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There is ample evidence supporting the generalizability of the stimuli-organism-response framework in the retail field, with limited extensions to digital signage inside malls. This article postulates that favourable perceptions of the mall environment result in stronger approach behaviours than positive experienced emotions. This varying indirect effect is predicated to be moderated by shoppers' enjoyment of hedonic digital signage content.

This study was conducted at two upmarket super-regional malls in South Africa with a wide variety of contemporary digital signage displaying hedonic content. Purposive quota sampling was used to intercept and survey 400 regular shoppers viewing dynamic hedonic digital signage content. Data was collected via an interviewer-administered structured questionnaire. Hayes macro conditional process analysis was used to determine the moderating role of hedonic content enjoyment and to estimate regression coefficients of the proposed model.

It was found that favourable perceptions of the mall environment is strongly associated with approach behaviours relative to the indirect effect of positive experienced emotions. When shoppers' enjoyment of hedonic content is factored in the model, low enjoyment of hedonic content shows an insignificant effect of digital signage on approach behaviours. However, for high enjoyment of hedonic content, this relationship is positive and significant.

Digital signage was only studied as a design cue and the promising role as social cue or ambient factor were thus not take into account. It also applied a cross-sectional survey rather than an experiment and has modelled the effects of digital signage as a part of retail atmospherics rather than its presence or absence in malls. The results were generated based on a survey with shoppers from two upmarket super-regional malls in South Africa while viewing digital signage displaying hedonic content. Findings might differ for utilitarian content and other settings.

Practical recommendations on how shopping mall management could utilise digital signage to possibly increase approach behaviours are provided.

There is very limited research on the effects of digital signage on shoppers in the mall environment. This study is one of the first to consider enjoyment of digital signage content inside malls as moderating variable. Additionally, this study contributed to this growing field of shopper-oriented technologies in methodological and pragmatic manners.

This article analyses the effect of bank concentration on women's political empowerment in 80 developing countries over the period 2004–2020.

Banking concentration (BC) is measured by the assets held by the three largest commercial banks as a percentage of total commercial bank assets in a country. We use several indices to measure political empowerment, namely: the political empowerment index, composed of three indices (i.e. the women's civil liberties index, the women's participation in civil society index and the women's political participation index). The empirical evidence is based on the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Fixed Effects (FE) techniques.

The following findings are established. Banking concentration reduces women's political empowerment. Furthermore, information sharing offices (i.e. public credit registries and private credit bureaus) mitigate the negative effect of bank concentration on women’s political empowerment. Information sharing thresholds that are needed to completely dampen the negative effect of bank concentration on women’s political empowerment are provided. Policy implications are discussed, notably: (1) that governments in developing countries increase competition by easing barriers to entry for potential banks, to facilitate the transition from confiscatory concentration to distributive concentration favorable to all stakeholders; and (2) information sharing offices should be consolidated beyond the established thresholds in order to completely crowd-out the unfavorable effect of bank concentration of women’s political empowerment.

The paper provides new empirical evidence that helps to advance the debate on the effects of banking concentration and information sharing in the banking sector on women's political empowerment in developing countries.

There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to individual health and very little evidence comes from less-developed economies. We use individual and multi-level data from Zambia on child nutritional health to test three hypotheses consistent with a negative correlation between income inequality and population health: the absolute income hypothesis (AIH), the relative income hypothesis (RIH) and the income inequality hypothesis (IIH). The results confirm that absolute income positively affects health. For the RIH we find sensitivity to the reference group used. Most interestingly, we find higher income inequality to robustly associate with better child health. The same pattern appears in a cross country regression. To explain the conflicting results in the literature we suggest examining potential mediators such as generosity, food sharing, trust and purchasing power.

Scholars have repeatedly concluded that heritage is a significant value driver for luxury brands (Riley et al., 2004; Fionda and Moore, 2009; Wuestefeld et al., 2012; DeFanti et al., 2014; Ardelet et al., 2015; Dion and Borraz, 2015; Dion and Mazzalovo, 2016). However, little is known on how consumers of different age group make sense of heritage luxury. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how consumers of different age groups make sense of heritage luxury brands (HLBs).

To achieve this, semi-structured, one-on-one, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 21 consumers of HLBs who fell into one of three age groups: Emerging adults (18 to 25 years), middle-aged adults (33 to 40 years) and older adults (67 to 74 years old).

The findings of this paper explored the different perceptions of the dimension of heritage in relation to luxury among consumers of different age groups. This paper focuses on the pioneering contributions of Urde, Greyser and Balmer (2007) in defining the dimensions of heritage brands. Although the dimensions of heritage brands defined by Urde et al. (2007) were useful as a starting point, differing perceptions among consumers of different age groups emerged which need to be considered. Findings of this study showed that consumers of all three age groups revealed three characteristics of HLBs. These are timelessness, quality craftsmanship and prestige. The durability and lasting appeal of HLBs was attributed to their high-quality craftsmanship. Quality craftsmanship, recognizability and price contributed to the perceived prestige value of HLBs. It was apparent throughout this study that HLB items helped participants feel connected to others, including their mothers or more remote forebears, their contemporaries and their descendants.

The author aims to understand the interplay between heritage and luxury, to understand how luxury brand consumers of different age groups are influenced by the heritage dimension. The relation between luxury and heritage becomes particularly intriguing when we consider how it affects the perceptions of consumers of different age groups.

This paper aims to design and evaluate an innovative community-based service for adults with autism in a rural region of Northern Ireland. The goal was to reduce their social isolation through gaining social skills and building social networks.

Over three years, 54 persons with a median age of 21 years received 12 months of one-to-one, personalised support and opportunities to participate in peer groups and social activities which are detailed in the paper. Quantitative and qualitative information about the impact of the service was obtained from its users, their relatives, as well as service personnel.

Service users rated themselves to have changed in more ways than did their relatives and staff although there was a consensus that the changes were most marked in terms of spending more time out of the house, engaging in more community activities, being more independent and increased confidence. The main benefits they perceived from participation in the project were socialising, new experiences and learning new things.

As with many service projects, a longer term follow-up of service users was not possible due to resource constraints.

The service could be replicated with suitable staff although current constraints on social care budgets have limited its expansion to more users and extension to other areas in Northern Ireland.

Reducing the social isolation of adult persons with autism spectrum disorders needs to be personalised to the person, their living circumstances and the community in which they live. Family carers also stand to gain from community support services.

This low level, low cost service was implemented in a predominantly rural area with a majority of users from socially deprived areas.

Expert systems are computer-based systems that mimic the logical processes of human experts or organizations to give advice in a specific domain of knowledge. Fuzzy expert systems use fuzzy logic to handle uncertainties generated by imprecise, incomplete and/or vague information. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the methods and applications in fuzzy expert systems.

The authors have carefully reviewed 281 journal publications and 149 conference proceedings published over the past 37 years since 1982. The authors grouped the journal publications and conference proceedings separately accordingly to the methods, application domains, tools and inference systems.

The authors have synthesized the findings and proposed useful suggestions for future research directions. The authors show that the most common use of fuzzy expert systems is in the medical field.

Fuzzy logic can be used to manage uncertainty in expert systems and solve problems that cannot be solved effectively with conventional methods. In this study, the authors present a comprehensive review of the methods and applications in fuzzy expert systems which could be useful for practicing managers developing expert systems under uncertainty.