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This study aims to examine the moderating role of dimensions of brand authenticity (continuity, credibility, integrity and symbolism) in the relationship between evaluations of imperfect experiences and satisfaction within a service experience context. Building on prior research arguing for the subjective evaluation of service experiences as well as for the use of signals during dynamic experiences that build a shield to protect a brand, it assumes that service experiences range across a continuum of experiential perfection/imperfection.

Two Web-based surveys, one pilot (N = 231) and one main (N = 349) have been conducted. The survey methodology was complemented by a (moderated) structural equation modelling approach taken for the data analysis.

The findings indicate that imperfect experiences in a restaurant context have a negative influence on satisfaction. Brand continuity, credibility, integrity and symbolism authenticity weaken the negative relationship between imperfect experiences and satisfaction, but this effect seems to depend on the type of experiential imperfections.

The current study provides theoretical and preliminary empirical evidence explaining how dynamic interactions with customers can impact subsequent static experiences. The authors found that the strength of the relationship between imperfect experiential elements and satisfaction does not only depend on perceived brand authenticity and does not always weaken when brand authenticity is present.

This study aims to examine the role of blockchain technology (BCT) in trust in financial reporting (TFR) and the use of smart contracts (USC). It aims to ascertain the mediating role of USC in the relationship between BCT and TFR, thereby contributing to the limited empirical literature in this domain.

Based on a sample of the accountants’ familiarity with BCT, a structural equation model was constructed and analyzed using AMOS 24. The model proposes and tests relationships between BCT, USC and TFR.

The study highlights BCT’s significant positive influence on TFR, with USC mediating this effect. It provides empirical evidence that supports the transformative potential of BCT and USC in enhancing TFR.

These findings have significant implications for practitioners, regulatory bodies and policymakers. By highlighting the effectiveness of BCT and USC in fostering TFR, the study makes one aware of strategies to mitigate financial malpractices. It promotes the adoption of BCT in accounting practices.

This study addresses a gap in the literature by investigating the complex interplay of BCT, USC and TFR. It offers a unique perspective by exploring the mediating role of USC, thereby enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms through which BCT can foster TFR.

Systematic reviews have contributed substantially to the development of knowledge in various academic fields and have helped discover new research potentials in a systematic manner. Specifically, this study aims to conduct a systematic bibliometric review to address ethical issues across the halal food supply chain (HFSC), as well as to identify the ethical challenges that food handlers face in ensuring authenticity, compliance with Shariah law and avoidance of contamination with non-halal ingredients in halal food products.

A bibliometric approach was used to analyse 263 publications from the Scopus database. The present research analysed the documents’ bibliographical data based on publication year, source title, country of origin, institution, authorship, keywords and citation count. The VOSviewer software was applied to perform citation and co-word analysis, as well as to construct bibliometric networks centred on the topic of ethical issues in the HFSC. This bibliometric review provides valuable insights for researchers to identify key publications and comprehend the foundational structure of the subject matter. It also helps guide future research into significant trends and new areas of study.

Citation analysis provides valuable insights into influential publications and the interconnectedness of research on HFSC. A co-word analysis revealed that discussions on ethics and integrity in the HFSC primarily revolved around the concept of halal and its implications, particularly in supply chain management. However, the limited frequency and prominence of these keywords suggests a scarcity of academic discourse on ethical matters in this field. Moreover, ethical considerations not only serve as a critical aspect of ensuring halal integrity but also emerge as a strategic imperative in marketing, brand management and the operation of global businesses.

This study addresses the need to examine the knowledge gap in the literature on ethical practices and issues in HFSC. Although there is a significant amount of academic writing in the halal context, there is a scarcity of research that specifically focuses on the ethical aspects of HFSC. This study also offers a framework for investigating the ethical practices and issues in HFSC.

The diagnosis and prediction methods used for estimating the health conditions of the bearing are of great significance in modern petrochemical industries. This paper aims to discuss the accuracy and stability of improved empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm in bearing fault diagnosis.

This paper adopts the improved adaptive complementary ensemble empirical mode decomposition (ICEEMD) to process the nonlinear and nonstationary signals. Two data sets including a multistage centrifugal fan data set from the laboratory and a motor bearing data set from the Case Western Reserve University are used to perform experiments. Furthermore, the proposed fault diagnosis method, combined with intelligent methods, is evaluated by using two data sets. The proposed method achieved accuracies of 99.62% and 99.17%. Through the experiment of two data, it can be seen that the proposed algorithm has excellent performance in the accuracy and stability of diagnosis.

According to the review papers, as one of the effective decomposition methods to deal with nonlinear nonstationary signals, the method based on EMD has been widely used in bearing fault diagnosis. However, EMD is often used to figure out the nonlinear nonstationarity of fault data, but the traditional EMD is prone to modal confusion, and the white noise in signal reconstruction is difficult to eliminate.

In this paper only the top three optimal intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) are selected, but IMFs with less correlation cannot completely deny their value. Considering the actual working conditions of petrochemical units, the feasibility of this method in compound fault diagnosis needs to be studied.

Different from traditional methods, ICEEMD not only does not need human intervention and setting but also improves the extraction efficiency of feature information. Then, it is combined with a data-driven approach to complete the data preprocessing, and further carries out the fault identification and classification with the optimized convolutional neural network.

This study aims to assess whether non-financial corporate social responsibility (CSR) information decreases audit risk and audit scope and enables speedier completion of audit reports. The study also investigates whether institutional investors’ ownership (IIO) has an influence on the association between CSR disclosures and audit report lag (ARL).

This study uses a sample of 154 Saudi firms over 2016–2021 (837 observations) and applies ordinary least square regression to examine the study hypotheses.

