Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts for organisations, society, and individuals. Offering multi-disciplinary insight into some of these, this article brings together 43 contributions from experts in fields such as computer science, marketing, information systems, education, policy, hospitality and tourism, management, publishing, and nursing. The contributors acknowledge ChatGPT's capabilities to enhance productivity and suggest that it is likely to offer significant gains in the banking, hospitality and tourism, and information technology industries, and enhance business activities, such as management and marketing. Nevertheless, they also consider its limitations, disruptions to practices, threats to privacy and security, and consequences of biases, misuse, and misinformation. However, opinion is split on whether ChatGPT's use should be restricted or legislated. Drawing on these contributions, the article identifies questions requiring further research across three thematic areas: knowledge, transparency, and ethics; digital transformation of organisations and societies; and teaching, learning, and scholarly research. The avenues for further research include: identifying skills, resources, and capabilities needed to handle generative AI; examining biases of generative AI attributable to training datasets and processes; exploring business and societal contexts best suited for generative AI implementation; determining optimal combinations of human and generative AI for various tasks; identifying ways to assess accuracy of text produced by generative AI; and uncovering the ethical and legal issues in using generative AI across different contexts. © 2023 The Authors

Purpose: The global pandemic and the resulting rapid and large-scale digitization changed the way firms recognized and understood knowledge curation and management. The changing nature of work and work systems necessitated changes in knowledge management (KM), some of which are likely to have a long-term impact. Using the lens of technology in practice, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of technology agency on KM structures and practices that evolved across five knowledge-intensive global organizations. This study then argues that sustainable knowledge management (SKM) systems evolve in specific contexts. Design/methodology/approach: This study adopts a qualitative case study design to examine five multinational knowledge-intensive global organizations’ KM systems and practices across diverse industry sectors. Findings: Based on the findings, the authors develop SKM systems and practices model relevant to a post-pandemic organizational context. The authors argue that KM digitization and adoption support socialization in knowledge sharing. Further formalization through organizational enabling systems aids the externalization of knowledge sharing. Deliberate practices promoted with leadership support are likely to sustain in the post-COVID era. Further, organizations that evolved ad-hoc or idiosyncratic approaches to managing hybrid working are more likely to revert to legacy KM systems. The authors eventually theorize about the socialization of human-to-human and technology-mediated human interactions and develop the three emerging SKM structures. Originality/value: This study contributed to practitioners and researchers by developing the various tenets of SKM. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The purpose of this article is to study the signaling potential of “supplier awards” in creating shareholder value for the award-giving and the award-receiving firm. We use event study methodology with supplier awards as events that signal mutually beneficial buyer–supplier relationship (BSR) efforts to estimate the firm value generated from these efforts. Supplier awards, apart from being a supplier development (SD) activity in themselves, are also a signal of a mutually beneficial relationship between a buyer and a supplier. This article performs a deep study by investigating the impact of traits, such as award exclusivity and award satiation, on the efficacy of supplier awards as a signaling mechanism. We find that shareholders of firms that give awards (buyers) and those of firms that receive awards (suppliers) react positively to such events, thereby establishing the signaling potential of supplier awards that signal the mutually beneficial BSR and SD efforts. We find that a more exclusive award has a higher positive impact on the buyer's shareholders. We also find that there is a higher impact on the supplier's market value when that supplier receives awards less frequently. This article pioneers a study of interorganizational awards that considers traits, such as exclusivity and award satiation, that are not frequently studied in extant research. IEEE

We investigate the puzzle of widespread participation in cryptocurrency pump-and-dump manipulation schemes. Unlike stock market manipulators, cryptocurrency manipulators openly declare their intentions to pump specific coins, rather than trying to deceive investors. Puzzlingly, people join in despite negative expected returns. In a simple framework, we demonstrate how overconfidence and gambling preferences can explain participation in these schemes. Analyzing a sample of 355 cases in 6 months, we find strong empirical support for both mechanisms. Pumps generate extreme price distortions of 65% on average, abnormal trading volumes in the millions of dollars, and large wealth transfers between participants. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Finance Association. All rights reserved.

