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Three types of industrial buyer-seller relational process models are available: joining theory, stage theory, and state theory. However, historically, these models have developed based on the knowledge and cultural context of the Western world. Several researchers note that national culture may have an impact on international industrial buyer-seller relationships. Including culture in the models is highly important, especially as the business environment is increasingly more global and different countries have different business cultures. The goal of this paper is to define the most suitable industrial buyer-seller relational process models for describing relationships in various contexts. The paper includes a through literature review and a single case study in order to reach this objective. A new state theory model evolved during the research. It consists of two beginning states: searching and starting; four purely middles states: constant/static, decline, growth, and troubled; and a purely end state: termination. The state of dormant/inert is both a middle state and an end state, that is, when the relational actors are not in contact does not mean that the relationship has ended, but instead, for example, new legislation may have been implemented, which requires the actors to evaluate their relationship and its future. A relationship goes through the two beginning states in the order mentioned above, but after that, any state may occur.

The purpose is to bring together all bibliographic references of the published literature on electronic books (e‐books) and related technologies in one source so that it will save time for others in conducting literature searches and reviewing the developments.

The information included in this bibliography is collected systematically from all the published sources in the world such as journal articles, conference papers, conference proceedings, books, reports and PhD theses on e‐books until the last quarter of 2004. Mainly it covers e‐books, e‐books publishing, the impact of e‐books on different types of users, e‐book publishing techniques and trends, e‐book user interfaces and other technologies related to e‐publications.

As computer usage continues to grow exponentially, the desire of users to use electronic publications (e‐publications) has also increased tremendously. This has led to the publication of materials in electronic form as e‐publications on both CD‐ROMs and web. The e‐book is one of the several forms of e‐publications and its popularity has been growing steadily for the past decade.

This bibliography will be useful to all researchers conducting research in any areas related to e‐books and e‐book publishing.

Conceptually examines the effect of individualism/collectivism on the tenets of equity theory. It is the view of the authors that the equality principle of reward allocation in collectivistic cultures is not a separate method of distribution, but a subset of the theoretically grounded equity principle appropriately integrating the cross‐cultural individualism/collectivism value. To support this position, the authors reduce equity theory to its fundamental elements and illustrate how in dividualism/collectivism separately affects each component. The derived model and subsequent discussion should provide researchers with a theoretical frame work for future empirical studies.

The industrial buyer-seller relational process models from the Eastern and Western worlds have not been combined. The Western world has dominated the development of the models, while there exist only a very limited amount of guanxi development models from the East. This paper is exploratory in nature, focusing on combining the development of these two worlds into one intercultural model. Four case relationships verify the proposed model.

This paper focuses on only one cultural context outside of the West, that is to say, China. In order to justify the model to be completely an intercultural one, research in other cultural contexts is necessary.

This study is an extension of an etic‐emic analysis of the individualism‐collectivism construct at the sociopsychological level to an organizational context. At the first level of comparison, strong and weak etics were extracted to permit comparability of values. At the second level, emic elements were produced to provide a basis of intercultural comparisons. Purely individualistic, purely collectivist and multidimensional factors emerged for the ten nations under consideration.

Accurate prediction of order demand across omni-channel supply chains improves the management's decision-making ability at strategic, tactical and operational levels. The paper aims to develop a predictive methodology for forecasting near-real-time e-commerce order arrivals in distribution centres, allowing third-party logistics service providers to manage the hour-to-hour fast-changing arrival rates of e-commerce orders better.

The paper proposes a novel machine learning predictive methodology through the integration of the time series data characteristics into the development of an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system. A four-stage implementation framework is developed for enabling practitioners to apply the proposed model.

A structured model evaluation framework is constructed for cross-validation of model performance. With the aid of an illustrative case study, forecasting evaluation reveals a high level of accuracy of the proposed machine learning approach in forecasting the arrivals of real e-commerce orders in three different retailers at three-hour intervals.

Results from the case study suggest that real-time prediction of individual retailer's e-order arrival is crucial in order to maximize the value of e-order arrival prediction for daily operational decision-making.

Earlier researchers examined supply chain demand, forecasting problem in a broader scope, particularly in dealing with the bullwhip effect. Prediction of real-time, hourly based order arrivals has been lacking. The paper fills this research gap by presenting a novel data-driven predictive methodology.

A comparison of distributive justice strategies was made between a collectivistic culture, i.e., Mexico, and an individualistic culture, i.e., the United States. This study is the first to include the effect of ingroup/outgroup on the distribution strategies as Fischer and Smith (2003) called for in their extensive meta‐analysis of the topic. Distributive justice was operationalized as the monetary rewards given by Northern Mexicans and Americans in sixteen different allocation vignettes. The results showed that the two groups were significantly different in only one of the allocation vignettes. These results indicate a convergence between the cultures of the northern maquiladora region of Mexico and of the United States. Northern Mexicans and Americans were not significantly different in their distributive justice strategies.

This paper aims to introduce a novel structure for the physical internet (PI)–enabled sustainable supplier selection and inventory management problem under uncertain environments.

To address hybrid uncertainty both in the objective function and constraints, a novel interactive hybrid multi-objective optimization solution approach combining Me-based fuzzy possibilistic programming and interval programming approaches is tailored.

Various numerical experiments are introduced to validate the feasibility of the established model and the proposed solution method.

Due to its interconnectedness, the PI has the opportunity to support firms in addressing sustainability challenges and reducing initial impact. The sustainable supplier selection and inventory management have become critical operational challenges in PI-enabled supply chain problems. This is the first attempt on this issue, which uses the presented novel interactive possibilistic programming method.

The first Hong Kong Real Estate Investment Trust (HK‐REIT), the Link REIT, was successfully launched in late 2005. The retail tranche of its initial public offering (IPO) was 19 times oversubscribed, and the IPO is the largest of its kind in the world until now. Despite the initial phenomenon success, there have been only three others to follow and get listed. Indeed, it took Hong Kong over two years to have her first Link REIT listed after the legislation for REIT products had come into force. The development of REIT market in Hong Kong has been slow compared to its counterparts in some other Asian countries. This paper aims to explain the somewhat sluggish growth of the HK‐REIT market. Its development is compared with some emerging Asian markets as well as the more mature markets in the USA and Australia. The study is focused on the legislations that govern REITs in different jurisdictions, their different REIT market envi‐ronments and the rationale from the respective governments to introduce their REITs. It is concluded that the sluggish development of HK‐REITs is mainly due to its market environment and industry structure. There is not enough incentive for developers to dispose their assets in the form of REITs. Besides, the HK‐REIT Code was initially criticized by the industry as being too restrictive. Though subsequent amendments on the HK‐REIT Code have been made to make it more conducive to the development of REIT market, further sustainable success will however hinge on the willingness from sponsors, particularly large developers, to offer their portfolios of properties for sale through REITs.