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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the conceptual issues of information behaviour research by reviewing the approaches to information interaction in the context of information seeking and retrieval (IS&R).

The study uses the conceptual analysis focussing on four pioneering models for interactive IS&R proposed by Belkin, Ingwersen and Ingwersen and Järvelin.

A main characteristic of models for information interaction is the tripartite setting identifying information resources accessible through information systems, intermediary/interface and user. Dialogue is a fundamental constituent of information interaction. Early models proposed by Belkin and Ingwersen focussed on the dialogue occurring in user-intermediary interaction, while more recent frameworks developed by Ingwersen and Järvelin devote more attention to dialogue constitutive of user-information system interaction.

As the study focusses on four models developed within the period of 1984-2005, the findings cannot be generalised to depict the phenomena of information interaction as a whole. Further research is needed to model the specific features of information interaction occurring in the networked information environments in particular.

The study pioneers by providing an in-depth analysis of the ways in which pioneering researchers have conceptualised the phenomena of interaction in the context of IS&R. The findings contribute to the elaboration of the conceptual space of information behaviour research.

This paper aims to assess the impact of digital financial innovation on financial system development in Common Market for eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). This paper evaluates the dynamic relationship between digital financial innovation measures and financial system development using time series data from COMESA countries for the period 1997–2019.

A dynamic autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) was adopted and the mean group (MG), pooled mean group (PMG) and dynamic fixed effect (DFE) of the model were estimated to evaluate the short- and long-run impact. In addition, the dynamic generalized method of moments (DGMM) was adopted for a robustness check. The Hausman test results show PMG to be the most consistent and efficient estimator, while the coefficient of lagged dependent variable of different GMM is less than the fixed effect coefficient, and, as such, suggests system GMM is the most suitable estimator. Data for the study were sourced from World Bank Development Indicator (WDI, 2020), World Governance Indicator (WGI, 2020) and World Bank Global Financial Development Database (GFD, 2020).

The result shows that digital financial innovation significantly impacts financial system development in the long run. As such, the evidence revealed that automated teller machines (ATMs), point of sale (POS), mobile payments (MP) and mobile banking are significant and contribute positively to financial system development in the long run, while mobile money (MM) and Internet banking (INB) are insignificant but exhibit positive and inverse relationship with financial development respectively. Further investigation revealed that institutional quality and a stable macroeconomic environment including their interactive term are significantly imperative in predicting financial system development in the COMESA region.

Researchers recommend a cohesive and conscious policy that would checkmate the divergence in the short run and suggest a common regional innovative financial strategy that could be pursued to incentivize technology transfer needed to promote financial system development in the long run. More so, plausible product and process innovations may be adapted to complement innovative institutions in the different components of the COMESA financial system.

Digital financial innovation services if well managed increase the inherent benefits in financial system development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents new background information on digital financial innovation that may stimulate the development of the financial system, particularly in the COMESA region. It also exposes the relevance of digital financial innovation, institutional quality and stable macroeconomic environment as well as their interactive effect on COMESA financial system development.

Although service research typically asserts that institutions coordinate actors’ value creation processes, institutions and resources are not necessarily transparent, aligned, or pre-existing. This paper aims to develop a more granular perspective on how actors coordinate for value.

Drawing on the established concepts of signaling and screening theory, this paper adopts a service marketing perspective to explore how independent heterogeneous actors coordinate for value creation at the individual level. Illustrative cases of corporate startup collaborations are presented in support of the proposed conceptual framework.

Actors share and acquire information through signaling and screening activities in a coordinative dialogue with other actors. These resource integration activities (for resource creation and matching) affect actors’ valuations and future actions.

The one-sided explanations of coordination in the existing literature reflect the dominance of the institutional theory. By contrast, the proposed agency-oriented perspective based on the integration of signaling and screening functions offers a more granular conceptualization of the resource integration process. As well as capturing how actors use coordinating dialogue to match resources and institutions, this account also shows that matching is a core element of resource integration rather than an antecedent. The findings indicate paths for future research that focus on the actor.

