Search Results (554)

This study assessed the level of service quality satisfaction among customers of carpentry technicians in Cabadbaran City, with emphasis on ten service dimensions: craftsmanship, timeliness, communication, durability, price transparency, customer service, design collaboration, reputation, and after-sales service. Employing a descriptive research design, data were collected through a self-constructed questionnaire administered to customers who had previously availed of carpentry services in the city. Results indicated that overall satisfaction across all dimensions was generally positive, as reflected in customers’ agreement ratings. However, notable gaps were identified that suggest areas for improvement. Craftsmanship and timeliness emerged as the most critical concerns, with respondents citing inconsistent job quality and delays in project completion. Issues of customization and durability were also highlighted, as some customers reported limited flexibility in design options and doubts about the long-term sturdiness of products. Communication shortcomings, particularly in providing project updates and explaining processes, further affected satisfaction. Design collaboration raised concerns as several customers felt excluded from important design decisions. After-sales service received mixed evaluations, with limited follow-up once projects were completed. Price transparency was another issue, with participants expressing the need for clearer cost breakdowns and greater value for money. Reputation was considered moderately satisfactory but inconsistent due to varying customer experiences. Overall, the study emphasizes the need for carpentry technicians to strengthen critical service quality dimensions to better meet customer expectations, improve satisfaction, and enhance the sustainability of their services. Full article

In the crowded landscape of social media, hashtags serve not only as navigational tools but also as strategic signals of meaning and intent. This study examines how hashtag strategies—specifically semantic similarity with post content and usage frequency—affect sales outcomes in influencer-driven electronic commerce. Drawing on self-presentation theory, we analyze panel data from Instagram posts to explore how these hashtag dimensions interact with influencers’ self-presentation styles. The results show that hashtag–posting similarity significantly enhances sales, particularly among influencers exhibiting a Judging (J)-type self-presentation marked by structured and purposeful communication. In contrast, hashtag frequency alone does not increase sales performance and may even diminish it, indicating that excessive use can be counterproductive. However, for J-type influencers, an increase in hashtag frequency yields positive effects when it is deployed within a coherent and structured self-presentation framework, strengthening trust and ultimately enhancing conversion rates. These findings highlight that both what is said (semantic content) and how much is said (frequency) matter, but their effects depend on influencers’ expressive styles. The study provides actionable insights for marketers and brands, suggesting that effective hashtag strategies should align with influencers’ self-presentation tendencies rather than follow standardized or quantitative rules. Full article

Point-of-sale (POS) consumer credit represents the most rapidly expanding retail-lending channel within the emerging Eurasian markets, necessitating a stringent operational framework for the underwriting model: the decision must be rendered within a mere few hundred milliseconds during the in-store checkout process, while the inputs are constrained to what the application XML is capable of conveying. This research endeavors to develop, internally validate, and operationally delineate a hybrid, explainable artificial intelligence framework aimed at POS credit scoring within the production portfolio of Kazakhstan’s largest second-tier bank. The architectural framework is delineated along two orthogonal dimensions—client tenure and decision-making channel—resulting in the formulation of three distinct production models: two transparent Weight of Evidence–Logistic Regression scorecards tailored for the real-time channel, and one isotonically-calibrated stacked ensemble (comprising LightGBM, CatBoost, and a three-layer neural network) designated for the batch channel. The selection of hyperparameters was conducted utilising Bayesian optimization within the context of stratified five-fold cross-validation. The digital scorecards achieve an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.847 and 0.835, whereas the offline ensemble enhances performance to an AUROC of 0.918, accompanied by a Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistic of 0.682 and a Gini coefficient of 0.836. The population stability indices persist below the threshold of 0.07, while isotonic recalibration effectively reduces the Brier score by 18%. Furthermore, an extensive examination of fairness demonstrates variations in approval rates within a margin of ±1.2 percentage points—and equalised-odds gaps below 1.5 percentage points in the true-positive rate and 0.7 percentage points in the false-positive rate—across multiple demographic factors such as gender, age, and distinctions between urban and rural classifications, thus establishing an artificial intelligence framework that is both regulatorily compliant and interpretable, aligning with the directives set forth by the Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market. Full article

