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This study investigated how the Covid-19 pandemic impacted cross-border acquisitions. Though literature suggests that cross-border investments decreased during the pandemic, there is little conclusive evidence on specific characteristics in the execution of particular acquisitions during such times. We applied the case study format to conduct our investigation by (1) providing a classification of influences on cross-border procedures and (2) highlighting critical characteristics during three phases of acquisitions, namely, search, negotiation and integration periods.

The grounded theory approach was applied to three in-depth case studies of German companies that acquired Japanese targets during the Covid-19 pandemic. Data were supplemented by information received through additional case studies of German subsidiaries in Japan and interviews with consultants.

Firms had already intended to acquire their respective targets, with their decisions having been made prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, the pandemic had no impact on target selection in the case firms. Owing to travel restrictions, information exchange was limited which inevitably led to higher usage of digitalization. While several barriers led to delays in negotiations, prevailing mutual trust and assistance from consultants helped to reduce difficulties. During the integration period, we found delays in synergy creation and increases in remote communication. Nevertheless, the digital workflow improved the efficiency.

Our study provides novel insights into the execution of cross-border acquisitions impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. We discuss new implications for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research and practice for the post-pandemic era, focusing on German firms acquiring Japanese targets.

This exploratory research aims to unravel how Chinese international students form their decisions regarding the school-to-work transition (sometimes also referred to as the university-to-work transition) when studying abroad.

The authors use the concepts of school-to-work transition and cultural approaches to investigate how Chinese graduate students make career decisions to navigate the school-to-work transition in the context of international mobility. The authors' empirical study is based on 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with Chinese graduate students studying in the Netherlands.

The authors discovered four patterns with two major subgroups among Chinese students studying in the universities in the Netherlands based on their initial intentions: return-return, open-return, open-stay and stay-stay. These patterns made sense when navigating the school-to-work transition: participants experienced varied international experiences, cultural perceptions and acknowledgment influences when enhancing employability and shaping their career decisions. Participants in the return-return and stay-stay groups indicated strong resilience and consistency in achieving their goals and strongly focused on long-term objectives. However, participants' open-return decision demonstrated a thoughtful alignment of personal goals and knowledge of the possible beneficial influence they may have in their home country. Open-stay participants utilized the overseas study opportunity to finalize their decisions and increase their employability in the local labor market, thereby creating a transition from university to work in the host country.

The authors highlight the way Chinese graduate students manage their international experience and provide novel insights into the role played by the cultural characteristics of their home country and host country.

This study aims to extend the cognitive appraisal theory by developing and validating a conceptual framework to illustrate how travelers' behavioral intention is generated via a multi-stage evaluation of health-related variables.

SEM and moderator analysis were conducted to examine the theoretical framework (post-intervention event travel intention) and to investigate how the appraisal process differs across travelers with various attitudes toward vaccination.

This study found that cruise travel intention was positively influenced by the perceived hedonic value and perceived trustworthiness and negatively influenced by perceived infection risk. Furthermore, whereas perceived hedonic value, perceived trustworthiness and perceived risk of infection were all predicted by crisis management, the dimensions of crisis management operated differently. In addition, vaccination attitudes amplified the unfavorable effect of perceived risk on intention.

Drawing on the CAT, this study developed and validated a conceptual framework to integrate crisis management with customers' behavioral intentions. This study extends existing cruise travel intention theory by demonstrating how post-pandemic travelers' behavioral intention is generated via a multi-stage appraisal-reappraisal process based on the evaluations of infection risks and cruise line crisis management.

In the Fall of 2019, Marietta College and Marietta City Schools, in Marietta, Ohio, piloted a program to improve literacy knowledge and pedagogy through completing LETRS training, a two-year literacy professional development based on the science of reading, as peers.

This project was aligned to effective professional development research that states better trainings are content-specific, allow support and collaboration and are ongoing throughout the school year (Blank and de las Alas, 2009; Darling-Hammond, Hyler, and Gardener, 2017) and respect participants work/life schedules (Bigsby and Firestone, 2017).

