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The online retail market shows a sharp increase in traffic during holiday sales. The ability to distinguish customers who will likely purchase is critical for provisioning traffic and for providing cost-effective promotions. This paper uniquely studies the browsing and purchasing behaviors of online shoppers during a yearly sale event in China, the world’s largest online marketplace. Based on 31 million action logs gathered from wide residential areas, we characterize the steps leading to purchases and determine their precursors. We investigate the effect of time (e.g., date, time of date), environment (e.g., platform, viewed category), and action (e.g., session time, clicks, sequence) on purchases. Action cues from shopping behaviors can be used for early detection. While most shoppers start with strong intentions to purchase, yet the moment of ordering comes rather impulsively within 30 seconds to several minutes of browsing. The predictive accuracy reaches as a high AUC of 0.924. The findings in this paper provide an understanding of traffic during mega sale events that can help online shops plan and provide a better user experience for upcoming shopping festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This systematic review contributes to the understanding of the characteristics of built food environments that may be associated with choices of alternative protein foods (APF). Using the built food environment typology proposed by Downs et al., we investigated various environmental structures (e.g., supermarkets, other retailers, farmers' markets, restaurants, schools, and online vendors) and the characteristics that may facilitate or hinder consumers' choices. For example, facilitators and barriers may refer to the physical characteristics of environmental structures, food presentation practices, the organizational strategies or policies operating in the setting, or the actions that retailers or consumers engage in while selling, serving, choosing, trying, or purchasing APF in these environmental structures. Methods: A systematic review (PROSPERO database preregistration; no. CRD42023388700) was conducted by searching 13 databases for peer-reviewed journals focusing on the fields of economics and business, agriculture, medical sciences, and social sciences. Data searches, coding, and quality evaluations were conducted by at least 2 researchers. A total of 31 papers (36 original studies) were included. The risk of bias was evaluated with the Joanna Briggs Institute quality evaluation tool, with 24 publications presenting low risk of bias. Results: The findings indicate that perceived and actual availability facilitate consumers' APF choices across a built food environment. Several barriers/facilitators were associated with APF choices in specific types of built food environments: the way food is presented in produce sections (supermarkets), consumer habits in terms of green and specialty shopping (grocery stores), and mismatches among retailer actions in regard to making APF available in one type of food environment structure (e-commerce) and consumers' preferences for APF being available in other food environment structures (supermarkets, grocery stores). The effect of a barrier/facilitator may depend on the APF type; for example, social norms regarding masculinity were a barrier affecting plant-based APF choices in restaurants, but these norms were not a barrier affecting the choice of insect-based APF in restaurants. Conclusions: Addressing barriers/facilitators identified in this review will help in developing environment-matching interventions that aim to make alternative proteins mainstream. Trial registration: PROSPERO database registration: #CRD42023388700. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on several business-related research working papers for managers and policy-makers. `Business to Consumer e-Commerce,' by Matthew G. Bain; `Extending the Economics of Disorganisation,' by A.A. Bevan, S. Estrin, P.G. Hare and J. Stern; `Organizing for Innovation in Large Firms,' by J. Birkinshaw and C.F. Fey.

Pete Vanexan president of Grand & Toy (G&T) was reviewing his company's 2001 budget forecast. It was January 13, 2001 in Toronto Canada, and Vanexan was on his was to [...]

Health budget allocation choices are increasingly aided by medical technology's economic evaluation (EE). With thousands of new items launched each year, the medical device (MD) business is one of the most active domains of medical advancement among providers of innovation. Some of these considerations have to do with the specifics of how the gadget works. The paper examines the investment assessment of new medical devices from an industrial viewpoint. The strategy EE-MD presented should lead to more inventive and cost-effective surgical supplies for the medical industry. The study's purpose is to better the decision-making process for medical device development. Small and medium-sized firms are a crucial source of innovation for the future, and the research focuses mostly on them. Design economy and professional engineering literature are linked in the article. The proposed multi-attribute and team method to construct selection discusses the financial factor and provides a strong foundation for ongoing program management by identifying project-specific risks and strategic alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pandemic changed the world by accelerating the digitization and development of new technologies, which, until recently, only appeared in SF movies. Neal Stephenson, who in 1992 published the book "Snow Crash" whose action takes place partly in metaverse, introduces for the first time a new concept, namely metaverse, a concept that has remained only a term for a long time. Metaverse is being seriously discussed in 2022 as a new form of infrastructure, making captivating, personalized experiences possible. This paper aims to answer the question of what metaverse is and to identify some business opportunities that can be developed using Metaverse. If we look at the metaverse as a new way of doing business, it includes transitions between physical and virtual experiences but especially immersive virtual experiences, becoming its characteristic note. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issued including one by Mu Xia and Nan Xia about supplier relationships, another by Ravi Bapna, Paulo Goes, and Alok Gupta about electronic marketplaces, and another by Thompson S.H. Teo, Shirish C. Srivastava, and Li Jiang about reliable government web sites.

