Published Vol. 9 No. 1

Volume 9, Issue 1 (March 2021)

Air Asia: From Regional to Global

In February 2009, Tony Fernandez, the founder of AirAsia was not bothered by the company’s mass order of 175 new aircraft for its AirAsia-X long-haul services. He could not resist the concern over the aircraft deferment to Thailand and Indonesia in 2011 because of the relocation of the low-cost carrier terminal in Sepang before AirAsia was forced to move to KLIA2. Such a situation would surely increase its operating costs exponentially. He also knew he was facing an economic downturn and the high competition, particularly for his AirAsia-X business. Major rivals of AirAsia-X in the region were Singapore Tiger Airways, Cebu Pacific Air of the Philippines and a global competitor was EasyJet in Europe had just launched aggressive campaigns and promotions which would affect its long-haul business.

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SADAFCO: The Food Basket of GCC

Saudia Dairy and Foodstuff Company as popularly known the SADAFCO [1], is one of the leading companies in the Gulf region and professionally managed supply chain management to ensure food for all. In terms of quality assurance, it obtained International Standard Organisation’s (ISO22000:2005) certificate and enjoyed a competitive advantage in diary industry and milk based products in serving approximately 32000 customers across the GCC region. It also enjoyed a network of distributors without any forward or backward integration strategy to cater the need of the vast markets it serves in UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain in GCC including Jordon.

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Measuring Workplace Harassment Based on Gender Nonconformity

The rise of research on workplace mistreatment in the past twenty years can be attributed to the realization that workplace mistreatment is associated with a host of deleterious outcomes for both the individual targets of the mistreatment and the organizations in which they work. However, the extant literature is failing to capture the full range of sex-based mistreatment that people may experience through a tendency to focus solely on sexual harassment and sex discrimination, which are very specific types of behavior based on one’s sex and gender stereotypes.

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Customer's Adoption of Mobile Government Services: The Role of Trust and Information Privacy

The purpose of the study is to examine the factors that impact the intention of Saudi citizens to use a mobile government smartphone application (Absher). Saudi Arabia seeks to invest and develop the infrastructure of the government’s mobile services, to be one of the leading countries in the region. Smartphone applications backed by mobile technologies have changed mobile services use which permit anywhere at any time access. Drawing on technology acceptance theories and relevant literature, this study developed and tested a structural model that integrates factors perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived privacy and trust in order to investigate the predictors of Absher use intention in the Saudi Arabia.

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Short or Long Review? - Text Analytics and Machine Learning Approaches to Online Reputation

This paper first constructs a numerical text review score by applying text analytics and machine learning techniques to more than three million online text reviews collected from the Airbnb platform. Next, we employ the text review score to analyze the effect of review length on text review score and obtain insights on the interplay between the text review length and online reputation. The main contributions of this paper include: experimenting with advanced text analytics and machine learning approaches to assess online reputation; constructing an innovative text review score as a new online reputation measure; building a large knowledge-based review corpus with labels; and obtaining important insights about the effects of text review length on online reputation. Further, it has managerial and business implications for all internet platform markets and the sharing economy players seeking to build more effective online reputation systems.

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Leading Change with Faculty in Higher Education Institution Mergers

Higher education institution administration must identify if there is a need to engage in an academic merger and how to effectively communicate with faculty and incorporate them during the change process. Faculty members in higher education institutions are essential to execute the phases of academic mergers and should be involved throughout the merger process. A qualitative case study of 12 faculty members from 12 different higher education institutions provides faculty perceptions and engagement in higher education institution mergers. The qualitative research data from faculty used in this paper discuss the emergent themes and recommended practices: 1) communication for buy-in, 2) planning for success, and 3) the emotions of disruption

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International Migration of Highly Qualified Housewife Mothers and Their Career Concerns

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of highly educated mothers with at least one child who have left their jobs and have immigrated to the UK because of their spouse's job. The study investigates the barriers that these Turkish women may face in the UK. Research on immigrants has been mostly restricted to quantitative methods which rely on statistical data sets. A search of the literature revealed that qualitative studies are rarely used within the field. In order to examine this issue, in-depth interviews were held with 20 Turkish participants who meet the research criteria. Integrating these findings with relevant international migration theories, this study reveals that those highly educated Turkish women with advanced career success who took part in this research have not managed to break the cycle of traditional gender roles.