Increasing depression and mental health problems among the elderly during the pandemic have become a grave concern. In the present study, we borrowed from the emotional contagion theory and examined the association between social media use (SMU) and depression among the elderly during the pandemic. Our findings suggest that active but not passive SMU is positively related to depression. Moreover, we also examined if SMU (both active and passive) has a varying effect on the mental health of the elderly based on their race, i.e. blacks and whites. Our findings suggest that active SMU is detrimental for both blacks and whites, whereas passive SMU is positively related to depression only among blacks. Further, we undertook multiperiod analyses where depression scores were measured at four different time periods. We found that the adverse impact of SMU on depression persists over time. The present study draws attention to the antecedents of depression among the elderly during COVID-19. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In this research, we study the air cargo loading problem that aims to assign cargo containers to appropriate loading positions within a freight carrier aircraft. Here, as we deal with an aircraft that has been specially reconfigured into a freight aircraft from originally a passenger aircraft, this leads to a novel air cargo loading problem that is subject to four types of constraints, namely: assignment constraints; maximum position weight limits and zero fuel weight limit considerations; center of gravity (CG) envelope limiting conditions, which are based on the aircraft weight and fluctuating CG during the fueling process; respecting panel weight limits (a legacy constraint from the passenger aircraft structure), which are related to the CG envelope; and finally, lateral imbalance limits for double-row cargo configurations. We minimize the deviation from an optimal CG value, which is determined based on fuel economy and safety restrictions. This problem is formulated as a 0–1 mixed-integer nonlinear programming model, which is subsequently linearized, and four different types of aircraft configurations are utilized to test our formulation. The results indicate that significant improvements can be achieved as compared to a more traditionally used method in the freight cargo industry. Finally, we highlight a user-oriented, functional, and graphically appealing decision support tool, based on the proposed optimization framework, that has been developed and deployed at a major air cargo operator in Singapore. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Governments in developing countries tend to assess the contracting mechanisms in the agricultural sector to maximize farmer welfare. We analyze the impacts of certain contract structures (wholesale price and revenue sharing) in the setting where the upstream pricing is regulated for farmer welfare. We develop an analytical model in which farmers sell inputs to firms competing in the downstream market. Our model embraces such features as (i) Cournot competition, (ii) regulated pricing of inputs, and (iii) total welfare maximization. We first characterize the market output and input pricing decisions. We then compare the pricing and players’ payoffs in our setting with those in the setting where the upstream pricing is deregulated. We ascertain the impacts of the degree of market competition on players’ payoffs and contracting decisions. We find farmer’s payoff is higher if it strategically decides the input price. Interestingly, under the revenue sharing contract, the value of strategic pricing to the farmer decreases with an increase in market competition. However, under the wholesale contract, the value of strategic pricing to the farmer may increase or decrease in the market competition. In addition, we analyze the setting where the farmers are located in distinct geographies with different pricing regulations and derive interesting findings. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Recent Coronavirus pandemic has prompted many regulations which are affecting the stock market. Especially because of lockdown policies across the world, the airlines industry is suffering. We analyse the stock price movements of three major airlines companies using a new approach which leverages a measure of internet concern on different topics. In this approach, Twitter data and Google Trends are used to create a set of predictors which then leads to an appropriately modified GARCH model. In the analysis, first we show that the ongoing pandemic has an unprecedented severe effect. Then, the proposed model is used to analyse and forecast stock price volatility of the airlines companies. The findings establish that our approach can successfully use the effects of internet concern for different topics on the movement of stock price index and provide good forecasting accuracy. Model confidence set (MCS) procedure further shows that the short-term volatility forecasts are more accurate for this method than other candidate models. Thus, it can be used to understand the stock market during a pandemic in a better way. Further, the proposed approach is attractive and flexible, and can be extended to other related problems as well. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Employee engagement is critical for the sustenance of organizations. Scholars have highlighted that the employer-employee interaction is an essential mechanism that enhances employee engagement. The communicative and interactional features of AI applications in HRM allow for a personalized and individualized approach to employees. The proliferation of AI-based solutions is increasing in various dimensions of HR business processes, leading to enhanced employee experiences and job satisfaction. However, this research domain is exploratory concerning the impact of AI-mediation HRM practices. Based on a multi-source, time-lagged study spanning over ten months in a multinational company, we have investigated the impact of AI-enabled chatbots on employee engagement in the present study. We have also examined climate for trust as the path through which chatbots impact engagement. Moreover, we have analyzed the implications of AI-enabled chatbots on employee outcomes based on their age and past performance. The contributions of the study to theory and practice have also been discussed. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

