Search results

The emergence of the Software-as-a-service (SaaS) licensing model dramatically changes how enterprise software is released. Especially, it is favored by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) because of the cost-friendly feature. In contrast, many large enterprises (LEs) own relatively abundant budgets and prefer the on-premise software to fulfill demands through customization. Considering the differentiated cost-acceptance level among customers, this study aims to address the versioning problem of the enterprise software faced by software firms.

A two-point distribution model is formulated to calculate the maximal profits software firm earned from both LEs and SMEs under three strategies (On-premise, SaaS and Hybrid). Then through profit comparison, this paper obtains the optimal versioning strategy and corresponding feasible conditions. Finally, the optimal solutions are derived concerning social welfare.

A significant finding is that moving to SaaS becomes necessary for the software firms in product releases since the on-premise strategy will not be optimal. Based on this, this paper discovers that when LEs own a cost-acceptance level close to that of SMEs, the hybrid strategy is the only optimal choice. When LEs become less sensitive to costs, the hybrid strategy is suggested if the customization cost falls below the threshold. Otherwise, the SaaS strategy becomes the optimal option. The conclusions explain why some software vendors transit to “cloud companies” thoroughly and provide practical insights for software firms’ future decisions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first information economics study to consider consumer cost sensitivity in discussing enterprise software versioning. The differentiated cost-acceptance level is introduced to describe the customer utilities, and the results uncover the necessity of moving to SaaS under diversified customer composition. This work provides significant theoretical value and practical insights.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the characteristic role of specialized markets and traders in the internationalization of emerging economies by examining the linkages between supply chain management (SCM) and industrial clustering in China.

Multi-method approach was employed as primary data were collected from a case study of Shaoxing textile cluster, and was supplemented with secondary data to triangulate the findings. The proposition that competitive advantages of industrial clusters facilitate effective SCM was explored.

The authors reveal that China’s cost advantage is manifested in the entire value chain. The provision of business friendly amenities as a result of synergetic benefits of vertical and horizontal integration of supply clusters promotes competitiveness of SMEs and region as a whole. Moreover, specialized markets and international traders found to play significant role in sustainable cluster development.

As with fieldwork and case studies, generalization should be drawn with care. Systematic synthesis of relevant case studies is recommended.

The study endorses the construction of local supply chains and suggests implementation of cluster strategy by focusing on environment-specific execution of triple helix model.

The article elaborates the linkages between cluster theory and SCM both within cluster and between interspersed clusters. It also explains how specialized markets and global players are enabling concentrated supply networks. The paper recommends extension of “Triple helix + 1 model” by making local community part of the underlying framework.

The purpose of this research is to examine how firms can build collective organisational citizenship behaviour towards the environment (OCBE) from green human resource management (GHRM) practices. The study tests how the three main aspects of GHRM, namely green abilities, green motivation and green opportunities, give rise to the enablers of green culture (EGC). The study further tests how each of the EGC (leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement and employee empowerment) leads to the development of OCBE at the organisational level of analysis.

Data were collected from Taiwanese manufacturing companies with a target of departmental heads. The authors managed to get 284 valid responses and analysed the data using path analysis on Stata12.

The study findings suggest that GHRM practices that include developing green abilities, green motivation and green opportunities support the development of the EGC. The EGC include leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement and employee empowerment. It was, however, found that green abilities do not support the development of message credibility. It was further found the EGC lead to the development of collective OCBE except for peer involvement.

The authors propose an original concept of EGC in the context of Taiwanese manufacturing firms. This paper is amongst the pioneer papers to test the OCBE at organisational level. The authors also develop an integrated conceptual framework upon which firms can use in order to build OCBE at organisational level. Previous studies have examined OCBEs at employee/individual level.

Employee green behavior can lead to a firm's green performance. However, green management research has not accorded adequate attention to the mechanism underlying green creativity. This study aims to investigate the influence of green human resource management (GHRM) practices on green creativity at both individual and collective levels.

Through a multisource, multiwave survey data obtained from employees of 3- to 5-star hotels in Kenya, the present study investigates how GHRM practices influence individual and collective green creativity. For the data analysis, we employed multilevel structural equation modeling using MPlus 7.2.

The study findings show that GHRM practices influence individual and collective green creativity. The proposed mediating role of the enablers of green culture (EGC) in these relationships was confirmed. Moreover, environmentally specific servant leadership moderated the relationships between GHRM and individual and collective green creativity.

The study recommends that hotel management should embrace GHRM practices to nurture green creativity at the employee and team levels. The hotels management is further persuaded by the findings of this study to pay attention to the four EGC (leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement and employee empowerment) which play a key role in enhancing green creativity among hotel employees.

The study recommends that hotel management should embrace GHRM practices to nurture green creativity at the employee and team levels. The hotels' management is further persuaded by the findings of this study to pay attention to the four EGC (leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement and employee empowerment) which play a key role in enhancing green creativity among hotel employees.

We develop and propose an integrated conceptual framework by which hotels can deploy to nurture green creativity at individual and team levels. We anticipate that our study findings will elicit further research into the mechanisms that reveal the nexus between GHRM and other employee green performance outcomes in the hotel sector.

The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of GHRM practices on employer branding among firms in developed and developing economies.

This study applied a cross-sectional survey for 234 respondents. The sample was derived from multiple databases consisting of firms in developed and developing countries.

The analysis indicates that green competence building practices and green performance management practices are positively related to environmental reputation and hence employer brand. Green employee involvement is exceptional because it has a more positive influence on environmental reputation in developed economies.