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Factors Affecting Counterfeit Products Purchase Decision

The purpose of the research was to identify the factors impelling the buyers' attitude towards the purchasing intention of counterfeit products among customers. The conceptual framework is proposed by different studies. All measures used were evaluated in terms of their internal consistency also in terms of discriminant validity and convergent validity to validate the data and the questionnaire. A survey was carried out on the Oman market with 350 respondents. The results of this research found that integrity and social status have a positive relationship and significantly affected the attitude of consumers when they made their purchasing decisions while price consciousness and novelty have a negative relationship with customer attitude.

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Ethiopia: Ugly Mathematical Unit Cost Fiscal Equalization Formula; Beautiful Findings

Grant allocation formulas used to allocate fiscal resources among different tiers of government have proved to be useful in many countries around the world. This article provides a unit cost approach equalization formula that was used in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE) to transfer resources from the regions to the woredas (districts) in 2007.

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Financial Markets are Not Efficient: Financial Literacy as an Effective Risk Management Tool

This paper advances the view that the deep confidence of market regulators in the assumptions and premises of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) has led to the underestimation of market risks, thus inactivating the market education of existing and future investors. Hence, they have not responded to financial illiteracy, which exacerbated the recent financial crisis. Investor education may be considered as a systemic risk management tool for future financial crises and, especially, financial literacy can drive a wedge between the regulation and the prevention of severe financial crises based on expected benefits versus losses. This also will help to regain investors’ trust in the market after the crisis and instill investors with more confidence. This approach has not yet received the attention it deserves.

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Estimating Return Volatility of Stock Market Indices: The Case of Boursa Kuwait

This study empirically investigates the conditional variance (volatility) in the daily returns of Boursa Kuwait’s market index, along with seven sectoral indices, for the period of 13 May 2012 to 1 March 2018. The returns results exhibited leptokurtosis, were skewed left, and were not normally distributed; additionally, there was evidence of ARCH effects. The symmetric GARCH model results demonstrated evidence of volatility clustering and persistence; the GARCH-M model results showed a negative relationship between the indices’ returns and risk. The conditional variance (volatility) is affected by positive shocks, leading to positive asymmetric values of EGARCH and negative asymmetric values of TGARCH. From this, it can be inferred that good news has a greater impact on the volatility of index returns than bad news. The research results are crucial for investors, risk forecasters, and policy makers

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Unlocking the Cult of Early-Stage High-Tech Startup Founders

In this paper, we unlock the cult of high-tech startup founders by taking a sample case study and observing various early-stage founders. Performing ethnographic studies has pointed us in the direction to use patents as a qualifier for technological credibility which serves as an inspiration to such startup founders. When the newbie startup founders are seeking funding, they need to define traits of the success laid out by top high-tech companies that were once startups. We observed 300 early-stage high-tech startup founders around the world, while some of them were in college, some quit college and others start after getting substantial work experience. The high-tech startup world is full of innovative ideas to solve big problems and introduce the workable tech solution to their respective markets. We performed a case study of an early-stage startup that won an innovation challenge and how they struggled to reach credibility and revenue success. Overall, we define this outcome as a cult among the early-stage high-tech startup founders while unlocking revenue success, patenting to scale innovation and human element.

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The Green New Deal, Financial Statements and the Accounting Profession

Climate change is real and immediate. The Green New deal (GND) is a set of policies, measures, events and actions designed to bring about systemic change to counter the effects of the catastrophic effects of climate change. These policies, measures, events and actions will deeply impact the accounting profession and the financial statements, since it aims to transform the US economy in a sustainable way by focusing on the long term. This article discusses the effects of GND on financial reporting and disclosure.

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Is Affirmative Action Still Necessary? Analysis of Minority-Working Adults’ Perceptions

This study analyzes the perceptions protected class employees in terms of the affirmative action in employment. Utilizing a sample of 151 protected class working adults, data analysis provided mixed support to the stated hypotheses which suggested that affirmative action had eliminated most discriminatory practices in corporate America. The results of this study answer the question of this study asserting the necessity of the affirmative action.

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