This study’s results show that ARL is significantly shorter for firms with higher CSR disclosures. Furthermore, the findings show that IIO has no significant impact on the association between CSR disclosures and ARL.

This study offers new insights into how auditors respond to CSR disclosures and whether institutional investor monitoring influences the audit process in an emerging economy.

This study aims to examine the association between anti-corruption corporate disclosure and earnings management practices by bringing evidence from a developed market.

The study uses data from non-financial FTSE 100 Shares in 2016 and 2017. This study develops a disclosure index to capture the anti-corruption disclosures and run pooled, fixed effects and generalized methods of moments regression models to explore the anti-corruption disclosure–earnings management association. This study also disentangles discretionary accruals into positive and negative, use adjusted discretionary accrual computation and take a more conservative view on discretionary accruals computation as an additional analysis.

The results show a negative and significant association between anti-corruption disclosure and earnings management practices. When disentangling discretionary accruals (overvalued/positive and undervalued/negative), the authors found that higher anti-corruption disclosures were negatively associated with positive discretionary accruals, but not associated with negative discretionary accruals. The additional analysis confirmed the previous results, showing that anti-corruption disclosures are perceived as a substantive practice, rather than a mere disclosure practice for legitimacy reasons.

This study contributes to debate on the symbolic versus the substantive uses of anti-corruption disclosures in the UK context.

Trust is the glue that holds cooperative relationships together and often exists in an asymmetric manner. The purpose of this study is to explore how to mitigate the issue of losses or increased transaction costs caused by opportunistic behavior in a soft environment where trust asymmetry is quite common and difficult to avoid.

This study focuses on examining asymmetric trust between the government and the private sector in public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Drawing upon both project realities and relevant literature, the primary conditional variables influencing asymmetric trust are identified. These variables encompass power perception asymmetry, information asymmetry, interaction behavior, risk perception differences and government-side control. Subsequently, through the use of a survey questionnaire, binary-matched data from both the government and the private sector are collected. The study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to conduct a configurational analysis, aiming to investigate the causal pathways that trigger asymmetric trust.

No single conditional variable is a necessary condition for the emergence of trust asymmetry. The pathways leading to a high degree of trust asymmetry can be categorized into two types: those dominated by power perception and those involving a combination of multiple factors. Differences in power perception play a crucial role in the occurrence of high trust asymmetry, yet the influence of other conditional variables in triggering trust asymmetry should not be overlooked.

The findings can contribute to advancing the study of trust relationships in the field of Chinese PPP projects. Furthermore, they hold practical value in facilitating the enhancement of trust relationships between the government and the private sector.

This paper explores how the disclosure quality, measured by the abnormal tone of environmental and social report, may determine the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) performance of the firm. This study also investigates the impact of the moderator “board of directors” to explore the extent to which a well-balanced board of directors may affect this association within an impression management strategy.

This work uses a sample of 616 firm-year observations using a sample of French firms indexed on SBF120 index from 2010 to 2017. To test the developed hypotheses, the GLS regression is applied and to control for endogeneity issue and sample selection bias, the authors used, respectively, the two stage least square (2SLS) procedure and the Heckman model.

Findings suggest that a well-balanced board of directors moderates the relationship between the ESG performance and the disclosure quality. The positive effect of abnormal tone management on ESG is weakened by the presence of a good structure of the board, attenuating impression management initiatives.

The research provides evidence of the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting quality, in particular disclosure tone management, on the level of ESG performance in the French context. As the board of directors may have a major impact on weakening impression management strategies in particular tone management practices, in order to improve CSR report quality, the authors recommend French companies to ensure a well-balanced board of directors.

This study helps investors to comprehensively evaluate the information disclosed on CSR reports. It unveils that a strong board composition induces better quality of CSR report and brings better ESG performance. Thus, the study results point to the importance of a well-balanced board of directors and the regulation of the narrative disclosure of CSR information.

We analyze the role of trust as a driver of speculative investment decisions in technology firms.

Structural Equation Modeling analysis in the context of blockchain technology supports our hypotheses.

Our findings indicate that a general propensity to trust technology leads to trusting beliefs in a service based on technology and that trusting beliefs in a technological service leads to a higher propensity to invest in any firm associated with that service. In addition, we show that in a non-technological context, there is no evidence for such an effect of trusting beliefs in a service on investment decisions. These results support the notion that trusting beliefs are facilitators of speculative investment in technology firms.

The research advances knowledge about the influence of trust in technology on investment decisions; its findings can help build new theoretical models regarding investment decisions using Fintech.

For investors, it is important to realize the potential bias identified in this study, so they can actively avoid adhering to it, thus avoiding exposure to unnecessary risk. Further, beyond individual investors, investment firms take active measures to avoid biases in their own decision-making. Banks and investment firms can help guide their clients about trust-based bias when building their investment portfolio.

Although trust in information systems has been studied extensively, research on the relationship between trust in technology and decisions to invest in technology-related firms is limited.

This study examines the correlation between ownership structure (OS) and financial reporting integrity (FRI), with emphasis on the impact of earnings quality (EQ) in the Egyptian context.

The study uses data from 472 firm-year observations of Egyptian publicly listed companies between 2014 and 2021 and carried out descriptive statistics, correlation tests, multiple regression analysis and two-stage least squares (2SLS) to test the hypotheses.

The results revealed that blockholders and institutional ownership significantly enhance reporting integrity through effective oversight and monitoring. The findings underscore the vital role of concentrated OS in overseeing reporting practices and mitigating managerial opportunism, thereby improving the transparency and reliability of financial disclosures in Egypt.

The findings enrich the literature on corporate governance and financial reporting quality and have important implications for policymakers, regulators and corporate stakeholders.

This work contributes valuable insights on how OS and EQ can bolster FRI, offering crucial information for combating financial crises and facilitating smooth business operations in Egypt.