We investigate the effect of stereotypical beliefs of teachers on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of secondary school students in two states of India. We measure teacher's bias through an index capturing teacher's subjective beliefs about the role of gender in academic performance. We tackle the potential endogeneity of teacher's subjective beliefs by controlling for teacher fixed effects in a value-added model that includes lagged test scores of students. We find that a standard deviation increase in the biased attitude of the math teacher increases the female disadvantage in math performance by 0.09 standard deviation over an academic year. We also find significant impacts on the gender gap in students’ math attitude, academic self-confidence, and effort as potential mechanisms for the effect on math score. We do not find any significant effect of English teachers’ gender bias on English learning of the students. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Our research uniquely shows that scarcity cues, when effectively managed by the service firms, can lead to favorable purchase decisions. We investigate how service firms that are scarce on time resource (busy) vs. money resource (poor) are perceived differentially on the two basic dimensions of social perceptions: warmth and competence. Across four studies, we provide the first empirical evidence that busy service firms are perceived higher on competence and poor service firms are perceived higher on warmth. We also find that service firms that are both busy and poor have the highest purchase preference compared to either busy or poor service firms. In addition, purchase preferences are moderated by the consumption contexts (exchange vs. communal relationship domain). Managerially, our findings that scarcity cues influence purchase preferences can benefit the design and execution of marketing strategies. © 2023, Academy of Marketing Science.

We investigate how social identity, namely gender and caste, affects stream choice at the higher secondary level of schooling in India. The choice of science stream at this level is a crucial determinant of subsequent science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and labor market outcomes. Using nationally representative data spanning a decade, we show that females and individuals from historically disadvantaged castes are significantly less likely to study science. We analyze the role of various socio-economic and schooling-related factors in explaining these gaps. We also highlight the interplay between caste and gender using an intersectionality framework. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Purpose: The provision of accommodation devices is said to aid organizational inclusion of employees with a disability. However, devices that are meant to enable might only partially facilitate productivity, independence, and social inclusion if these devices are not accepted by the user's workgroup. The authors outline a conceptual model of accommodation device acceptance through a sociomaterial lens to suggest conditions influencing workgroup device acceptance. Design/methodology/approach: To build the model, the authors draw upon the sociomateriality and disability literature to frame accommodation devices as experienced in ongoing interactions, representing the goals, feelings, and interpretations of specific workgroups. The authors also unpack attributes of devices—instrumentality, aesthetics, and symbolism—and propose how each of these can pattern social conduct to influence device acceptance. The authors then draw upon the disability literature to identify attributes of workgroups that can be expected to amplify or diminish the effect of device attributes on device acceptance in that workgroup. Findings: The conceptualization, which the authors illustrate with examples particular to visual impairment, presents implications for who and what serves as a gatekeeper to accommodation device acceptance and thereby workgroup inclusion. Originality/value: Prior research has focused on conditions under which devices are requested by users or made available by organizations, undergirded by the assumption that devices are well-specified once provided and that they operate relatively predictably when used in various workgroups. The authors focus instead on what happens after the device is provided and highlight the complex and dynamic interaction between an accommodation device and the workgroup, which influences device and user acceptance. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Governments across the globe initiated various tax reforms in the post- Global Financial Crisis period to rein in aggressive corporate tax avoidance for managing budget deficits. These developments created new realities in the international business environment by altering the costs and benefits of corporate tax management. Yet, we have a limited understanding of the effectiveness of tax reforms in controlling corporate tax avoidance at the global level. COVID-19 offers a litmus test for how corporates manage their taxes during the pandemic in light of past tax reforms. We use financial constraints and reputational costs as two contradicting theoretical perspectives to explain corporate tax avoidance during the crisis. Consistent with the financial constraints hypothesis, we find that firms avoid taxes amid COVID-19 to prevent liquidity crunches. Our study also highlights the role of country-level information and governance quality in curbing tax avoidance during extreme events like COVID-19. Our findings call for an immediate tax policy intervention to limit corporate tax avoidance during the ongoing pandemic phases. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Research Summary: Using a sample of 205,792 individuals in 70 countries with 39 languages, this paper presents novel empirical evidence for how a language's future time reference, defined as the requirement that speakers mark time in the future, affects a speaker's likelihood of engaging in social entrepreneurship. FTR subtly shapes a speaker's temporal orientation, such that speaking a futured language (i.e., strong FTR) favors a short-term orientation which positively affects the likelihood of being a social entrepreneur. Furthermore, institutional uncertainty arising from weakly entrenched institutions moderates this relationship. Individuals who speak futured languages in contexts characterized by regulatory institutional uncertainty (weak rule of law, weak property rights, and strong corruption) are more likely to engage in social entrepreneurship. Theoretical and practical implications and future research directions are discussed. Managerial Summary: This paper examines the influence of language and regulatory institutions on an individual's decision to engage in social entrepreneurship. We show that entrepreneurial strategies towards social value creation are more likely to be pursued in countries where language is characterized as futured (i.e., using sentences with “will/shall + infinitive”) with the linguistic feature of future time reference (FTR). Moreover, the positive impact FTR has on the strategic decision to become a social entrepreneur intensifies when there is regulatory institutional uncertainty. That is, the probability an individual is a social entrepreneur increases when there is weak rule of law, weak property rights, and strong corruption within a country. In sum, our study highlights the important interplay between language, an overlooked cognitive institution, and regulatory institutions in shaping entrepreneurial behaviors and social outcomes. © 2022 The Authors. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Strategic Management Society.

