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According to the logistics performance index, emerging countries such as India are lagging behind developed countries such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH region). The purpose of this study is to compare and understand the differences in logistics outsourcing outlook in the two regions by considering both manufacturing firms (M-firms) and logistics service providers’ (LSPs) perspectives.

A survey targeting both LSPs and M-firms in DACH and India is conducted. A total of 96 responses were analyzed by using the chi-square test to investigate the differences and alignments in outsourcing motivation, relationship and governance between firms within and across regions.

M-firms in India bear strategic motivations behind outsourcing and those in DACH incline towards costs. LSPs in both regions align with the motivations of M-firms. M-firms in India rely more on LSPs by transferring the ownership of outsourced tasks, as compared to DACH. Both M-firms and LSPs in DACH claim a high level of ownership. However, firms in DACH and India do not differ significantly in terms of outsourcing engagements they seek.

The findings may only be generalized to large firms in India and DACH.

The findings of this study help managers enhance their understanding of the differences between M-firms and LSPs, and also across countries. LSPs in DACH, if they wish to operate successfully in India, will have to adapt to the M-firms strategic motivations and offer higher dependency.

This study is novel, as it investigates differences between India and DACH countries while also including both manufacturers’ and logistics service providers’ perspectives.

The purpose of this study is to suggest a reward-based crowdfunding approach and test customers’ financial contribution behaviour (FCB) as a fundraising strategy for hospitality enterprises.

To investigate this initiative, a conceptual model motivated by the theory of planned behaviour, integrating economic, emotional, social and altruistic values, perceived risk and electronic word of mouth has been considered. Partial least square structural equation modelling is applied to test the model. Data was collected from 263 respondents across three regions – Europe, Asia and Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Findings revealed that attitude, self-efficacy and subjective norm of the customers positively influence their financial contribution intention. Further, Asian customers demonstrate significantly higher FCB in comparison to MENA.

This study will be helpful for the hospitality players to raise the funds during the crisis and survive to pay the reward back to the customers. This study will be helpful to the crowdfunding platforms to understand the factors which influence the contribution behaviour.

The results of this study can encourage hoteliers and other hospitality players looking to approach their funding needs through crowdfunding by providing them a guide to maximise their possibility and level of success.

Hospitality businesses demand new approaches and strategies to keep operating during COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 time. This research is original to provide insights into customer contribution intentions during COVID-19.

This study aims to explore the gaps concerning the organizational operant resources (OORs) of logistics service providers (LSPs) expected in outsourcing relationships. The study considers the views of both manufacturing firms (M-firms) and LSPs in India and DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) seeking gaps within and across regions.

This research employed a survey targeting executives from large M-firms and LSPs in both India and DACH. The perceptions about the importance and improvement expectations of 17 OORs are analyzed. A modified version of importance-improvement analysis (A-B), a novel comparative A-B analysis (CABA) method, has been proposed to identify the importance and improvement gaps in OORs between M-firms and LSPs within and across India and the DACH region.

There are more gaps between M-firms and LSPs in India compared to DACH. Cross-country comparisons reveal that LSPs in India and DACH have similar perceptions concerning the OORs, but M-firms in India have significantly higher improvement expectations than those in DACH.

This study proposes an analytical approach that enables managers to identify improvement areas and better align with their outsourcing relationship partners. It also highlights aspects that need to be considered while entering emerging markets such as India.

The analysis approach using CABA is novel. Also, among the cross-country studies, this is the first to compare outsourcing relationships in India with the DACH region while involving both users' and service providers' perspectives.

While previous studies focused mainly on East Asia to Europe or United States trade routes, in recent years, trade among South-East Asian countries has increased notably. The price of transporting a container is not fixed and can fluctuate heavily over the course of a week. Besides, extant literature only identified seasonality patterns in the container freight market, but did not explore route-varying seasonality patterns. Hence, this study analyses container freight seasonality patterns of the six South-East Asian routes of the South-East Asian Freight Index (SEAFI) and the index itself and forecasts them.

Data of the composite SEAFI and six routes are collected from the Shanghai Shipping Exchange (SSE) including 167 weekly observations from 2016 to 2019. The SEAFI and individual route data reflect spot rates from the Shanghai Port to South-East Asia base ports. The authors analyse seasonality patterns using polar plots. For forecasting, the study utilize two univariate models, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and seasonal autoregressive neural network (SNNAR). For both models, the authors compare forecasting results of original level and log-transformed data.

This study finds that the seasonality patterns of the six South-East Asian container trade routes are identical in an overall but exhibits unique characteristics. ARIMA models perform better than SNNAR models for one-week ahead test-sample forecasting. The SNNAR models offer better performance for 4-week ahead forecasting for two selected routes only.