Vehicle sales constitute an important component of household consumption and a key transmission channel of macro-financial conditions in South Africa. This study investigates the macroeconomic determinants of vehicle sales by examining the roles of economic activity, interest rates, and inflation over the period 2000Q1 to 2025Q4. Using quarterly data, the analysis employs the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to estimate both long-run and short-run relationships, complemented by an error correction model and Granger causality analysis. The results confirm the existence of a stable long-run cointegrating relationship among the variables. In the long run, vehicle sales respond positively to economic growth, while inflation and interest rates are associated with reduced demand. Short-run dynamics indicate that vehicle sales respond positively to economic growth, and negatively to interest rates and inflation, reflecting affordability and credit constraints, alongside rapid adjustment to macroeconomic shocks. The Granger causality results suggest that vehicle demand is largely driven by macro-financial conditions rather than exerting feedback effects on them. Overall, the findings highlight the sensitivity of South Africa’s automotive sector to macroeconomic stability and underscore the importance of prudent monetary policy and price stability in sustaining durable goods demand. Full article

With the rise in social channels, branders have gained more sales opportunities, but at the same time, they have to face practical challenges such as channel introductions, product configuration, and product pricing. Although existing studies have discussed branders’ product configuration, most of them confine product differentiation strategies to homogeneous e-commerce platforms, overlook the heterogeneity between traditional and social platforms, and rarely consider the impact of consumption subsidies. To this end, we consider a supply chain consisting of a brander and two heterogeneous e-commerce platforms. By incorporating both single and differentiated-product configurations, we developed a sequential Stackelberg game model to analyze the brander’s optimal channel introduction, product configuration, and pricing strategies under government consumption subsidies. Under the model settings and assumptions of this paper, we derive the following findings: (1) when the quality of the general product is relatively high, the brander achieves higher profits after introducing social channels; (2) when the commission rate is high and the quality of the high-level product falls within a specific threshold, the brander achieves the maximum profit under the single-product strategy; (3) when the proportion of fans is high, the profit of the social platform is higher than that of the traditional platform; (4) when the quality of high-level products is relatively low, the platform supply chain can achieve Pareto optimality by adopting the single-product configuration. This paper elucidates the strategic roles of product configuration and consumption subsidies in the context of social channel introduction, thereby providing a theoretical basis for branders’ operational decisions and for the government’s formulation of consumption subsidy policies. Full article

This multi-level study investigates the economic resilience of mango farmers during the COVID-19 pandemic and their pesticide management practices under Thailand’s Q-GAP (Quality Good Agricultural Practices) certification standard. Field surveys compared the economic outcomes of 104 certified and 151 non-certified farmers from 2019 to 2023, together with pesticide use practices during the year preceding the 2024 survey. The sample was drawn from three provinces in northern Thailand: Phitsanulok, Phetchabun, and Phichit. The statistical analysis of the collected information produced several key findings. Certified farms achieved significantly higher production and sales than non-certified farms over the five-year period, mainly due to larger farm size and higher prices obtained from premium export market sales. Certified farmers also adopted a wider range of coping strategies during the pandemic, whereas non-certified farmers mainly reduced mango investments related to mango cultivation. Certified farmers reported significantly higher rates of insecticide and fungicide adoption, as well as significantly higher annual pesticide application frequencies across all three pesticide categories. Residue analysis showed no significant difference in organophosphate (OP) residues between the two groups; however, pyrethroid (PY) residues were significantly higher among certified farms. This pattern suggests that certified farmers may apply pesticides more intensively to satisfy the aesthetic requirements of premium export markets. Regression results further showed that herbicide application frequency was the only factor marginally associated with PY-type residue levels among certified farmers, although this finding should be interpreted cautiously because of the weak model fit. Full article