Purpose: COVID-19 induced uncertainty in the firms’ business transactions, financial markets and product-market competition, causing a severe organizational legitimacy crisis. Using the organizational legitimacy perspective and agency theory, this paper aims to study the relationship between prior corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, monitoring cost (MC) and firm performance. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a quarterly panel (16,924 firm-quarter observations from 61 countries for CSR and 53,345 firm-quarter observations from 55 countries for MC) for 14 quarters from January 2018 to June 2021. This study uses panel fixed-effect regression models to estimate the effect of CSR activities and MC (measured as audit fees) on firm performance during the COVID-19 period. Findings: This study finds a U-shaped relationship between CSR and firm performance. This relationship is strengthened during COVID-19. In contrast, this study finds an inverted U-shaped relationship between firm MC and firm performance. However, this relationship is weakened during the pandemic. Originality/value: This study contributes to theory and practice on maintaining organizational legitimacy and reducing agency costs during the pandemic. This study shows that firms’ prior legitimacy-gaining practices, such as CSR activities and MC, provide an opportunity to increase firm value. To balance agency costs and legitimacy benefits, firm managers also need to identify the optimal level of CSR activities and MC. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Countering ads with fake claims represent a significant challenge for marketers and policymakers. We show how gender can help better target debunking efforts toward fake ads. First, we find that females (vs. males) show higher sensitivity to debunking efforts toward fake ads, leading to less favorable attitudes toward the brand and, consequently, lower purchase intentions. We then further probe these effects by introducing processing variables from the tenets of perceived risk (perceived health risk) and information processing confidence (skepticism toward the ad). We find that debunking information induces higher levels of skepticism among females owing to their lower information processing confidence than males, leading to downstream effects of higher perceptions of health risk, less favorable attitudes toward the brand, and lower purchase intentions among females than males. Our findings provide implications for advertisers and policymakers to battle the ongoing proliferation of fake ads. © 2023 Advertising Association.

It is well recognized that many organizations operate under situations of high complexity that arises from pervasive interdependencies between their decision elements. While prior work has discussed the benefits of low to moderate complexity, the literature on how to cope with high complexity is relatively sparse. In this study, we seek to demonstrate that Lindblom’s decision-making principle of muddlingthrough is a very effective approach that organizations can use to cope with high complexity. Using a computational simulation (NK) model, we show that Lindblom’s muddlingthrough approach obtains outcomes superior to those obtained from boundedly rational decision-making approaches when complexity is high. Moreover, our results also show that muddlingthrough is an appropriate vehicle for bringing in radical organizational change or far-reaching adaptation. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Brand Confusion is a time-worn yet highly relevant topic for marketers, researchers, and regulatory agencies because colossal and ever-increasing number of legal cases on brand confusion have kept them interested in it. This study aims to provide a commentary on worldwide scientific literature on brand confusion highlighting the evolution, advances, trends, and inter-connections. For this purpose, 200 documents on brand confusion published between 1985 and 2019 have been systematically reviewed using Bibliometrix, a software based on R Studio. This study contributes by presenting a snapshot of the extant research on brand confusion and by providing useful insights for practitioners and researchers in terms of managerial implications and directions for further research. This is the first study to explore a wide range of global interdisciplinary scholarly work on brand confusion and its causes. © 2022 K.J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research.

Customers play a significant role in motivating frontline employees. However, little research has examined the impact of employees’ interactions with external beneficiaries in explaining service performance. In the present study, we borrowed from the job characteristics model and social exchange theory to build our model. Drawing on data from 889 frontline service employees and 2667 customers in the microfinance sector, our study demonstrated that supervisor support (an internal factor) and contact with beneficiaries (an external factor) influence employee service performance. We also investigated employee gratitude as an intervening mechanism through which supervisor support and beneficiary contact improve employee service performance. In addition, we found that employees’ perception of the external prestige of their organization is a powerful force linking the above factors with service performance. Our findings advance the understanding of employee service performance, thus providing significant implications for research and practice. © 2022 British Academy of Management and Wiley Periodicals LLC.