Major industry players such as shipping lines, shippers, ship-owners and others should take into account the route-level seasonality patterns in their decision-making. Forecast analysts can consider using the original level data without log transformation in their analysis. The authors suggest using ARIMA models in one-step and four-step ahead forecasting for majority of the routes. The SNNAR models are recommended for multi-step forecasting for Shanghai to Vietnam and Shanghai to Thailand routes only.

This study analyses a new shipping index, that is, the SEAFI and its underlying six routes. The authors analyze the seasonality pattern of container freight rate data using polar plot and perform forecasting using ARIMA and SNNAR models. Moreover, the authors experiment forecasting performance of log-transformed and non-transformed series.

SME funding gaps in developing economies are substantial. Crowdfunding is an innovative way to raise funds that may be part of the solution for closing such gaps. The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of crowdfunding contribution intentions in the context of a developing country –Bangladesh.

The authors collect data by using a structured questionnaire distributed through Facebook. The analysis is based on data collected from 252 valid responses and uses the ordered probit regression for estimation. For robustness, the authors also estimate the hypothesized model using ordered logistic regression and OLS regression finding identical results.

The authors find that liking the campaign idea and positive media coverage of a crowdfunding campaign have a positive association with crowdfunding contribution intention. Surprisingly, personal relations, others' recommendation and the location of the campaign's owner were not significantly associated with crowdfunding contribution intention in our study. Moreover, respondents' location in Bangladesh (vs. abroad) and their age are positively associated with contribution intention, while education is negatively associated with intention.

Earlier studies focused on the determinants of ex post crowdfunding intentions in developed and more mature crowdfunding markets. The authors contribute by examining ex ante crowdfunding contribution intentions in the developing economy of Bangladesh, which is at the market's inception stage.

Extant literature on knowledge sharing in higher education institutions (HEIs) concentrates on non-behavioral perspectives and indicates that academics continue to hoard knowledge despite being given incentives to bolster knowledge sharing behavior (KSB). This study aims to examine KSB among academics from a behavioral perspective through the lenses of the theory of planned behavior, perceived trust and organizational climate.

Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to 12 private universities using the drop-off/pick-up approach, resulting in 405 usable responses, which were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling.

Academics’ salient beliefs – that is, behavioral beliefs, normative beliefs and control beliefs – significantly influence their attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control (PBC). Attitude, subjective norms, PBC, perceived trust and organizational climate directly influence knowledge sharing intention (KSI), whereas attitude, KSI, subjective norms and PBC directly influence KSB. Noteworthily, KSI is a mediator in the relationships between attitude, subjective norms and PBC with KSB.

This study makes a seminal contribution through the novel conceptualization and theoretical generalizability of the theory of planned behavior by which HEIs can reinforce their competitiveness and global position by enhancing KSB among academics using a profound behavioral strategy.

The study identifies nine important research areas and critically maps the structural relationships among supply chain resilience (SCRES) dimensions, namely, vulnerabilities, capabilities, strategies and performance metrics. The analysis also revealed various influential authors, journals, institutions and trending articles, across SCRES literature.

This study performs a bibliometric analysis of 771 articles published over the 32 years from 1988 to 2020, and network analysis in combination with content analysis of 90 most cited articles published in research fronts of SCRES.

The results demonstrate the underlying research areas within the SCRES, which are clustered into nine research themes: (1) conceptual development of SCRES, (2) recent developments of designing resilient supply chain (SC) networks, (3) focus on identifying drivers of SC vulnerability and risks, (4) impact of risks on network resilience, (5) risk assessment to avoid breakdowns/disruptions, (6) measuring resilience approaches/drivers to improve SC performance, (7) building resilient capabilities by integrating other SC dimensions, (8) quantification of SC network and (9) emphasis on developing robustness in SC networks.

This research offers implications for classifying the works in literature based on bibliometric information and network analysis techniques. This can help researchers and practitioners to understand the prominent areas in SCRES and provide guidelines for future research in this area.

This study provides an overview of the evolution of SCRES over time in the domain of supply chain management and also outlines a future research agenda claimed by the trending articles to encourage further investigations in the field of SCRES.

Earlier firms were evaluated mostly from their financial performance perspective, but with the increasing attention to sustainability goals, environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of firms became key concerns to stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of ESG performance of banks on their financial performance, in the context of emerging markets.

This study employs the generalised method of moments technique for estimation purpose due to the dynamic nature of the data and to correct for endogeneity. This study uses the ESG performance data of 93 emerging market banks from 2015 to 2018, available in Asset4 ESG database of Refinitiv, formerly known as Thompson Reuters. The accounting and financial data are collected from Refinitiv Datastream database.

The findings indicate a positive association of emerging market banks’ environmental and social performance with their financial performance, but governance performance does not influence financial performance.

While many studies exist on the association of ESG concerns of an organisation with their financial profitability, the literature on in the context of banking is still limited. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examines the effect of ESG practices of banks on their financial performance in the context of emerging economies.