Long‐term value creation is expected not only to be concerned with maximizing shareholder value but also includes the impact on other stakeholders and the environment. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues are therefore gaining increasing importance, in line with the growing demand for corporate sustainability. ESG ratings foster the comparison of companies with respect to their sustainable practices. This study aims to investigate how ESG ratings impact financial performance in the European food industry. Ordinary least squares regression is applied to analyze the relation between ESG ratings and financial performance over a 4‐year period from 2017 to 2020. The profitability measures Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE) are employed as financial performance measures, while ESG ratings are obtained from the database CSRHub. Results show that higher ESG ratings are associated with better financial performance. Although the effect is modest in the present study, the findings support previous results that ESG ratings are positively related to financial performance. Nonetheless, they also highlight that ESG ratings strongly converge to the mean, which depicts the need to reassess whether ESG ratings are able to measure actual ESG behavior.
Advances in Web 2.0 technologies have led to the widespread assimilation of electronic commerce platforms as an innovative shopping method and an alternative to traditional shopping. However, due to pro-technology bias, scholars focus more on adopting technology, and slightly less attention has been given to the impact of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) on customers’ intention to use social commerce. This study addresses the gap by examining the intention through exploring the effect of eWOM on males’ and females’ intentions and identifying the mediation of perceived crowding. To this end, we adopted a dual-stage multi-group structural equation modeling and artificial neural network (SEM-ANN) approach. We successfully extended the eWOM concept by integrating negative and positive factors and perceived crowding. The results reveal the causal and non-compensatory relationships between the constructs. The variables supported by the SEM analysis are adopted as the ANN model’s input neurons. According to the natural significance obtained from the ANN approach, males’ intentions to accept social commerce are related mainly to helping the company, followed by core functionalities. In contrast, females are highly influenced by technical aspects and mishandling. The ANN model predicts customers’ intentions to use social commerce with an accuracy of 97%. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of increasing customers’ intention toward social commerce channels among consumers based on our findings.
1 January 2019 in International Journal of Engineering Business Management
While mobile marketing is widely practised in developed countries, this is not always the case for developing countries, such as Jordan, where the acceptance level for mobile marketing remains low. This study aims to uncover the predictors for the behaviour of Jordanian customers with regard to the acceptance of mobile marketing. For this purpose, a questionnaire based on quantitative research was conceived. This investigation involved the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2), which was extended to include two additional variables: ‘trust’ and ‘risk’. For the empirical testing of the model, data was collected from 321 respondents, and the hypotheses were tested through variance-based structural equation modelling. SmartPLS 3.0 was used to analyse the data. The findings from this study suggest that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation, social influence, price value, facilitating conditions, habit and risk significantly influence the behavioural intention of customers regarding the adoption of mobile marketing. On the other hand, the trust factor was found to be an insignificant predictor in this area.
10 February 2023 in International Journal of Engineering Business Management
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a major part of the telecommunications sector. WSN is applied in many aspects, including surveillance battlefields, patient medical monitoring, building automation, traffic control, environmental monitoring, and building intrusion monitoring. The WSN is made up of a vast number of sensor nodes, which are interconnected through a network. However, despite the growing usage of applications that rely on WSNs, they continue to suffer from restrictions, such as security issues and limited characteristics due to low memory and calculation power. Security issues lead to a lack of communication between sensors, wasting more energy. The need for efficient solutions has increased, especially with the rise of the Internet of Things, which relies on the effectiveness of WSNs. This review focuses on security issues by reviewing and addressing diverse types of WSN assaults that happened on each layer of the WSN that were published in security issues in the previous 3 years. As a consequence, this paper gives a taxonomy of security threats for each layer and different algorithmic solutions that numerous researchers who seek to counter this attack have explored. This study also presents a framework for constructing an intrusion detection system in the WSN by emphasising the drawbacks of each approach suggested by researchers to defend against specific forms of assault. In order to diminish the impact of this attack, this summary shows which attacks the majority of researchers have dealt with as well as which ones they have not yet addressed in their academic work.
29 May 2021 in International Journal of Intelligent Systems