (EM) and tax aggressiveness (TA) on shareholder wealth and on stock price crash risk (SPCR) of German companies.

The sample comprises 820 firm-year observations of 188 non-financial companies listed on German stock exchanges from 2008 to 2014. The authors apply generalized least square panel regression to overcome autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity problems.

EM and TA are not related in terms of affecting shareholder wealth and SPCR. EM has no impact on shareholder wealth but significantly affects SPCR. TA has a significant positive effect on shareholder wealth but no impact on SPCR. Thus, EM practices applied within German companies are non-opportunistic, as they do not affect shareholder wealth and decrease SPCR. TA practices are also non-opportunistic, as they increase shareholder wealth and do not affect SPCR.

This study provides insights that can improve managers’ accounting choices (EM vs TA) and alleviate investor concerns about the effect of managers’ manipulation strategies. Considering other variables affecting TA, such as discretionary book tax differences, may add further insights into this discussion. The analysis of and comparison with other markets may shed more light on the validity and generalizability of the results.

This study recommends that investors must take into consideration the accounting variables to ensure better investment decisions and highlight the importance of CEO choices on market reaction.

The investigation of the mutual impact of EM and TA on shareholder wealth and SPCR is novel, and so too is the analysis of whether EM and TA are complementary or substitute for each other in this relationship.

This paper aims to provide an in-depth evaluation of how German and Austrian utilities use Facebook to engage stakeholders, including a look at the objectives pursued with the use of Facebook, addressed stakeholders as well as the provided information. German and Austrian utility companies are confronted with serious changes in the European energy sector. In this context, stakeholder theory emphasises the importance for utility companies to actively manage the relationships with the relevant stakeholders. Nowadays, a considerable number of these stakeholders might be addressed by using Facebook.

The quantitative study includes 88 German and Austrian utility companies.

Research findings indicate that Facebook is a common instrument in the German and Austrian energy sectors. It seems that so far, no real stakeholder dialogue has been achieved. Moreover, issues which deeply affect a wide variety of citizens are not emphasised on most Facebook accounts. Therefore, so far, the majority of utilities is not using the full potential of Facebook.

By developing a process of agenda-setting driven by social media, the paper contributes to the existing literature and gives practical implications for public and private entities in the energy sector.

This paper aims to propose the use of isogeometric analysis (IGA) for the simulation of electrical machines to represent their geometries exactly and obtain numerical solutions of high accuracy and regularity.

IGA makes use of non-uniform rational b-splines to parametrise the domain and approximate the solution spaces. Dealing with the different stator and rotor topologies, the computational domain is split into two non-overlapping parts on which Maxwell’s equations are solved independently and are interconnected by a classical Schwarz domain decomposition scheme. The results are compared with the conventional polynomial finite element method (FEM).

The new methodology is reliable and efficient. The obtained solutions of the fields are in good agreement with the ones obtained by the FEM approach. IGA offers a better accuracy than FEM.

The application of IGA combined with domain decomposition to the model of an electric machine is a new and original contribution.

This paper explores the relationship between married women's intrahousehold decision-making participation and marital gender roles, next to factors suggested in the household bargaining literature. Additionally, the authors investigate whether women's employment carries the same importance for decision-making participation as contributions to household incomes.

Using 2011/2012 Nicaraguan Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), the authors estimate multinomial logistic regressions for eight decision-making domains, analyzing three levels of decision-making: wife-dominant or sole decisions, joint decision-making (with the partner) and decision-making by someone else. The authors create an additive index for measuring internalized marital gender roles.

Women's intrahousehold decision-making participation is explained differently depending on the decision-making area and level of participation. Women with a better relative position vis-à-vis partners and not following patriarchal gender roles are more likely to make decisions jointly with their partners, but not alone. Women's age and educational level are the strongest predictors in the analysis. Women's employment reduces their decision-making participation in children's disciplining and daily cooking-related decisions.

It focuses on married women only, while marital status might be a determinant of decision-making itself and left out the contribution of unearned incomes.

Interventions aimed at increasing women's intrahousehold decision-making participation should not only focus on economic endowments but also comprehend the gendered dynamics governing intrahousehold allocation.

The study incorporates quantitative measures of marital gender roles in the study of intrahousehold decision-making. It also contributes to the literature with insights from contexts where women's involvement in employment increased against a background of patriarchal gender roles.

This study aims to explore the requirements that manufacturing companies must meet when implementing advanced services involving financial solutions.

This study develops a framework to assess the applicability of advanced services from a financial perspective, which is applied in a multi-case study setting.

This study identifies relevant internal and external conditions to the business implementing financialised advanced services – such as the finance function’s level of sophistication, the capacity to assess market potential or the ability to use financial structuring to attract new financial players – that help predict the likelihood of adopting advanced services involving financial solutions. The research suggests planning operations as a “financial product” from the viewpoint of the financer and investor.

The financing culture and market disparities may condition the relative weight of the dimensions analysed in the framework.

Launching services involving financial solutions is a complex process, and hence, the proposed framework can help managers identify the major adjustments needed to embrace those advanced service modalities.

This study investigates the role of financial solutions in advanced services, from both the conceptual and business perspectives.