The objective of this research is to analyze how omnichannel consumer journey design (OCJD) influences the online customer experience (OCE) and e-satisfaction in consumers' multirooming behavior (searching for information in online and offline channels and purchasing the product online).

The problem-solving theory and experiential marketing perspective are the theoretical background that enables the establishment of five hypotheses. A survey is conducted on multiroomers who had purchased a product online, following an online and offline research journey.

The results showed that OCJD directly and indirectly (through online consumer experience) influences e-satisfaction. Females and younger individuals exhibited higher levels of e-satisfaction.

First, this research analyzes consumers' multichannel search strategies. Second, the consumer journey is incorporated into the study of multichannel retailing. Third, an emergent typology of cross-channel free-riding behavior is analyzed: multirooming.

One key determinant of entrepreneurial success is entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), defined as an individual’s confidence in his or her ability to perform entrepreneurial tasks. Whereas previous research has examined how individual and business factors influence ESE, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of entrepreneurs’ social networks upon ESE. The paper examines such relationships for black and white entrepreneurs.

In total, 110 black and white entrepreneurs responded to a survey measuring ESE and critical constructs representing elements of the quality of entrepreneurs’ networks: emotional carrying capacity (ECC) and network ethnic diversity.

The authors found significant, positive relationships between both ECC and network ethnic diversity on ESE for white entrepreneurs but only found a significant positive relationship between ECC and ESE for black entrepreneurs.

While research is clear about the role that ESE plays in entrepreneurial activities, few studies have focused on the factors that improve ESE. In the present work, the authors study the role of context by examining how entrepreneurs’ social networks influence ESE. The authors examine such influences for both white and black entrepreneurs to better understand the implications of ethnicity.

This study aims to explore US hotel guests’ privacy concerns with a twofold aim as follows: to investigate the privacy categories, themes and attributes most commonly discussed by guests in their reviews and to examine the influence of cultural proximity on privacy concerns.

This study combined automated text analytics with content analysis. The database consisted of 68,000 hotel reviews written by US guests lodged in different types of hotels in five European cities. Linguistic Inquiry Word Count, Leximancer and SPSS software were used for data analysis. Automated text analytics and a validated privacy dictionary were used to investigate the reviews by exploring the categories, themes and attributes of privacy concerns. Content analysis was used to analyze the narratives and select representative snippets.

The findings revealed various categories, themes and concepts related to privacy concerns. The two most commonly discussed categories were privacy restriction and outcome state. The main themes discussed in association with privacy were “room,” “hotel,” “breakfast” and several concepts within each of these themes were identified. Furthermore, US guests showed the lowest levels of privacy concerns when staying at American hotel chains as opposed to non-American chains or independent hotels, highlighting the role of cultural proximity in privacy concerns.

Hotel managers can benefit from the results by improving their understanding of hotel and service attributes mostly associated with privacy concerns. Specific suggestions are provided to hoteliers on how to increase guests’ privacy and on how to manage issues related to cultural distance with guests.

This study contributes to the hospitality literature by investigating a neglected issue: on-site hotel guests’ privacy concerns. Using an unobtrusive method of data collection and text analytics, this study offers valuable insights into the categories of privacy, the most recurrent themes in hotel guests’ reviews and the potential relationship between cultural proximity and privacy concerns.

This paper presents a survey of research into interactive robotic systems for the purpose of identifying the state of the art capabilities as well as the extant gaps in this emerging field. Communication is multimodal. Multimodality is a representation of many modes chosen from rhetorical aspects for its communication potentials. The author seeks to define the available automation capabilities in communication using multimodalities that will support a proposed Interactive Robot System (IRS) as an AI mounted robotic platform to advance the speed and quality of military operational and tactical decision making.

