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This chapter synthesizes the economics, law, and technology of security tokens and security token offerings (STOs). Security tokens are an increasingly important instrument in decentralized finance (DeFi) markets. They are blockchain-based investment contracts that are subject to securities law. Interoperability, fractional ownership, market liquidity, and rapid settlement are the main reasons security tokens are a primary catalyst for digitizing finance. The chapter empirically compares STOs with initial exchange offerings (IEOs) and initial coin offerings (ICOs). STOs take longer and raise more funding. However, controlling for other factors, the amount raised in STOs and IEOs is lower than in utility-token ICOs. These findings suggest an avenue for future research. Moreover, both the law and the technology of security tokens need to address critical challenges related to the competent jurisdiction in multinational activities and blockchain interoperability, scalability, and natural resource degradation.

Bitcoin’s introduction as the first cryptoasset in 2009 ushered in a new era, representing a seismic shift in the financial markets. Since then, this evolving asset class has generated much interest, excitement, and growth. This chapter begins by providing a brief background of cryptoassets. It then discusses their main types (cryptocurrencies, security tokens, and utility tokens), users (individual investors, major financial institutions, endowments, and hedge funds), and benefits and drawbacks. Next, it sets forth the book’s purpose, distinguishing features, intended audience, and structure. The chapter provides a synopsis of each of the remaining 21 chapters. Although no single book can encompass all changes and iterations of these technologies as they emerge in the marketplace, this book brings together a broad collection of industry expertise and academic analysis to create a book helpful to researchers, academics, and practitioners.

From a technological determinist perspective, machine learning (ML) may significantly contribute towards sustainable development. The purpose of this study is to synthesize prior literature on the role of ML in promoting sustainability and to encourage future inquiries.

This study conducts a systematic review of 110 papers that demonstrate the utilization of ML in the context of sustainable development.

ML techniques may play a vital role in enabling sustainable development by leveraging data to uncover patterns and facilitate the prediction of various variables, thereby aiding in decision-making processes. Through the synthesis of findings from prior research, it is evident that ML may help in achieving many of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.

This study represents one of the initial investigations that conducted a comprehensive examination of the literature concerning ML’s contribution to sustainability. The analysis revealed that the research domain is still in its early stages, indicating a need for further exploration.

This study aims to investigate the influence of online opinion leadership and opinion seeking the intention to purchase and purchase behaviour of organic food in Saudi Arabia.

This study used an online questionnaire as a method to collect data from Instagram users in Saudi Arabia. Statistical analysis was performed using the SmartPLS to test the research model.

The study demonstrates the links between the perceived benevolence of the opinion leadership through Instagram and purchase behaviour of organic food and between opinion seeking and intention to purchase.

This study provides insights into the favourable impact of opinion leadership and opinion seeking on consumers’ intention to purchase and purchase behaviour for marketers, especially in the organic food sector of a Middle Eastern context.

Prior studies have investigated the impact of opinion leadership and opinion seeking on purchase behaviour, but not within the organic food sector. This study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by providing useful insights to enhance the understanding of the influence of online opinion leadership on purchase behaviour of organic food. This study also makes a valuable contribution to organic food research in Middle East countries, where there is a lack of research on organic food purchase behaviour.

Rural welfare is more than addressing problems of ‘poverty’. As we argue here, social policy initiatives are also conceived by governments as solutions to geographical problems about uneven regional development and population distribution. What these problems were, and how welfare provision could solve them, has varied from generation to generation and takes shape in place-specific ways. That welfare provision has operated as de facto geographical development and population policy is particularly the case in Australia, in its context of massive continental size and heterogeneous rural places. In Australia, the ‘rural’ means much more than just the ‘countryside’ surrounding or between networks of cities and towns (in the traditional European sense; see Gorman-Murray, Darian-Smith, & Gibson, 2008). ‘Rural Australia’ is inserted into national politics as a slippery geographical category, coming to encompass all of non-metropolitan Australia (each of Australia's states only having one major city), within which there is great diversity: broadacre farming regions involving the production of cash crops at scales of thousands of squared kilometres; regions producing rice and cotton with state-sponsored irrigation; coastal agricultural zones with smaller and usually older land holdings (often the places of traditional ‘family farming’ communities); single industry regions focused around minerals extraction or defence (many of Australia's major defence bases being located outside state capitals either in sparsely populated regions in Australia's north or in smaller ‘country towns’ in the south, where they dominate local demography); semi-arid rangelands regions dominated by enormous pastoral stations leased on Crown land (single examples of which rival the United Kingdom in size); and remote savannah and desert regions many thousands of kilometres from capital cities, supporting Aboriginal communities living on traditional country mixing subsistence hunting and gathering with government-supported employment and food programmes. In this context, rural welfare performs a social policy function, but also becomes a means for government to comprehend, problematise and manage geographical space.