Some benefits of this collaboration were that teachers, college faculty and teacher candidates were able to communicate more effectively about literacy because we all had shared background knowledge and spoke the same language when it came to literacy. We were also able to make more meaningful clinical experiences for our teacher candidates because we created a stronger connection between the knowledge and pedagogy taught in students’ literacy courses and the practices they saw in real classrooms. Inservice teachers saw the college faculty and teacher candidates as strong partners, which greatly strengthened our clinical preparation.

The paper includes implications for the development of stronger partnerships between teacher preparation program faculty and school partnership faculty and more authentic and meaningful clinical experiences for teacher candidates.

This project shows how meaningful partnerships and clinical experiences can be created when partnership faculty are seen as peers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore networked business models on a nascent market for a sustainable innovation.

The study takes a qualitative approach through a comparative case study of three solar photovoltaic (PV) parks in Sweden. Data was collected from 14 interviews with multiple supply chain and network actors as well as secondary data. Industrial marketing and purchasing is applied for theoretical framing.

The study demonstrates transactional, relational, environmental and social drivers for participating in the network. The study reveals the duplicity of the nascent market, which encourages supply chain actors to develop their individual business models to take a larger market share or become future competitors to current collaborators. On the nascent market with few developed regulations, the network enables actors to influence regulations on local and regional levels.

The study is limited to the nascent solar PV industry in Sweden, which is characterized by institutional turbulence, market uncertainties and few established supply networks.

Practitioners need to consider multifarious drivers for participating in networked business models, where the economic driver may be the least motivating.

This study provides several multiactor business models and classifies them into specific applications and general applications. The study provides unique insight into the complexity of interactions among supply chain actors in networked business models on a nascent market for sustainable innovation. Due to the scarcity of available partners on the nascent market, actors need to look beyond their on-going relationships and their network horizon, or actors’ roles evolve to include activities that was not part of their individual business models.

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for people of all ages underscores the vital role of public healthcare facilities (PHFs) in delivering essential healthcare services. However, these facilities often suffer from inadequate maintenance, exacerbated by the insufficient implementation of maintenance strategies. Recognizing the importance of PHFs in enhancing healthcare services, this paper investigates the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) in the maintenance strategies of PHFs in South Africa.

Through semi-structured interviews with nineteen purposively selected maintenance personnel from the Limpopo Department of Health (DoH), this study identified and analyzed the CSFs to enhance maintenance operations in PHFs. Thematic content analysis was employed to derive key insights from the collected data.

The study's findings highlight adequate maintenance planning and effective leadership as the two overarching CSFs in the maintenance of PHFs. These factors play a pivotal role in addressing challenges that hinder the current maintenance team from meeting maintenance requirements to the satisfaction of both staff and patients within PHFs.

The study offers valuable insights for policymakers to improve the effectiveness of maintenance operations in PHFs. By addressing the identified CSFs, policymakers can enhance maintenance operations in PHFs, positively impacting healthcare service delivery and the well-being of both staff and patients.

This study aims to elucidate the dynamics of monetary and fiscal policy interactions in Brazil, focusing on the impacts of positive shocks in government consumption and interest rates. By comparing rational and behavioral agent responses, it clarifies how these frameworks influence gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, private and government consumption and nominal interest rates.

The study employs a new Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with Bayesian estimation from 2000Q1 to 2022Q4, capturing rational and behavioral behaviors with adjustments for Brazilian economic idiosyncrasies. Impulse response functions (IRF) assess the dynamic effects of policy shocks, providing a comparative analysis of the two frameworks.

Behavioral agents show greater initial sensitivity to policy shocks, causing more pronounced fluctuations in GDP, inflation and private consumption compared to rational agents. Over time, the behavioral approach leads to a more robust recovery, while the rational approach results in a quicker return to equilibrium but less pronounced long-term recovery. The study also finds fiscal policy can partially offset the negative impacts of monetary tightening, with a more delayed effect in the behavioral model.