Tobacco use remains a major public health challenge in Jordan, where cigarette smoking and waterpipe use are both common and dual use is increasingly prevalent. Community pharmacies are highly accessible healthcare settings, yet structured smoking-cessation services remain underutilized. This study evaluated the clinical effectiveness and implementation of Dual-Quit Digital, a pharmacist-delivered cessation counseling program tailored to the type of tobacco used, paired with a 6-month automated WhatsApp^® (Menlo Park, CA, USA) follow-up system. We conducted a pragmatic, two-arm, parallel-group, Hybrid Type 2 cluster randomized controlled trial in 16 community pharmacies in Jordan, randomized 1:1 to intervention or usual care. A total of 320 adult tobacco users were enrolled (160 per arm). The intervention combined a structured in-pharmacy pharmacist consultation, tailored behavioral support, phenotype-stratified pharmacotherapy support, and 6 months of semi-automated WhatsApp^® follow-up with telepharmacy escalation for predefined red-flag responses. The control arm received usual care, consisting of opportunistic brief advice and standard over-the-counter sales without proactive follow-up. The primary outcome was biochemically verified continuous abstinence at 6 months, defined as exhaled carbon monoxide (CO) < 10 ppm and analyzed using intention-to-treat principles. Secondary outcomes included 7-day point prevalence abstinence (PPA) at 3 and 6 months, 30-day PPA at 6 months, both-product abstinence among baseline dual users, pharmacotherapy uptake and adherence, and implementation-relevant outcomes, including service reach, feasibility of recruitment, and digital engagement metrics. All 16 pharmacies were retained, and all 320 randomized participants were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. At 6 months, CO-verified continuous abstinence was achieved by 26.3% of participants in the intervention arm compared with 11.3% in the control arm (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 2.84, 95% CI 1.55–5.18; p < 0.001). The intervention also improved 7-day PPA at 3 months (33.1% vs. 15.6%; aOR 2.68, 95% CI 1.56–4.60; p < 0.001), 7-day PPA at 6 months (30.6% vs. 14.4%; aOR 2.62, 95% CI 1.48–4.62; p = 0.001), and 30-day PPA at 6 months (28.1% vs. 11.9%; aOR 2.89, 95% CI 1.59–5.24; p < 0.001). Among baseline dual users, both-product abstinence was higher in the intervention arm (21.9% vs. 7.8%; aOR 3.30, 95% CI 1.12–9.75; p = 0.026). Pharmacotherapy initiation was more frequent in the intervention arm (72.5% vs. 28.1%; p < 0.001), as was self-reported adherence for at least 8 weeks among initiators (56.0% vs. 26.7%; p = 0.002). In the intervention arm, active patient response rates to scheduled WhatsApp^® messages remained substantial, with 88.1% responding at Week 1, 73.8% at Week 4, 67.5% at Month 3, and 61.3% at Month 6; 145 red-flag triggers were captured from 62 participants, and 84.1% of escalations resulted in successful pharmacist follow-up within 48 h. The Dual-Quit Digital model significantly improved smoking-cessation outcomes compared with usual care and proved operationally feasible. These findings support integrating phenotype-stratified pharmacist counselling, pharmacotherapy support, and low-burden digital follow-up as a pragmatic cessation model for Jordan and similar settings. Full article

Program KBLBB was implemented to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change by 2030. Total sales of Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) in Indonesia until June 2025 are 107,428, with the increase in sales resulting in a proportional rise in EV battery waste. EV battery waste requires comprehensive policy recommendations for its management, as in Indonesia. The goal of this research is to develop a sustainable assessment for an EV battery waste management model that addresses environmental, economic, and social perspectives. The assessment is carried out using the End-of-Waste framework model, Reuse, with recycling technology hydrometallurgy for Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) and Lithium Ferro Phosphate (LFP) batteries. The results show that the environmental impacts of waste from NMC batteries are 20% smaller than those of LFP batteries, with 80% of the impacts. The total cost of waste from LFP batteries is lower than that of NMC batteries. The S-LCA risk score shows the same results for waste from NMC and LPF batteries: a very high risk for actual female employment, unequal remuneration, no collective bargaining indicators, and no right to organize. Sensitivity analysis results for EV battery waste management model for NMC batteries with hydrometallurgy, collection level of 30%, and recovery rate of 85%. Full article

