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The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of video game and surgical experience on the ability to adapt to and use the neuroArm virtual reality (VR) simulator.

A total of 48 participants, comprising video gamers, medical students, surgical residents, and qualified surgeons, were recruited. Subjects played three video games and completed a questionnaire. Three pre‐determined tasks simulating surgical procedures were performed using the simulator. Performance was measured by time for task completion, number of errors, and quality of outcome.

Gamers outperformed other groups on all measures of performance at almost every task on the VR simulator. All groups showed interval improvement in performance. As age of participants increased, irrespective of their sex and group, their quality of performance decreased and time to complete tasks increased. Initially, the men outperformed the women at every task, however, the difference decreased with repetition.

More participants are needed to increase statistical significance of the results, in particular female participants.

This study showed that gamers adapted rapidly to the neuroArm trainer, which could be attributed to enhanced visual attention and spatial distribution skills from video game play. Therefore, visuospatial skills may become strong elements in the selection criterion for future generations of surgical trainees.

This study evaluated performance on the neuroArm trainer for the first time. The results provide insight into the design of a training program that helps select and prepare future surgeons for robotic surgery.

Extant research on comparative advertising has focused only on “market leader” comparisons (a brand targeting the market leader), whereas in the marketplace, “multi-brand” comparisons are more prevalent (Kalro et al., 2010). Moreover, most research focuses on direct comparisons only. Hence, this research aims to investigate the interplay between comparison ad strategy (“market leader”/“multi-brand” comparisons) and comparison ad format (direct/indirect comparisons) on the effectiveness of comparative advertising.

This paper uses four 2 × 2 fully crossed factorial designs (comparison ad format: direct vs indirect and comparison ad strategy: market leader vs multi brand) with established and new brands in two categories: powdered detergents and smart phones. All studies were conducted in metropolitan cities of India.

By and large, the experiments indicated that direct (indirect) comparisons lowered (heightened) perceived manipulative intent and enhanced (reduced) attitude-toward-the-ad for multi-brand (market leader) comparisons.

Findings suggest that when advertisers use comparative advertising, they may use direct ads when using multi-brand comparisons and use indirect ones when using market leader comparisons. It could also be argued that when advertisers use multi-brand comparisons because of fragmentation in the marketplace, they may directly compare against these multiple brands. When advertisers need to compare against a market leader, they may do so indirectly.

This research is among the first to investigate multi-brand comparisons that are widely used in the industry and that too in the context of both direct and indirect comparison formats.

Strategic transformations are likely necessary for all organizations at some point in their existence, but the role of external stakeholders in committing resources to support transformations has been largely overlooked. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap by developing a theoretical model detailing which factors increase the likelihood that financial stakeholders will commit resources to strategic transformation.

Neo-institutional and stakeholder theories are applied to the strategic transformation phenomenon to develop six propositions regarding financial stakeholders’ resource commitment to strategic transformation.

Moral legitimacy, pragmatic legitimacy and unfamiliarity with the firm directly affect the likelihood that financial stakeholders will commit resources to strategic transformation. Cognitive legitimacy or familiarity amplifies the positive effect of pragmatic legitimacy on resource commitment, and pragmatic legitimacy lessens the negative effect of unfamiliarity with the firm on resource commitment.

This paper lays out a clear conceptual model of the antecedents of financial stakeholders’ resource commitment to strategic transformation, aiding practitioners in securing critical stakeholder support and filling an important gap in strategic transformation/stakeholder literature.

Business incubators are advantageous to new venture legitimacy because they provide rich access to entrepreneurial resources, and their incubation networks can offer endorsement to incubatees. However, empirical evidence on this topic is limited, and the existing literature relies predominantly on the Western context. Given that not all developing country incubators have resourceful and reputable external entrepreneurial networks as in the industrialized countries, and that new ventures need to build legitimacy along cognitive and socio-political dimensions that require different actions to influence different stakeholders, this study investigates empirically how business incubators facilitate their incubatees to build legitimacy in a context where resource and reputation conditions are weak. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how business incubators perform legitimacy-building roles effectively.

A multiple case study of business incubators in Chongqing, a second-tier Chinese city, is presented. Using grounded theory, this paper draws its findings from a synthesis of interviews and secondary data of seven incubators and their ten incubatees.

The legitimacy-building role of business incubators is performed well in this research context. Evidence is presented that incubators play different roles in building different dimensions of incubatees’ legitimacy. Government-associated incubators play a salient role in building incubatees’ socio-political legitimacy whilst non-government related incubators shape their incubatees’ cognitive legitimacy.

This study contributes to the business incubators literature by revealing how incubators perform the legitimacy-building role when their resource endorsement is weak. The results suggest that incubators need to strengthen their ties with external stakeholders and that new ventures need to take key stakeholders into consideration when they select incubators to enter.