This paper provides insights into the interplay between monetary and fiscal policies under different agent expectations, emphasizing the importance of incorporating behavioral elements into macroeconomic models to better capture policy dynamics in emerging markets.

Despite the proliferation of cyberthreats upon the supply chain (SC) at large, knowledge on SC cybersecurity is scarce and predominantly conceptual or descriptive. Addressing this gap, this research examines the effect of SC cyber risk management strategies on integration decisions for cybersecurity (with suppliers, customers, and internally) to enhance the SC’s cyber resilience and robustness.

A research model grounded in the supply chain risk management (SCRM) literature, with roots in the Dynamic Capabilities View and the Relational View, was developed. Survey responses of 388 SC managers at US manufacturers were obtained to test the model.

An impact of SC cyber risk management strategies on internal cyber integration was detected, which in turn impacted external cyber integration with both suppliers and customers. Further, a positive effect of internal and customer cyber integration on both cyber resilience and robustness was found, while cyber integration with suppliers impacted neither.

Industry practitioners may adapt certain risk management and integration strategies to enhance the cybersecurity posture of their SCs.

This research bridges between the established domain of SCRM and the emergent field of SC cybersecurity by forming and testing novel relationships between SCRM-rooted constructs tailored to an SC cyber risks context.

Studies on land acquisition (LA) and recovery simulations have garnered considerable attention amidst climate change. Previous literature has reported that LA and relocation contribute to reducing repetitive disaster losses or downzoning (limiting development). However, studies on decision-making about resettlement or relocation for landowners or decision-makers for disaster-impacted lands are limited. This study aims to qualitatively illustrate LA program schemes for recovery, and identify the underlying concepts of LA in Italy, the United States and Japan. By doing so, this study contributes to construction of future agent-based recovery simulations.

This study seeks to identify a variety of LA models in different contexts to provide input for future works. This study employed multiple case studies to explore common and contrasting results, and identify varied LA concepts. The methodology involved a literature review, including official reports, to examine the timeframes of LA projects qualitatively, complemented using aerial photos to confirm related land use changes pre- and post-LA.

The results indicate that buyout programs in the United States enhance renaturalization in flood-prone areas as a downzoning approach. In contrast, LA in Japan focuses on the continuation of communities or neighborhoods through the recovery and relocation process. In Italy, LA is used to contribute to supporting the tradition/legacy of historic housing and facilities for post-disaster temporary dwellings, reflecting an underlying concept of “tradition and legacy.”

This comparative study fills a research gap by focusing on LA concepts, and its novelty lies in finding the underlying concepts of LA in three countries. Through international comparison, it suggests that LA in Japan could incorporate conservation of the historical town center or the opportunity for downzoning.

Hospitality firms aim to increase their profits by implementing a variety of marketing activities, including using decoy pricing to provide alternative choices for consumers. Decoys are relatively higher-priced offerings that signal lower value than the other offerings in the consideration set. The purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of decoy pricing on consumer choices across various contexts in the foodservice and hotel industries.

Across the pilot and four main studies, the current research employs a sequential exploratory mixed-method design to investigate the influence of decoy pricing in the foodservice and lodging industries. The qualitative part of this research was based on two focus groups, followed by a pilot study and four main study experiments.

The results show that decoy pricing escalates consumers’ choices of more expensive product bundles in both restaurant and hotel cancellation policy contexts. However, decoy pricing does not increase the selection of more expensive hotel product bundles.

While decoy pricing has been utilized as an effective revenue maximization strategy for product placement in retail stores, less is known about how promotional advertisements with decoy offers influence hotel and restaurant customers to choose more costly options. Specifically, this is the first study that explores whether decoy pricing and product/service bundling can encourage customers to select more expensive offers in hotel and restaurant contexts, considering the types of hospitality bundles that may limit this effect.