The salience of the international purchasing office (IPO) in the management of international sourcing activities of multinational corporations (MNCs) has steadily increased, in developed and emerging economies, since the first adoption of this supply chain strategy in the 1980s. The aim of this...

Setting up an international purchasing office (IPO) is one of the key steps for firms doing global sourcing. This paper aims to explore the relationship between strategy and structure in a contemporary global purchasing context. We build a theory of IPOs, employing a case study method to address...

A central and still open question in consumer and happiness research is whether happiness depends on absolute or relative levels of wealth and consumption. To address this question the authors go to a finer level than overall happiness and distinguish three types of happiness: happiness from...

Stored value cards (SVCs) are ubiquitous, but little investigation has been undertaken into actual and desired replenishment behaviour, or the economic impact of card consolidation on consumers and service providers (such as retailers and public transit authorities). We develop classic and joint...

In this paper, we first fabricated a nanoPt modified platinum electrode. Then through a simple method, the electrode surface was introduced with a submonolayer of bismuth that acted as an effective promoter. Cyclic voltammetry and other characterizations were employed. The obtained...

Influence maximization problem is about finding a small set of nodes from the social network as seed set so as to maximize the range of information diffusion. In this paper, the theory of coritivity and method of finding core nodes in networks are introduced to deal with this problem. From the...