The purpose of this paper is to recognize the benefits of the initial coin offering (ICO) as a way of raising funds and to present a detailed comparison between the ICO and the initial public offering to realize the future possibilities that this new funding method holds.

It is an exhaustive review of the ICO, the mechanism of crowdfunding, the blockchain technology behind it, benefits and current shortcomings of the ICO, and the potential future development of the ICO as a convenient and efficient way of raising capital.

ICOs have brought billions of dollars of funding to startups and projects worldwide in less than two years. Concurrently, many successful ICOs yielded extremely high returns to investors and believers of this new way of funding businesses.

While the ICO is a revolutionary vehicle for business funding, it has raised concerns among users as well as potential investors about its risk and lack of regulation. The future of this innovative funding method highly depends on further development and placement of appropriate regulatory supervision, better understanding of risk and benefits and attaining the confidence of users.

This is a review of the advantages and drawbacks of the ICO. If the current fraud, market and cybersecurity risks can be mitigated and standardized regulations are developed, the ICO has a future to become an established way of capital funding or even replace the existing options, regardless of the size and age of companies.

The current study is an attempt to investigate the residential satisfaction and prioritize effective components on residents' satisfaction based on household surveys conducted in eight Mehr housing complexes in Mazandaran province located in different counties of this region.

In the current work, using software of SmartPLS 3, second-order confirmatory factor analysis has been employed to evaluate and rank influential factors on residents' satisfaction.

As a result of descriptive analysis, 51.8% of the respondents were highly satisfied with Mehr housing complexes. Moreover, the results showed that there was the highest level of satisfaction (76.3%) with the security, while the lowest one (34.4%) was related to satisfaction with the facilities of the housing complexes. The standardized coefficients obtained showed that the components of physical characteristics (0.901), facility (0.863), neighborhood relationship (0.810), visual quality (0.774), security (0.737) and environmental health (0.715) have the most influence on the satisfaction of the residents, respectively.

This paper proved that migration has a significant effect on the level of residents' satisfaction, in multicultural cities. Therefore, it is crucial to promote social interaction and involvement among different ethnic groups in residential complexes that can result in intimacy, hence satisfying sociocultural needs, improving neighborhood relationships and consequent satisfaction of residents in Mehr housing projects in Iran.

As one of the most cutting-edge technologies in the digital age, facial enhancement technology (FET) has greatly enhanced consumer online shopping experience and brought new e-commerce opportunities for cosmetics retailers. The purpose of this paper is to extend the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model in the context of FET. In addition to the concepts from the original model, the new FET-UTAUT model features (low) body esteem, social media addiction and FET adoption.

A purposive sampling of FET users in China via an online questionnaire yields 473 respondents. To analyze the data, this research uses the structural equation modeling method via statistical package for the social sciences and analysis of a moment structures software. A two-step approach, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, was used to test the hypotheses and generate the findings.

Performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions and (low) body esteem have positive relationships with FET adoption. FET adoption has a positive relationship with online purchase intention of branded color cosmetics, and the empirical evidence for the moderating role of social media addiction in the relationship between FET adoption and online purchase intention is inconclusive.

This research extends the traditional UTAUT model by proposing a novel FET-UTAUT model that incorporates additional key concepts such as body esteem, FET adoption and social media addiction. Managerial implications of this research are provided for FET designers and branded color cosmetic retailers.