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The widespread use of mobile devices raises concerns about their negative effects on users’ well-being but also presents business opportunities. To harness this phenomenon effectively, understanding various aspects of user engagement is essential. This study aims to develop and empirically evaluate a conceptual framework for examining user engagement in mobile technology.

This study explores user engagement with mobile technology. The authors developed a conceptual model and collected data through an online survey, focusing on engagement with mobile apps, services and devices. The authors analyzed the data to identify factors influencing each aspect of the mobile engagement.

The findings suggest that engaging mobile apps should be visually appealing, novel, reliable and enjoyable. Mobile services engage users when they are easily accessible and adaptable to diverse needs. These results emphasize the importance of dissecting mobile technology engagement into app, service and device engagement for a deeper understanding of their impacts.

This study underscores the significance of comprehensively understanding user engagement in mobile technology. By delineating engagement dimensions and their determinants, it offers insights for businesses to optimize strategies in leveraging mobile user behavior. This structured approach enhances theoretical understanding and has practical implications for designing user-centric mobile technology solutions.

The research proposes a customised framework for improving logistics service quality (LSQ) in Tanzania's railway transportation, focusing on customer engagement and integrating customer-desired services.

The survey method obtained data from railway customers regarding the LSQ offered. Both probability and purposive sampling techniques were used to get the sample size. The open- and closed-ended questionnaires gathered the pertinent data. The data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively using the IBM® SPSS® 21.0 and AMOS 21.0 software packages, respectively. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were performed to analyse data and establish relationships between variables.

This study anticipated that the LSQ framework during the period of reviewing literature included three variables for freight transporting customers (tangible components, ways of fulfilment and information actions) and eight variables for passengers (tangible, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, comfort, empathy, connection and convenience). EFA and CFA dropped some factors. The retained factors were used as inputs to develop a framework. The qualitative analysis also established the improvement of customer’s desired services (CDS) and LSQ, which were the framework's processes for improving the LSQ. Ultimately, the study developed the LSQ framework for railway transportation.

The study was conducted on Tanzania’s railways, which incorporated challenges in the Tanzanian context. However, many challenges in the developing countries are relatively the same. Therefore, modifications can be made to adopt the developed framework and be used in other countries to cover the geographical and other challenges in particular countries.

Tanzania’s railway infrastructures are somehow not fully utilised to meet the actual needs of the transportation sector. For example, one of the railway companies has a built capacity of 4 million tonnes carrying capacity per year, but the actual cargo transported by the railway is 200,000 tonnes. This comes from several challenges within the railway companies, including the quality of their services, thus leading to a need to develop a LSQ framework.

The extensive use of mobile money (MM) has been widely recognized as a digital engine of socioeconomic development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper aims to focus on the effects of MM use and stockouts on informal microenterprise performance and investigate whether MM use mitigates the relationship between stockouts and firm performance.

This study utilizes firm-level data from the latest World Bank Informal Sector Enterprise Surveys across six SSA countries. We employ instrumental variable-adjusted and propensity score-weighted regressions to investigate the buffering effect of MM use.

We find a significantly positive effect of MM use and a significantly negative impact of stockouts on informal microenterprise performance. Importantly, we establish that MM use attenuates the negative impact of stockouts on firm performance. We further document that the attenuating effect of MM use is more profound for firms using MM for transactions with supply chain partners, located in communities with high MM use rates, and operating in the retail industry.

Our research generates important managerial and policy implications. Future policies should capitalize on MM to foster an effective financial ecosystem in which informal microenterprises can survive and grow, thereby deepening their contributions to sustainable development.

Whereas the business benefits of MM among small, medium and large firms are well-documented, the role of MM use on informal microenterprise performance is less understood. This study fills the research gap in the literature by focusing on the influence of MM use on the relationships between informal microenterprise operations and performance.

This chapter examines the significant transformations brought about by the incorporation of service robots in the ever-changing retail industry. In the retail industry, advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), co-bots, robotics, and automation, are transforming the experiences of customers and employees in response to the surge in human–robot collaboration (HRC) and worldwide investments in innovative projects. The primary goal of the research is to examine the impact of incorporating service robots on employees’ willingness to work in a retail sector that fosters collaboration between humans and robots while improving the performance. The research highlights the key factors influencing employee perspectives and inclinations for collaborating with service robots in retail environments, as determined by an in-depth review of academic research and industrial insights. The results demonstrate the positive influence of service robots on improving HRC, optimising inventory management, and enhancing overall operational efficiency in the retail sector. The conclusion emphasises the need to adopt a holistic approach to successfully use the potential of service robots, with the aim of establishing a retail ecosystem that is both sustainable and harmonious. The presence of service robots in the retail industry has significant implications, offering a competitive advantage. The research results reveal stakeholders’ perspectives on the crucial role of service robots in driving future development and maintaining long-term benefits. This chapter offers a comprehensive review of innovative technology in the retail marketplace, offering significant insights into the transformative potential of service robots.