This study develops a comprehensive carbon footprint assessment model that integrates forward and reverse logistics to evaluate and compare greenhouse gas emissions from online and offline apparel sales channels in China, with a particular focus on high return rates. The model quantifies emissions from transportation, packaging, storage, and operations, incorporating return and exchange logistics. The system boundary is limited to enterprise-controllable sales-phase activities and excludes consumer travel. Three sales models are compared: factory-to-consumer (F2C), traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, and brick-and-mortar retail (BMR). Within this defined boundary, BMR exhibits the lowest carbon footprint (0.296 kg CO₂e/item), followed by F2C (0.408 kg CO₂e/item) and B2C (0.602 kg CO₂e/item). Packaging dominates online emissions (55–57%), whereas store operations are the main contributor to offline emissions (43%). Return rates are identified as a decisive factor, accounting for over 31% of e-commerce emissions and potentially increasing them by 171.3% under extreme scenarios. Sensitivity analysis reveals that trunk line distance (factory to warehouse) has a greater impact on emissions than last-mile return route optimization. Relocating the factory closer to consumers reduces B2C transport emissions by 72.3%, whereas replacing conventional packaging with recycled plastic reduces total B2C emissions by 46.0%. These findings provide channel-specific sustainability strategies: return reduction and packaging innovation for online channels, and energy efficiency improvements for physical stores. These results are conditional on the defined system boundary. If consumer travel by private car were included, the relative advantage of offline channels would diminish or could reverse. Full article

Indonesia’s bird trade research has largely focused on songbirds, leaving other exploited taxa, such as hornbills, understudied. We address this gap by analyzing hornbill seizures in Indonesia (January 2015–December 2024) and online hornbill advertisements (January 2015–February 2025). We recorded 126 seizures and 231 advertisements revealing widespread illegal exploitation of all thirteen native Indonesian hornbill species, and endemic species from the Philippines and Africa. Trade involved live hornbills and hornbill beaks and casques. The prevalence of live trade suggests targeted poaching for the pet market is more extensive than previously documented, underscoring the need for further research and heightened enforcement. At least four endemic Philippines hornbill species were found in trade. The absence of CITES import records for these species indicates illegal international trafficking. At least two African endemic species were also observed for sale online in Indonesia underscoring the need for international monitoring and regulatory oversight to prevent over-exploitation. East Java and Jakarta emerged as principal trade hubs and Riau as a key transit point for hornbill parts entering international trafficking routes. Hornbills are particularly vulnerable to over exploitation because of their slow maturation, low re-productive rates, and complex ecological requirements. As such, Indonesia’s illegal hornbill trade demands targeted actions, including legal reform, strengthened enforcement capacity, and enhanced accountability of online platforms to curb these pressures and protect remaining populations. Full article

This study investigates the key determinants of firm profitability in the global automotive sector, examining whether superior returns on assets (ROA) stem from operational efficiency, strategic leverage, or innovation intensity, and highlighting the potential trade-off between efficiency and investment in capital-intensive industries. Analysing a global panel dataset of 192 automotive firms from 38 countries/regions over 2010–2024, a fixed effects regression model with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors was applied to control for unobserved heterogeneity, heteroskedasticity, and cross-sectional dependence across 11 financial and strategic variables. The findings reveal that firm size and inventory turnover are significant positive drivers of profitability, while research and development (R&D) intensity exerts a strong negative impact. The positive association with the effective tax rate reflects reverse causality, where more profitable firms incur higher tax burdens, rather than a causal effect of taxation on performance. Notably, working capital management, leverage, sales growth, and capital expenditure showed no statistically significant effects after controlling for firm and time effects. Temporal fluctuations, including a marked profitability decline in 2024, underscore the sector’s sensitivity to macroeconomic shocks. This study contributes robust, large-scale empirical evidence on the short-term profitability trade-off associated with R&D intensity in a globally integrated industry, addressing cross-sectional dependence through its methodological approach. Full article

The objective of this paper is to offer a mathematical formulation of economic value added (EVA) that incorporates distance-to-default (DD) and thus a default-free capital structure. The latter is extended via the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) to introduce a default-free EVA. The data include the nonfinancial firms listed in the DJIA30 and NASDAQ100 covering the period 1992Q2–2023Q3. The results of standard specification tests and the GMM estimator show that (a) DD causes an increase in WACC and thus, EVA decreases; (b) the interest coverage ratio can be used effectively to compensate for default risk, thus adjusting the default-free EVA positively; (c) both EVA and default-free EVA can effectively be managed via common determinants, namely, net working capital ratio, total liabilities to EBITDA, sales growth rate, debt–equity ratio, and earnings per share; (d) the positive impact of the inflation rate on both EVA and default-free EVA justifies the use of default-free EVA as a metric for equity risk premium; and (e) the robustness of the results via stochastic geometric Brownian motion shows that the determinants of default-free EVA are stable. This paper contributes to related studies by incorporating credit risk via the DD into default-free EVA. Full article

