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The expansion of bike-sharing enterprises has led to a series of social problems, and due to the high breakage rate and high recycling cost of bike sharing, enterprises are reluctant to maintain them. Therefore, government regulation does play a leading role in maintaining bike sharing. This study’s purpose is to investigate how the government should regulate the bike-sharing enterprises that maintain bicycles.

Firstly, the authors assume that there is only one bike-sharing enterprise and establish a game model that the government regulates the enterprise. Furthermore, the authors extend the model to the case that there are two competing enterprises in the market. Finally, through numerical analysis, the influence of various factors on the government strategy and revenue is analyzed.

The authors find that the regulatory probability of two enterprises are regulated by the government is larger than that of one enterprise. When two bike-sharing enterprises compete without government regulation, both will choose the non-self-discipline strategy, thus falling into the Prisoner's Dilemma. If the government regulates them, then both enterprises will choose the self-discipline strategy. Finally, through numerical analysis, it is found that the self-discipline behavior of bike-sharing enterprises is related to the government regulatory probability, the cost of self-discipline, the probability of being reported and the penalties. Interestingly, the cost of government regulation will not affect the regulation probability of government.

This research provides a theoretical reference for the government to make the regulation strategies of bike sharing and achieve the sustainable development of bike sharing.

This research provides a theoretical reference for the government to make the regulation strategies of bike sharing and achieve the sustainable development of bike sharing.

Free banking theory, as developed in Adam Smith’s 1776 treatise, “The Wealth of Nations” is a useful tool in determining the extent to which the “invisible hand of the market” should prevail in regulatory policy. The purpose of this study is to provide a timely review of the literature, evaluating the theory’s relevance to regulation of financial technology generally and cryptocurrencies (cryptos) specifically.

The methodology is qualitative, applying free banking theory as developed in the literature to technology-defined environments. Recent legislative developments in the regulation of cryptocurrencies in the UK, European Union and the USA, are drawn upon.

Participants in volatile cryptocurrency markets should bear the consequences of inadvisable investments in accordance with free banking theory. The decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies and the exchanges on which these are traded militate against coordinated oversight by central banks, supporting a qualified free banking approach. Differences regarding statutory definitions of cryptos as units of exchange, tokens or investment securities and the propensity of these to transition between categories across the business cycle render attempts at concerted classification at the international level problematic. Prevention of criminality through extension of Suspicious Activity Reporting to exchanges and intermediaries should be the principal objective of policymakers, rather than definitions of evolving products that risk stifling technological innovation.

The study proposes that instead of a traditional regulatory approach to cryptos, which emphasises holders’ safety and compensation, a free banking approach combined with a focus on criminality would be a more effective and pragmatic way forward.

Digital platforms (DP) are transforming service delivery and affecting associated actors. The position of DPs is impacted by the regulations. However, emerging economies often lack the regulatory environment to support DPs. This paper aims to explore the regulatory developments for DPs using the multi-level perspective (MLP).

The paper explores regulatory developments of ride-hailing platforms (RHPs) in India and their impacts. This study uses qualitative interview data from platform representatives, bureaucrats, drivers, experts and policy documents.

Regulatory developments in the ride-hailing space cannot be explained as a linear progression. The static institutional assumptions, especially without considering the multi-actors and multi-levels in policy formulation, do not serve associated actors adequately in different times and spaces. The RHPs regulations must consider the perspective of new RHPs and the support available to them. Non-consideration of short- and long-term perspectives of RHPs may have unequal outcomes for established and new RHPs.

This research has implications for the digital economy regulatory ecosystem, DPs and implications for policymakers. Though the data from legal documents and qualitative interviews is adequate, transactional data from the RHPs and interviews with judiciary actors would have been insightful.

The study provides insights into critical aspects of regulatory evolution, governance and regulatory impact on the DPs’ ecosystem. The right balance of regulations according to the business models of DPs allows DPs to have space for growth and development of the platform ecosystem.

This research shows the interactions in the digital space and how regulations can impact various actors. A balanced policy can guide the paths of DPs to have equal opportunities.

DP regulations have a complex structure. The paper studies regulatory developments of DPs and the impacts of governance and controls on associated players and platform ecosystems.

To examine how shareholding affects optimal profits, R&D innovation, NEV market scale and social welfare in two supply chain models with partial and cross ownership patterns.

The gradual retreat of government subsidies has directly weakened the financial support available to the stakeholders of new energy vehicles (NEVs). In this context, upstream and downstream enterprises of NEV are constantly seeking new business models of cooperation to achieve possible win-wins. NEV supply chain shareholding is an emerging new practice for such explorations. However, its performance in the NEV supply chain is seldom investigated. In this paper, we employ a Stackelberg game model to investigate how partial and cross-ownership affect the optimal decisions in a NEV supply chain.

Results showed that: (1) Compared with the unilateral shareholding model, the battery supplier will benefit from cross-ownership in the supply chain, while the NEV manufacturer will not necessarily benefit from it. At the same time, cross-ownership will bring the greatest incentive for battery R&D (2) Supply chain downstream competition will not necessarily lead to the improvement of the total consumption of NEVs or the level of battery design. Pareto improvement can be brought only when one of the manufacturers holds less than a certain equity threshold. In addition, downstream competition will also not necessarily bring more benefits to the battery supplier.