This review will begin by presenting key developments in the robotic interaction field with the objective of identifying essential technological developments that set conditions for robotic platforms to function autonomously. After surveying the key aspects in Human Robot Interaction (HRI), Unmanned Autonomous System (UAS), visualization, Virtual Environment (VE) and prediction, the paper then proceeds to describe the gaps in the application areas that will require extension and integration to enable the prototyping of the IRS. A brief examination of other work in HRI-related fields concludes with a recapitulation of the IRS challenge that will set conditions for future success.

Using insights from a balanced cross section of sources from the government, academic, and commercial entities that contribute to HRI a multimodal IRS in military communication is introduced. Multimodal IRS (MIRS) in military communication has yet to be deployed.

Multimodal robotic interface for the MIRS is an interdisciplinary endeavour. This is not realistic that one can comprehend all expert and related knowledge and skills to design and develop such multimodal interactive robotic interface. In this brief preliminary survey, the author has discussed extant AI, robotics, NLP, CV, VDM, and VE applications that is directly related to multimodal interaction. Each mode of this multimodal communication is an active research area. Multimodal human/military robot communication is the ultimate goal of this research.

A multimodal autonomous robot in military communication using speech, images, gestures, VST and VE has yet to be deployed. Autonomous multimodal communication is expected to open wider possibilities for all armed forces. Given the density of the land domain, the army is in a position to exploit the opportunities for human–machine teaming (HMT) exposure. Naval and air forces will adopt platform specific suites for specially selected operators to integrate with and leverage this emerging technology. The possession of a flexible communications means that readily adapts to virtual training will enhance planning and mission rehearsals tremendously.

Interaction, perception, cognition and visualization based multimodal communication system is yet missing. Options to communicate, express and convey information in HMT setting with multiple options, suggestions and recommendations will certainly enhance military communication, strength, engagement, security, cognition, perception as well as the ability to act confidently for a successful mission.

The objective is to develop a multimodal autonomous interactive robot for military communications. This survey reports the state of the art, what exists and what is missing, what can be done and possibilities of extension that support the military in maintaining effective communication using multimodalities. There are some separate ongoing progresses, such as in machine-enabled speech, image recognition, tracking, visualizations for situational awareness, and virtual environments. At this time, there is no integrated approach for multimodal human robot interaction that proposes a flexible and agile communication. The report briefly introduces the research proposal about multimodal interactive robot in military communication.

This paper aims to examine the influence of interactive social media marketing communications on teenagers’ cognitive, affective and behavioral attitude components in South Africa. The study also considers the impact of a number of additional factors such as usage (access, length of usage, log-on frequency, log-on duration and profile update incidence) and demographic (gender, age and population group) variables on young consumers’ attitudes toward social media marketing communications.

A survey was used via three self-administered questionnaires, which were distributed to over 13,000 learners in the age range of 13-18 years (Generation Z cohort) at colleges and high schools in South Africa. A generalized linear model was used for statistical data analysis.

The study ascertained that social media marketing communications had a positive on each attitude component among adolescents, but on a declining scale, which correlates to the purchase funnel. The results also revealed that teenagers who used social media for long time periods; updated their profiles frequently and were from the Colored and Black population groups, displayed the most favorable attitudinal responses to social media marketing communications.

Social media was collectively analyzed and did not consider the number of different social media types, which could be examined individually. This investigation only considered the Generation Z cohort, but other cohorts to attitudes toward social media marketing communications could also be assessed.

Companies and their brands should consider using and/or adapting their strategies based on the declining impact of social media marketing communications on the hierarchical attitude stages among young consumers and the divergent influence on usage and demographic variables when targeting the lucrative and technologically advanced, but capricious, Generation Z consumers.

This research established that social media marketing communications had a favorable influence on cognitive, affective and behavioral attitude components among young consumers, but on a declining scale, which is in congruence with the purchase funnel model. This investigation also makes an important contribution to attitudinal research in developing countries, where there is a lack of research in social media marketing communications.