Electronic commerce appeared as a new way of managing businesses in the digital era. However, it has also been accelerated by the recent pandemic situation. Retailers had to find new strategies of reaching customers in the online environment. Thus, concepts such as multi-channel and omni-channel retailing have gained the attention of both retailers and researchers in this field. This paper aims at using a text-mining approach in order to reveal the researchers focus on this theme in a period that also precedes and covers the COVID-19 pandemic. The research methodology follows five steps that are necessary in order to obtain a relevant collection of documents that will further provide the content to be analyzed. These steps refer to: (1) Creating the database of documents for analysis purposes; (2) identifying geographic areas for separating the collection’s documents; (3) framing a thematic dictionary of descriptors; (4) exploring the text using text mining approach; and (5) correspondence analysis. The discussion of the main findings is constructed starting with the geographic and the temporal distribution of documents and the design of a thematic dictionary of descriptors. Then, exploring the content of the documents provides information on the frequency of descriptors and reveals clusters of descriptors along with a link analysis. All of them are presented separately on geographic regions. Finally, the correspondence analysis of descriptors versus years provides the proximity maps and reveals the preferred topics and less approached themes. Among the main findings, one can highlight: (1) The greatest contributor in terms of documents related to the theme of interest is the United States; (2) a higher number of connections (and stronger) among descriptors for America as compared to the other two regions; (3) some categories of descriptors are specific to a particular year, which means that there are different themes under the researchers lens depending on the period; (4) the most frequently used descriptors are included in the following categories from the dictionary: Online retail environment and Consumer behavior, regardless of the region. In the end of this paper, research limitations and guidelines for future research are elaborated.

This study aims to examine the impact of COVID-19 and sustainable ecommerce in Hungary and Kenya. COVID-19 has devastated the global economy, resulting in financial and job losses. Routine changes in spending have moved the focus from non-essential to essential items, due to the impact of COVID-19, the associated economic meltdown, and the deterioration of people's physical and mental health. However, e-commerce can be a better option to stop the spread of COVID-19 due to its real benefits and usefulness in solving the challenges faced. The methodology used in this paper is the collection of primary data from an online survey questionnaire, and secondary data from several databases, e.g., the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Johns Hopkins Centre websites. The results show the negative impact of COVID-19 on society and the economy, as well as the positive and significant effects of the growth of e-commerce during COVID-19, where most of the goods being purchased are medical supplies: masks, medicines, and food. This has been made possibleby the rise of e-commerce platforms as a link in sustainable e-commerce after the significant disruption to the worldwide supply chain due to total lockdown. E-commerce has shown growth during the COVID-19 pandemic period as a sustainable platform. In conclusion, this study proposes policies that support e-commerce in developing countries during and after COVID-19. Furthermore, theoretical, and managerial implications are proposed in the study. It is high time to warn businesses to adopt information and communications technology (ICT) to flourish and thrive during times of financial and economic hardship, such as the use of e-commerce with the right policies enacted to support sustainable e-commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces how to infer trust relationships from billion-scale networked data to benefit Alibaba E-Commerce business. To effectively leverage the network correlations between labeled and unlabeled relationships to predict trust relationships, we formalize trust into multiple types and propose a graphical model to incorporate type-based dyadic and triadic correlations, namely eTrust. We also present a fast learning algorithm in order to handle billion-scale networks. Systematically, we evaluate the proposed methods on four different genres of datasets with labeled trust relationships: Alibaba, Epinions, Ciao, and Advogato. Experimental results show that the proposed methods achieve significantly better performance than several comparison methods (+1.7-32.3% by accuracy; $p<<0.01$ p < < 0. 01 , with $t$ t -test). Most importantly, when handling the real large networked data with over 1,200,000,000 edges (Ali-large), our method achieves 2,000× speedup to infer trust relationships, comparing with the traditional graph learning algorithms. Finally, we have applied the inferred trust relationships to Alibaba E-commerce platform: Taobao, and achieved 2.75 percent improvement on gross merchandise volume (GMV). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Romania the term entrepreneurship became popular after 1990 when private capital companies were brought under regulation. In this context, the terms used in this paper come to supplement or to emphasize the elements necessary to assess the entrepreneurial phenomenon. Thus, in the first part of the paper we have presented besides an evolution of the term "entrepreneur", a classification according to classical theories, such as the one belonging to Adam Smith, as well as current classifications regarding changes in the business environment, namely the exponential growth of businesses in online field due to the Internet. At the end of the paper we have presented a statistical analysis of the entrepreneurial phenomenon in Romania and on European or international level, according to several criteria, such as attitude towards entrepreneurship and the development of a business, age groups and the attitude towards entrepreneurship, the reasons that influence the development of a business, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]