At present, NEV supply chain management has attracted widespread attention from scholars from all walks of life. Previous studies have been carried out that covers topics such as pricing strategies and optimal profits and the role of NEV in the sustainable development of the automotive industry supply chain, or disparate impacts of government subsidies and carbon emission regulation on supply chain members. However, as far as the authors know, compared with the new emerging NEV corporate practice, the shareholding phenomenon between upstream and downstream in the supply chain of NEV has not been studied in the existing studies.

The purpose of this paper is to scrutinise the effectiveness of four derivative exchanges’ enforcement efforts since 2007. These exchanges include the Commodity Exchange Inc. and ICE Futures US from the United States and ICE Futures Europe and the London Metal Exchange from the UK.

The paper examines 799 enforcement notices published by four exchanges through a behavioural science lens: HUMANS conceived by Hunt (2023) in Humanizing Rules: Bringing Behavioural Science to Ethics and Compliance.

The paper finds the effectiveness of the exchanges’ enforcement efforts to be a mixed picture as financial markets transition from the digital to artificial intelligence era. Humans remain a key cog in the wheel of market participants’ trading operations, albeit their roles have changed. Despite this, some elements of exchanges’ enforcement regimes have not kept pace with the move from floor to remote trading. However, in other respects, their efforts are or should be, effective, at least in behavioural terms.

The paper’s findings are arguably limited to exchanges based in Anglophone jurisdictions. The information published by the exchanges is variable, making “like-for-like” comparisons difficult in some areas.

The paper makes several recommendations that, if adopted, could help exchanges to increase the potency of their enforcement programmes.

A key aim of the paper is to shift the lens through which the debate concerning the efficacy of exchange-level oversight is conducted. Hitherto, a legal lens has been used, whereas this paper uses a behavioural lens.

The 50th anniversary of Fox's Beyond Contract and Man Mismanagement coincides with another vital contribution to the sociology of work from 1974: Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. This article analyses these two scholars' complementary approaches to job design and the extent to which Fox's ideas influenced subsequent labour process thought.

The article's methodological approach is a historiographical reading of Fox and Braverman's thought in the context of their times and later scholarship.

The article demonstrates that despite some noteworthy overlap with Braverman concerning scientific management, Fox's insights were marginal to later iterations of labour process analysis. It delves into the reasons for this relative neglect, providing an understanding of the dynamics at play.

This paper's value lies in its combined industrial relations and labour process historiography. It offers a fresh perspective on Alan Fox's relationship to the latter field of study.

The changing roles of the United Nations (UN) and national institutions have made addressing climate change a critical concern for many multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) survival and growth. This chapter discusses how such institutions, which vary in their nature and characteristics, shape firm strategies for climate change adaptation. Exploring different versions of institutional theory, the chapter demonstrates how and why institutional characteristics affect typical patterns of firm ownership, governance, and capabilities. These, in turn, influence companies’ internationalisation and climate-change strategies. Climate change poses challenges to how we understand firms’ strategic decisions from both an international business (IB) (HQ–subsidiary relations) and global value chains (GVC) (buyer–supplier relations) perspective. However, climate change also provides opportunities for companies to gain competitive advantages – if firms can reconfigure and adapt faster than their competitors. Existing IB and GVC research tends to downplay the importance of climate change strategies and the ways in which coherent or dysfunctional institutions affect firms’ reconfiguration and adaptation strategies in a globally dispersed network of value creation. This chapter presents a perspective on the institutional conditions that affect firms’ climate change strategies regarding ownership, location, and internalisation (OLI), and GVCs, with ‘investment’ and ‘emerging standards’ playing a significant role. The authors illustrate the discussion using several examples from the Global South (i.e. Bangladesh) and the Global North (i.e. Denmark, Sweden, and Germany) with a special emphasis on the garment industry. The aim is to encourage future research to examine how a ‘business systems’, or varieties of capitalism, institutional perspective can complement the analysis of sustainability and climate change strategies in IB and GVC studies.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Of critical concern to the world is the need to reduce consumption and waste of natural resources. This study provides a multi-level exploration of the ways situational and transformational links between levels and challenges are related to the adoption and utilization of material flow cost accounting in Vietnam, to encourage green productivity.

Based on triangulation of public documents at different institutional levels and a set of semi-structured interviews, situational and transformational links and challenges for material flow cost accounting in Vietnam are examined using purposive and snowball sampling of key actors.

Using a multi-level framework the research identifies six situational and transformational barriers to implementation of material flow cost accounting and suggests opportunities to overcome these. The weakest links identified involve macro-to meso-situational and micro-to macro-transformational links. The paper highlights the dominance of meso-level institutions and lack of focus on micro transformation to cut waste and enable improvements in green productivity.

The paper identifies ways for companies in Vietnam to reduce unsustainability and enable transformation towards sustainable management and waste reduction.

The paper is the first to develop and use a multi-level/multi-time period framework to examine the take-up of material flow cost accounting to encourage transformation towards green productivity. Consideration of the Vietnamese case builds understanding of the challenges for achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 12, to help enable sustainable production and consumption patterns.