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The authors aim to examine how macro, meso and micro territorial boundaries influence the loan repayment performance of female clients of mega microfinance institutions (MFIs) operating in a polarized Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

The study uses panel data (random effect analysis) comprising seven years and 407 MFIs of LAC.

The repayment performance of MFIs' female clients in LAC is meso and micro territorially bounded. It is positively influenced by the urbanization and gender inequality levels of the LAC countries, and by the number of loans per MFI loan officer.

Data concerning the risk of the businesses women invested in, or data related to women's access to credit, were not included; high heterogeneity in large countries must be taken into account. The authors' findings expand the understanding of territorial boundary conditions concerning female clients' repayment performance and extend the prior literature on the subject.

The authors' findings suggest that the MFIs operating in LAC should increase their number of loan officers. The MFIs of the Mexico-led cluster may also seek a better balance between female and male clients, since hiring more loan officers may be impracticable for them.

The authors empirically challenge the widely accepted assumption that female clients are always the best choice for MFIs. They also unfold territorial boundaries conditioning these clients' performance.

The purpose of this article is to offer new insights into crisis communication in service ecosystems. The authors present a framework to conceptually categorize service crises and then analyze key aspects of crisis communication among different stakeholders in a service ecosystem.

Building on crisis communication and service ecosystems research, we propose a framework to better understand crisis communication during service crises in service ecosystems. In doing so, we propose a typology of service crisis in service ecosystems and identify the main factors of crisis communication under the lens of the Rhetorical Arena Theory (RAT).

This article integrates communication theory and service research in the area and identifies different key dimensions to gain a deeper understanding of crisis communication in service ecosystems. Moreover, and building on RAT, several research lines are recommended in order to explore further macro (i.e. the role and interactions between different stakeholders in the event of a crisis) and micro (i.e. individual aspects related to the context, media, genre and text) dimensions, and their importance during the communication process.

Our framework offers a typology of service crises and suggests the importance of considering a multi-actor, multi-channel perspective in communication when a crisis occurs in order to monitor and avoid the potential negative impact for both the organization's recovery and the service ecosystem evolution afterward.

The study presented in this article aims to examine the impact of the leveraging of three distinct ambush marketing strategies that are under-researched in the literature: Promotion, Event, and Broadcast.

An experiment was conducted where the type of ambush strategy was manipulated (i.e. Promotion, Event, Broadcast, no ambush) as well as the market dominance of the sponsor (i.e. dominant or non-dominant) and the congruence level between the event and the sponsor (i.e. high or low congruence).

Ambush strategies' impacts differ widely. The Broadcast strategy is the most harmful to the identification of the actual sponsor; the Event strategy favors the identification of the pseudo-sponsor as the sponsor, while the Promotion strategy is both harmful to the actual sponsor and beneficial for the pseudo-sponsor. Furthermore, although dominant brands benefit more from their sponsorships, they are more affected by an ambush than non-dominant brands.

Only one sponsor and one pseudo-sponsor were considered at a time. In addition, digital media were not investigated as vectors of ambush marketing. Further research where multiple sponsors and pseudo-sponsors are leveraging their associations to an event, using both off and on-line media, needs to be undertaken.

Against the Promotion strategy sponsors need to create not only strong but also unique associations with the event. The Event strategy can be circumvented with preemptive smaller scale events. Exclusive access to the program broadcast for event sponsors can protect against pseudo-sponsors.

This study is the first to provide empirical evidence regarding the impact of the Promotion, Event, and Broadcast strategies. Previous studies had focused almost exclusively on another strategy: the airing of commercials by pseudo-sponsors during event broadcast against which most sponsors are now effectively protected.