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Carbon emission is a significant issue for the current business market and global warming. Nowadays, most countries have focused to reduce the environmental impact of business with durable financial benefits. The purpose of this study is to optimize the entire cost functions with carbon emission and to find the sustainable optimal ordering quantity for retailers.

This paper illustrates a sustainable inventory model having a set of two non-instantaneous substitutable deteriorating items under joint replenishment with carbon emission. In this model demand and deterioration rate are considered as deterministic, constant and triangular fuzzy numbers. The objective is to find the optimal ordering quantity for retailers and to minimize the total cost function per unit time with carbon emission. The model is then solved with the help of Maple software.

This paper presents a solution method and also develop an algorithm to determine the order quantities which optimize the total cost function. A numerical experiment illustrates the improvement in optimal total cost of the inventory model with substitution over without substitution. The graphical results show the convexity of the cost function. Finally, sensitivity analysis is given to get the impact of parameters and validity of the model.

This study considers a set of two non-instantaneous substitutable deteriorating items under joint replenishment with carbon emission. From the literature review, in the authors’ knowledge no researcher has undergone this kind of study.

This study investigates the rise of online female entrepreneurship in emerging economies from institutional perspectives and the resource-based view (RBV). The research also explores how choosing online entrepreneurship affects the performance of female entrepreneurs.

Data were collected through surveys, and quantitative data analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that women entrepreneurs perceive online platforms as rare, valuable, imperfectly imitable and non-substitutable resources. Furthermore, the impact of informal institutions on choosing online platforms is supported, but the influence of formal institutions remains unclear. Additionally, the study finds that opting for online platforms helps entrepreneurs achieve financial and stakeholder relationship goals but does not significantly contribute to strategic and learning goals.

Our research highlights how transitioning from a physical to an online business platform can become a valuable resource for marginalized, deprived and struggling entrepreneurs, particularly women, operating within challenging institutional contexts, often prevalent in emerging economies.

This paper considers a supply chain with a manufacturer (she) selling through an online retail platform (he) and studies the channel structure choices of two firms when investing in advertising.

The authors assume that the platform provides the manufacturer with an agency and/or reselling channel; thus, there are three possible channel structures: agency channel, reselling channel and dual channel. By developing a game-theoretic model, the authors investigate the channel structure choices of two firms when advertising separately, simultaneously and cooperatively and analyze the optimal combination strategy of channel structure and advertising scheme for both firms.

When the advertising efforts of the two firms are independent of each other, the equilibrium results show that different advertising schemes lead to different channel choices. For the manufacturer, it is optimal to choose the dual channel structure and adopt the advertising scheme that both subsidizes platform advertising and advertises on her own. For the platform, this combination is also optimal at a high commission rate; otherwise, the advertising scheme in which both firms advertise simultaneously is optimal and he is better off switching from the dual channel structure to the reselling channel structure as interchannel substitution intensity increases. The above results still hold for complementary advertising efforts and asymmetric marginal advertising costs, while in the case of substitutable advertising efforts, one firm may ride on another firm's advertising efforts, leading to different strategic combinations.

This paper not only provides useful guidance for manufacturers and platforms in channel selection and advertising strategy, but also theoretically enriches the literature on manufacturer encroachment.

Based on the idea of part standardisation and product differentiation in lean management, this paper answers the question when integrate firms should choose market foreclosure to maximise profits by studying a two-tier supply chain, which contains three types of firms: suppliers, manufacturers and integrated firms. Moreover, the effect of the substitutability between final products and the competition among firms in the supply chain would be investigated from the perspective of dynamic analysis.

Considering the decision order of integrated firms and manufacturers in the downstream of the supply chain, the authors build three competition models. In each model, integrated firms compete with manufacturers in Bertrand–Nash fashion. And, suppliers compete with each other in Cournot fashion, so do integrated firms and manufacturers. The authors further discuss how the competitive relationship between firms affect the equilibrium result.

Numerical analysis reveals that under other conditions unchanged, the increased competition between downstream firms leads to the rise in the willingness of selling parts for integrated firms, while the increase in the number of suppliers has the opposite effect. In addition, due to the market change before and after the vertical merger, it may lead to the transition from profitable to unprofitable for the vertical merger.

This paper provides a theoretical analysis and managerial implication for integrated firms' market foreclosure decision. From the perspective of dynamic analysis, this paper demonstrates the result of vertical mergers and provides an explanation for the failure of vertical mergers.