COVID-19 was a prolonged public-health shock that disrupted mobility, access to services, and household spending. Although the official U.S. poverty rate declined to 11.1%, the Supplemental Poverty Measure rose to 12.9%, suggesting that material hardship persisted unevenly across places. This study asks whether pre-existing livelihood vulnerability and local epidemic burden translated into geographically concentrated consumption losses during 2020–2022. Because sustained consumption loss can erode households’ health-related spending, tracking where spending declines concentrate helps connect local social and environmental conditions to how communities withstand a health crisis. We analyze consumer expenditure, unlike prior research relying on aggregate retail sales, to capture fine-grained economic strains as a proxy for shock-absorption capacity. A Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) was calculated for each U.S. county using 16 socio-economic variables, and counties were classified as high- or low-risk. A multilevel model then examined how socio-economic and COVID-19 factors at county and census tract levels shaped consumption changes. Higher-risk communities experienced greater consumption reductions. At the census tract level, the non-White ratio, vacancy rate, built year, per capita income, education level, and housing value were significant. At the county level, COVID-19 cases and deaths, crowding, public transportation use, and vehicle availability mattered most. These findings support place-targeted strategies that combine public-health response with socio-environmental interventions to reduce disparities rooted in pre-existing vulnerability. Full article

This study investigates the structural misalignment between official wage benchmarks and actual market wages in the Republic of Korea to establish an independent, forestry-specific wage system essential for labor sustainability. Historically, the Republic of Korea forestry project costs have relied on construction industry benchmarks, leading to a “diverging hypothesis” where official rates fail to reflect the specialized risks and technical skills required in forest operations. To address this, a comprehensive wage survey was conducted in 2025 across 13 specialized forestry occupations. Utilizing a sampling frame of 7555 sites, 1044 units were selected via stratified sampling with square-root proportional allocation, ensuring a relative standard error (RSE) of 2.5%. The findings reveal that market wages consistently exceed construction benchmarks by 4.5% to 41.0%. The most significant disparities were observed in leadership and mechanized roles, reflecting substantial “risk–responsibility” and “skill premiums”. Furthermore, the study identifies a structural shift toward risk-transfer strategies, such as stumpage sales, in response to the Serious Accidents Punishment Act (SAPA). These results underscore the urgent need for a specialized wage framework to ensure safety and long-term resilience. Ultimately, such institutional refinement is a prerequisite for securing the high-quality human capital necessary for a sustainable circular bioeconomy. Full article

The resource utilization of construction and demolition waste (CDW) is crucial for advancing the green transformation of the construction industry, but it faces challenges such as insufficient upstream R&D motivation and low downstream market acceptance. To investigate the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sales effort on the recycled cement supply chain, in this study, a Stackelberg game model of a two-tier supply chain comprising a single recycled cement manufacturer and retailers is constructed. Under government subsidy conditions, four CSR sharing modes are systematically compared: no CSR (NS), manufacturer-borne (MS), retailer-borne (RS), and shared by both (TS). The results indicate the following: (1) CSR implementation reduces wholesale and retail prices while increasing sales effort, the incorporation rate of recycled aggregates, and market demand, with retailers bearing CSR yielding the most significant pull effect; (2) heightened sensitivity to sales effort incentivizes retailers to increase sales investment and encourages manufacturers to increase the incorporation rate of recycled aggregates, thereby increasing overall supply chain profits and utility; and (3) when the CSR coefficient does not exceed the critical value of 0.97, both manufacturer profits and retailer profits increase as the CSR level increases under the TS model; under the RS model, total supply chain profits and total utility reach their maximum. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) undertaken or jointly undertaken by retailers can better align economic and social objectives. This study provides theoretical foundations and practical insights for policy formulation and corporate decision-making in construction waste resource management. Full article