This chapter looks at a number of diverse elements that led to the rise of the digital banking industry. In this age of rapid digitisation, today's bank transactions and activities are mostly done on mobile phones or other smart devices instead of going back and forth between a traditional branch lobby. With more and more customers seeking banking services accessible around the clock from the palm of their hand, based on the numerous experiential data digital platforms have accumulated for many years in the field and other places, traditional financial institutions will have no way but to break open their thinking about how to deliver those services to think. Governments and their regulators are beginning to see the potential risks posed by the new digital banking technology and want consumer protection, competition put under even stricter conditions for players as well and system stability all guaranteed. Above all, it is evidence of something people cannot ignore: the sharp upward trend of cybersecurity risk in recent years. The advent of digitalisation eliminated any excuse for storing sensitive financial data without the most modern cyber defences. Then, at a further level, financial tech start-ups come up like crocuses in spring while Bigtech companies all over the globe are jumping into banking. Both cooperation opportunities and competitive challenges await traditional banks. However, bank customers' changing demographics (millennials and GenZ) are the most vivid examples as they age, together with global universal financial inclusion trends, bringing about social and economic challenges.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the trade structure of India’s pharmaceutical sector with a focus on intra-industry trade (IIT).

This paper starts with analysing export destinations and import sources using significant trade shares; the study calculates IIT between India and its consistent trade partners at an aggregate level and considers the problem of categorical aggregation at a disaggregate level. To determine the determinants of IIT at different levels, the Vector Error Correction model used production-related data to identify the drivers of IIT. Also, the Granger causality test was used for short-run causality.

This study examining India’s consistent trade partners from 1993 to 2023, finds long-run association and short-run causality. The results show a significant long-run association between total IIT and factors like unskilled labour share, invested capital, fuel consumption, total input and net value added. The key low-vertical IIT (LVIIT) drivers are invested capital, unskilled labour, fixed capital and total inputs. The negative long-run association between the total input and LVIIT obtained implies a rising level of total input cost, leading to a fall in IIT and LVIIT. Also, a negative association is obtained for unskilled labour and total IIT, while a positive association is obtained for LVIIT. In the short run, causality indicates that total IIT is influenced by invested capital and fuel consumption, while unskilled labour shares and total inputs drive LVIIT. Both IIT types impact invested capital, highlighting the need for policy intervention in input markets. It provides insights for improving quality trade expansion and correcting production-related factors.

Unlike other studies on the pharmaceutical trade in India, this study analyses India’s pharmaceutical trade for a longer time period, focusing on destination-wise analysis and calculating the intra-industry trade index while taking care of the problem of categorical aggregation. Further, the study attempted to find the long-run association with production-related drivers.

In this paper, we explore the role of education in household financial technology (FinTech) adoption.

Using representative nationwide household data from the 2017 China Household Finance Survey, we employ the change in China’s compulsory schooling law in the 1980s as an instrumental variable for educational attainment.

We find that among Chinese households, education has statistically significant and economically important effects on the use of various FinTech services, including digital banking, mobile payment, digital wealth management and digital consumer credit. Further analysis indicates that exogeneous increases in education lead to higher levels of financial literacy and social trust, both of which are potential drivers of FinTech adoption. Our findings provide new insights into the importance of education for household financial decision-making and technology adoption.

The contribution of our study is mainly twofold. First, we provide evidence on the role of education in household financial decision making. Second, this study adds to the literature on household adoption of technological innovation in finance. Our findings are also policy-relevant.

This study was motivated by the lack of the scientific focus to a particularly vulnerable social group in Croatian society – parents with official status of “parent caregivers,” who provide care to their child/children with the most severe disabilities. The aim of the study was to examine the role of caregivers’ cognitive emotion regulation strategies, and external social support in their well-being. As indicators of well-being, we used mental health, life satisfaction, and stress experience in the parental role. The sample was non-probabilistic and consisted of 210 caregivers, mostly mothers, from the Republic of Croatia (N = 204). Caregivers completed an online questionnaire which included set of demographic questions, followed by scales of general mental health, life satisfaction, parental stress, social support, and cognitive emotion regulation strategies. The results point to the protective role of social support for the mental health of parents, life satisfaction, and the experience of stress in the parental role. Among the different cognitive emotion regulation strategies used in the study, positive refocusing had the most protective role for caregivers’ well-being.

To investigate whether individuals more closely associate characteristics of effective leaders with men compared to women and whether those associations advantage men in interactions.

An online survey and a laboratory experiment. The online survey had participants evaluate characteristics they most closely associated with effective leaders, men in general, or women in general. The laboratory experiment assigned participants fictitious partners before they completed an ambiguous task. Partners were men or women, and instructions did or did not describe contrast sensitivity ability as related to leadership ability.

In Study 1, participants evaluated characteristics of men in general more closely to the characteristics of effective leaders than they did the characteristics of women in general. Findings showed this effect to be driven by responses from male participants. In Study 2, the influence gap between male and female partners widened significantly in a direction that advantaged men when study instructions described contrast sensitivity as being positively correlated with leadership ability.

Individuals associate characteristics of effective leadership in ways that advantage men and that those associations advantage men in interactions.

Results indicate that even if differences in competency expectations between women and men were to disappear, women might remain disadvantaged in interactions with implications for leadership.

The paper conclusively demonstrates that participants in the samples associated men more than women with leadership ability/effectiveness and that the associations advantaged men in interactions. These results have broad implications for research in status, gender, and leadership.