This study is cross-national in nature and compares GHRM practices in developed and developing economies.

The rising public concern for the natural environment is compelling business entities to revise their business models toward green management. Most manufacturing firms have realized that green innovation is a critical factor that drives their success. However, green human resource scholars have overlooked this research line despite the potential contribution it can advance in green management scholarship. This paper empirically models the extent to which green innovation culture (GIC) moderates the relationship between green human resource management (GHRM) and green competitive advantage (GCA). The paper has two-fold objectives. First, to investigate the effects of GHRM and GIC on the firm's GCA and second, to model the extent to which GIC moderates the link between GHRM practices and GCA of manufacturing firms in Zhejiang Province of China.

Data were collected from 324 Chinese employees from the manufacturing sector. The authors captured data from all levels of the organization. The authors made three models equations: two direct and one interactive. The authors then applied structural equation modeling (SEM) using AMOS 24 to test the study models and hypothesis.

The findings suggest that GHRM practices, which include recruitment and selection, training and development (green abilities); performance management and reward and compensation (green motivation); and employee involvement and leadership (green opportunities) have a significant positive effect on the firms GCA. The findings also indicate that firms that GIC, which include green product innovation (GPDI) and green process innovation (GPRI), promotes the firm's GCA. The paper further reveals that firms that combine GHRM and GIC attain higher GIC than those which practice GHRM only.

This paper draws a roadmap on how the top management in manufacturing firms can drive the firm's operations toward a higher GCA. It's the pioneer paper to suggest the combination of GHRM and GCI for enhanced GCA.

The available literature demonstrates that green human resource management (GHRM) practices enhance the firm's green performance. However, the studies fail to show how GHRM practices give rise to green culture and how such green culture influences the green competitiveness of a firm. Anchored on the Ability Motivation Opportunity (AMO) theory, this study investigates how firms can build green competitive advantage from GHRM. The study focuses on four enablers of green culture (EGC): leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement and employee empowerment. The study tests the mediating role of each EGC in the relationship between GHRM and green competitive advantage (GCA). The study findings provide managers with a deeper understanding of how GHRM supports the development of the EGC and how they explain the firm's GCA.

Data was collected from a large-scale survey of Malaysia's manufacturing firm. We managed to collect 96 valid and useable questionnaires.

We find that GHRM practices give rise to EGC and the EGC mediate the relationship between GHRM and GCA.

The study presents the EGC in the green competitiveness context and goes further to test its mediating role in the GHRM–GCA relationship. We also develop a novel conceptual framework that manufacturing firms can deploy to attain green competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to study the price decisions and profits of two firms in a competitive market in which one platform firm considers whether to adopt a consumer customization strategy.

This study develops the consumer’s utility function, which captures consumers’ behavioural and emotional factors in the self-customizing process, and it adopts a game theory approach to analyze the equilibrium price and equilibrium profit for each firm.

The results show that increased sensitivity in consumer customization might not benefit the platform, especially when the size of the consumer group deriving positive additional utility from the self-customizing process is small. Interestingly, if the consumer customization sensitivity is high, increasing sensitivity can benefit both firms by relaxing competition between them, while it can hurt consumer surplus. The study also further identifies the conditions under which platforms can adopt a consumer customization strategy.

Two major limitations of the study are that the model does not involve price discrimination or explore the value of adopting a consumer customization strategy in a vertically differentiated market.

This study offers managerial insights for the platforms that intend to invest in a consumer customization strategy, including providing a more simple, more efficient self-customizing process for consumers; empowering consumers to broadcast their creations to a large network by social media technologies; addressing how to determine what consumers really need and want; and so on.

Little research has been performed to analyze the impacts of adopting a consumer customization strategy on pricing decisions in a duopoly market by capturing consumers’ behavioural and emotional factors. While this study explores the above research issue, it also illustrates the effect of the adoption of a consumer customization strategy from a consumer surplus perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of optimal pricing strategies for two substitutable products from the same product platform and the effects of variations in product architecture.

The authors design a product line which consists of two substitutable products and use a traditional market segmentation research framework to analyze the pricing and product design strategies.

It is concluded that profit tends to rise in a centralized supply chain at the expense of market share of the integral product. In a decentralized supply chain, one product will reduce its market share so as to enhance the degree of modularity. Although enhancing the extent of integration of a product will bring in more flexibility during the design of the product line, this will do so at the expense of the market share of the other product.

The authors find that the two products form a product line and share a common module belonging to the platform, so any changes in the modules (changes in product architecture) not only affect the product in question but also the other one in the product line.

The study investigates the inter-linkages between geopolitical risk (GPR) and food price (FP).

By employing the bootstrap full- and sub-sample rolling-window Granger causality tests.

The empirical results show that there is a time-varying bidirectional causality between GPR and FP. High GPR leads to a rise in FP, suggesting that geopolitical events usually may disrupt supply and demand conditions in food markets, and even trigger global food crises. However, the negative effect of GPR on FP does not support this view in certain periods. This is mainly because GPR is also related to the global economic situation and oil price, which together have impacts on the food market. These results cannot always be supported by the inter-temporal capital asset pricing model, which states that GPR affects FP in a positive manner. Conversely, there is a positive impact of FP on GPR, indicating that the food market is an effective tool that can reflect global geopolitical environment.

In the context of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, these analyses can assist investors and policymakers to understand the sensitivity of FP to GPR. Also, it will provide significant revelations for governments to attach importance to the role of food price information in predicting geopolitical events, thus contributing to a more stable international environment.