In an attempt to satisfy the desire to become a global economic leader, China is working on a series of ambitious deals with several countries. As a major country in a region considered as an emerging market, the immense infrastructure gap that is curtailing trade and accessibility for economic growth has led to major changes in economic policy. The past few decades have seen China invest billions of dollars not only in the developing countries of Africa and Asia but also in other world economic giants of Europe and the USA. China has embarked on a rigorous global effort to close the infrastructure gap through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in partnership with multilateral development banks. China’s BRI brings together several countries in East Asia and the Eurasian mainland into close proximity with China, thereby promoting inland trade between the countries. The investments in this project are estimated to reach US$1tn over a span of ten years. However, the volume of outward foreign direct investments (OFDI) from China to the host countries is determined by several factors. Several previous researchers have studied various issues affecting the business activities of China and the given countries. First, the cultural organization, policy approaches and objectives of China as a country create trade barriers with countries involved in the BRI plan. This paper aims to provide a comparative overview of how the institutional distance of the Belt and Road countries from China affects their sustainable development.

Data on the nature, success and challenges of the BRI (such as the volume of bilateral trade and OFDIs and its financial implications) were extracted from various published studies. The impact of cultural distance and internationalization of the BRI enterprise was analyzed through a comparative research methodology.

A significant relationship exists between institutional distance and sustainable development of the Belt and Road countries. However, the barriers – for example, inhospitable culture and regulations for organizations in participating countries – could become pillars of success once resolved.

Previous studies lacked a standard framework to investigate how institutional distance is related to China’s outbound trade with the Belt and Road countries. The comparative analysis methodology adopted in this study fills this gap.

This study aims to examine the effects of employee voice (EV) and team-member exchange (TMX) on employee job satisfaction (EJS) and affective commitment to an organization among Gen Y employees of hotel companies in the USA and China.

Using a Qualtrics panel, a self-administered online survey was completed by Gen Y hotel employees in the USA and China. Multiple-group structural equation modeling analysis examined relative moderating effects on the proposed framework.

The effect of EV on EJS was greater in China than in the USA. However, Gen Y hotel employees in the USA who experience high-quality TMX are more likely to have greater EJS than they would in China.

Further studies need to be carried out in other hospitality sectors or non-hospitality business areas with different cross-national contexts.

Chinese hotel managers need to develop effective ways to encourage Gen Y EV. To promote TMX of Gen Y employees in the USA, supporting team-oriented projects and/or evaluations can be an effective way.

This study advances previous cross-cultural studies by focusing on a generation subculture. It makes significant contributions to the hospitality literature, as it is the first among research studies that examines Gen Y employees’ extra-role behavior (EV) and TMX across different national cultures: the USA vs China.

Why employees stay or leave their organization in Republic of Korea (South Korea) can be better understood by taking into account the idiosyncratic institutional and cultural contexts. In this chapter, we aim to provide a comprehensive review of employee turnover research in South Korea and discuss its implications for research. Specifically, we explain how employee turnover decisions may be affected by the characteristics of South Korean labor market (duality, polarization, and intergenerational issues) and cultural environments (collectivism, high power distance, and high-performance orientation). The review shows that organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and on-the-job embeddedness are three key mechanisms explaining employee turnover in South Korea. Building upon the review, we conclude the review by suggesting future research directions: (a) examining turnover behavior as a key outcome, (b) developing a theoretical framework for social identity and embeddedness, and (c) understanding intergenerational issues.

Weak separability is an important concept in many fields of economic theory. This chapter uses Monte Carlo experiments to investigate the performance of newly developed nonparametric revealed preference tests for weak separability. A main finding is that the bias of the sequentially implemented test for weak separability proposed by Fleissig and Whitney (2003) is low. The theoretically unbiased Swofford and Whitney test (1994) is found to perform better than all sequentially implemented test procedures but is found to suffer from an empirical bias, most likely because of the complexity in executing the test procedure. As a further source of information, we also perform sensitivity analyses on the nonparametric revealed preference tests. It is found that the Fleissig and Whitney test seems to be sensitive to measurement errors in the data.

The paper provides an overview of research published in the innovation and operations management (IOM) literature on 15 methods for cost management in new product development, and it provides a comparison to an earlier review of the management accounting (MA) literature (Wouters & Morales, 2014).

This structured literature search covers papers published in 23 journals in IOM in the period 1990–2014.

The search yielded a sample of 208 unique papers with 275 results (one paper could refer to multiple cost management methods). The top 3 methods are modular design, component commonality, and product platforms, with 115 results (42%) together. In the MA literature, these three methods accounted for 29%, but target costing was the most researched cost management method by far (26%). Simulation is the most frequently used research method in the IOM literature, whereas this was averagely used in the MA literature; qualitative studies were the most frequently used research method in the MA literature, whereas this was averagely used in the IOM literature. We found a lot of papers presenting practical approaches or decision models as a further development of a particular cost management method, which is a clear difference from the MA literature.

This review focused on the same cost management methods, and future research could also consider other cost management methods which are likely to be more important in the IOM literature compared to the MA literature. Future research could also investigate innovative cost management practices in more detail through longitudinal case studies.

This review of research on methods for cost management published outside the MA literature provides an overview for MA researchers. It highlights key differences between both literatures in their research of the same cost management methods.