The paper aims to provide some insight into mental models of the bibliographic universe and how they compare with functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) as a conceptual model of the bibliographic universe.

To get a more complete picture of the mental models, different elicitation techniques were used. The three tasks of the paper were: card‐sorting, concept mapping and comparison task. The paper deals with comparison task, which consisted of interviews and rankings, and provides a discussion of the results of the paper as a whole.

Results of the ranking part of the comparison task confirm the findings of concept mapping task. In both cases, while there are individual differences between mental models, on average they gravitate towards FRBR.

This is a small study and it provides only a glimpse of the implications of using FRBR as a conceptual basis for cataloguing. More FRBR‐related user studies are needed, including similar studies on different groups of individuals and different types of materials, as well as practical studies of user needs and user interfaces.

The results of this study are the first user‐tested indication of the validity of FRBR as a conceptual basis for the future of cataloguing.

This is the first published paper of mental models of the bibliographic universe and uses a unique combination of mental model elicitation techniques.

This research proposes a decision framework for using non-financial measures to define a replenishment policy for perishable health products. These products are perishable and substitutable by nature and create complexities for managing inventory. Instead of a financial measure, numerous measures should be considered and balanced to meet business objectives and enhance inventory management.

This research applies a multi-methodological approach and develops a framework that integrates discrete event simulation (DES), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques to define the most favourable replenishment policy using non-financial measures.

The integration framework performs well as illustrated in the numerical example; outcomes from the framework are comparable to those generated using a traditional, financial measures-based, approach. This research demonstrates that it is feasible to adopt non-financial performance measures to define a replenishment policy and evaluate performance.

The framework, thus, prioritises non-financial measures and addresses issues of lacking information sharing and employee involvement to enhance hospitals' performance while minimising costs. The non-financial measures improve cross-functional communication while supporting simpler transformations from high-level strategies to daily operational targets.

The literature is full of studies of production functions with capital and labour aggregate indices, mainly for the economies or manufacturing industries of the USA and Canada. Traditional Cobb‐Douglas and CES specifications treated aggregate labour on the assumption that heterogeneous labour categories were highly substitutable. Berndt and Christensen proposed that a consistent aggregate of diverse labour exists if certain Allen‐Uzawa partial elasticities of substitution (AUES, denoted σij, i, j = factor inputs) are equal.

A multispecialty hospital possesses sustainable competitive advantage if it continuously improves performance, repeatedly delivers quality service and unique value to the patients and the sources of competitive advantage are valuable, rare, inimitable, non-substitutable or causally ambiguous. The term sustainable competitive advantage is vague and ambiguous and the environment in which hospitals operate is dynamic, turbulent and disruptive. Therefore, sources of competitive advantage must change and evolve with time. This paper aims to explore the themes of competitive advantage in a dynamic environment for multispecialty hospitals in India by studying data from secondary sources for five hospitals.

The findings of the case study were based on the analysis of secondary data that are extracted from the official websites of the hospitals, with the grounded theory approach.

Five identified themes are as follows: changing and adapting; clinical excellence; creating unique value; managing unpredictable circumstances and patient-centric approach. All the themes supported hospital performance, service and value delivered to patients and therefore may help in building a competitive advantage of the hospital. However, sustainability factors were inconsistent across the themes.

The CXOs and CMOs of hospitals can review the themes periodically and re-align the business strategies to build a sustainable competitive advantage.

The findings of the study uncovered the criticality of re-alignment of resources deployed in the unpredictable and ever-changing environment in which hospitals thrive to build sustainable competitive advantage.

This paper aims to focus on duopolistic competition under dynamic price and production postponement for two differentiable products that share common product platform at a certain degree of product commonality.

Both price and production postponement modelling are benchmarked according to their profit in order to investigate the product substitutability effect to the profit and also their appropriateness to different competition situations. In addition, dynamic property is applied to show the demand changes effect of both strategic decisions (price and production) against demand uncertainty.

The results show that the pure price postponement is appropriate to be applied into highly customized products while pure production postponement to configurable products.

Price and production postponement decisions help managers to optimize product development as well as production strategy by considering demand and supply sides.

Price and production postponements give alternative ways to managers for deciding on how to produce products as fighting product and mass customized product.

Innovative price and production postponement models are the novelty of this paper.