The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to changes in business, technology, and social interactions, creating a new normal that has important implications for the role of technology, including mobile banking services that offer safer and more hygienic payment methods than cash. Innovations in mobile banking services have been considered to have the ability to provide unbanked customers with better access in growing markets such as Indonesia, which still has a huge unbanked population of 100 million people. This study evaluates the driving factors of mobile banking adoption by 1441 banking customers among major digital banks in Indonesia. Data collected between September 2022 and March 2023 were examined using PLS-SEM with Smart PLS 4.0.9.6. This study extends the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior (DTPB) framework by including Disease Risk, Trust, Firm Reputation, Perceived Risk, Performance Risk, Privacy Risk, Financial Risk, Psychological Risk, Time Risk, and Disease Risk. The findings show that Trust, Attitude, Perceived Behavior Control, Perceived Risk, Psychological Risk, and Disease Risk play a significant role in respondents’ intention to adopt mobile banking services. In contrast, Subjective Norm, Firm Reputation, Performance Risk, Privacy Risk, Financial Risk, and Time Risk had lower impacts. The findings suggest that users choose mobile banking over cash as a safety measure. As a result, banks must prioritize their mobile banking innovations tailored to personalized user experience to deepen engagement, with easy-to-use navigation that fits the lifestyles, values, and needs of banking customers.

We develop a medium size dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to assess the macroeconomic consequences of introducing an interest-bearing central bank digital currency (CBDC), an electronic alternative of payment with public use properties of cash and that can furnish as bank settlement balances. The model consists of seven sectors, namely households, retail firms, wholesale firms, capital producing firms, commercial banks, central bank, and government, and offers rich features. The use of cash and CBDC is differentiated with respect to their prices and transaction costs. In particular, we quantify the effects of negative shock on CBDC transaction cost to evaluate the potential of CBDC as an alternate instrument in liquidity holding in addition to cash and bank deposits. We also examine the effects of productivity shock and monetary policy shock on CBDC interest rate and CBDC demand, and their interaction with other main variables of the model.

Pest and plant diseases cause damages and economic losses, threatening food security and ecosystem services. Thus, proper pest management is indispensable to mitigate the risk of losses. The risk of environmental hazards induced by toxic chemicals alongside the rapid development of chemical resistance by insects entails more resilient, sustainable, and ecologically sound approaches to chemical methods of control. This study evaluates the application of three dynamical measures of controls, namely, green insecticide, mating disruption, and the removal of infected plants, in controlling pest insects. A model was built to describe the interaction between plants and insects as well as the circulation of the pathogen. Optimal control measures are sought in such a way they maximize the healthy plant density jointly with the pests’ density under the lowest possible control efforts. Our simulation study shows that all strategies succeed in controlling the insects. However, a cost-effectiveness analysis suggests that a strategy with two measures of green insecticide and plant removal is the most cost-effective, followed by one which applies all control measures. The best strategy projects the decrease of potential loss from 65.36% to 6.12%.

A new normal has been established as a result of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social behavior, technology, and business. This has a significant effect on how technology is used, such as mobile banking services, which offer more hygienic and secure payment alternatives than cash. Mobile banking has been viewed as having the ability to enhance access to unbanked customers in developing economies such as Indonesia, where 100 million people remain unbanked. This study aims to develop strategies using importance-performance analysis (IPA) to improve adoption based on the perceived importance and performance of 1441 mobile banking users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected using an online questionnaire administered during the period of September 2022 to March 2023 using the mobile banking adoption attributes of Attitude, Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Compatibility, Subjective Norm, Interpersonal Influence, External Influence, Perceived Behavior Control, facilitating conditions, self-efficacy, firm reputation, trust, disease risk, performance risk, financial risk, privacy risk, time risk, psychological risk, and perceived risk. IPA results were divided into four quadrants: “concentrate here”, “keep up the good work”, “low priority”, and “possible overkill” with a representation that respondents regard as important and well-addressed. The findings show that bank strategists seeking competitive advantage must push innovation efforts to protect users by improving privacy risk and financial risk and enhancing mobile banking security from potential cyberattacks. Digital banks and associated institutions need to educate mobile banking customers on the benefits of security measures for these services, which may improve confidence and trust, and consequently, accelerate mobile banking adoption.

In the framework of integrated pest management, biological control through the use of living organisms plays important roles in suppressing pest populations. In this paper, the complex interaction between plants and pest insects is examined under the intervention of natural enemies releases coupled with sterile insects technique. A set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations is developed in terms of optimal control model considering characteristics of populations involved. Optimal control measures are sought in such a way they minimize the pest density simultaneously with the control efforts. Three different strategies relating to the release rate of sterile insects and predators as natural enemies, namely, constant, proportional, and saturating proportional release rates, are examined for the attainability of control objective. The necessary optimality conditions of the control problem are derived by using Pontryagin maximum principle, and the forward–backward sweep method is then implemented to numerically calculate the optimal solution. It is shown that, in an environment consisting of rice plants and brown planthoppers as pests, the releases of sterile planthoppers and ladybeetles as natural enemies can deteriorate the pest density and thus increase the plant biomass. The release of sterile insects with proportional rate and the release of natural enemies with constant rate are found to be the most cost-effective strategy in controlling pest insects. This strategy successfully decreases the pest population about 35 percent, and thus increases the plant density by 13 percent during control implementation.