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From virtual vision to business reality: embracing the metaverse revolution
No full textAbstract
This paper investigates the emerging potential of metaverse technology and the diverse opportunities it presents for companies across industries. Although the metaverse remains in its nascent stages, its swift evolution has introduced a broad spectrum of use cases that hold significant promise for businesses. However, despite the evident potential, there remains a limited understanding of how metaverse technology can be effectively applied to benefit business operations and strategy. To address this gap, this study employs a scoping review methodology, systematically collecting and analyzing data from academic literature, publicly available sources, and company websites. The comprehensive review identified 101 distinct use cases of metaverse technology, which were subsequently categorized into three primary application fields: developing new product and service offerings, enhancing customer experience, and optimizing internal business processes. These findings not only provide a compelling rationale for companies contemplating the adoption of metaverse technology but also represent the first extensive exploration of its applications across diverse fields and industries. The study offers valuable insights that are crucial for both academic researchers and business practitioners who are keen to understand and leverage the transformative potential of the metaverse. By mapping out the current landscape of metaverse applications, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how companies can harness this technology to drive innovation, improve operational efficiency, and create new value propositions in an increasingly immersive and interconnected world.M1;M10;M19;M2
Handlungsempfehlungen für die Einbindung von Menschen mit geistiger Beeinträchtigung in Softwareengineering-Projekte
No full textZusammenfassung
Die digitale Transformation durchdringt nahezu alle Lebensbereiche. Digitale Teilhabe ist damit zur Voraussetzung umfassender sozialer Teilhabe geworden. Menschen mit geistiger Beeinträchtigung haben aufgrund ihrer kognitiven Limitationen Schwierigkeiten, die zur Nutzung vieler digitaler Angebote notwendigen digitalen Fähigkeiten zu erwerben. Daher sind diese besonders von Exklusion bedroht. Obwohl das Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz ab 2025 barrierefreie digitale Angebote vorschreibt und einzelne erfolgreiche Lösungen bereits existieren, bleibt die Verbreitung inklusiver Systeme gering. Eine zentrale Ursache hierfür ist die seltene, aber dringend notwendige systematische Einbindung von Menschen mit geistigen Beeinträchtigungen in Softwareengineering-Projekte. Vielen Projektteams fehlt das hierfür notwendige methodische Handwerkszeug. Der Beitrag schließt diese Lücke, indem für die drei besonders geeigneten qualitativen Methoden Einzelinterviews, Fokusgruppen und Shadowing-Studien praxistaugliche Handlungsempfehlungen für eine partizipative, nutzerzentrierte Entwicklung von inklusiven digitalen Services vorgestellt werden. Diese basieren auf bestehenden Erkenntnissen aus der Literatur, die umfassend um eigene Erfahrungen aus drei Projekten mit der Zielgruppe angereichert wurden. Die resultierenden Empfehlungen sollen Barrieren in der Projektpraxis abbauen, die Entwicklung inklusiver digitaler Lösungen fördern und damit einen Beitrag zur digitalen – und in der Folge auch sozialen – Teilhabe von Menschen mit geistiger Beeinträchtigung leisten. @Digital transformation shapes almost every sphere of life. Consequently, digital inclusion has become a prerequisite for full social participation. Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, however, often struggle to acquire the digital skills required to use many digital services and are therefore at particular risk of exclusion. Although the German Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz will mandate barrier-free digital offerings from 2025 and few successful prototypes already exist, the diffusion of inclusive systems remains scarce. A key obstacle is the still rare—but crucial—systematic involvement of users with intellectual and developmental disabilities in software engineering projects. Many development teams lack suitable but necessary methodological guidance. This article addresses the gap by providing practical guidelines for participatory, user-centered design of inclusive digital services based on three especially suitable qualitative methods: individual interviews, focus groups and shadowing studies. The guidelines combine insights from the existing literature with learnings from three own projects. They aim to reduce practical hurdles, promote inclusive solutions and, ultimately, strengthen both digital and social participation for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities
Consumers' Willingness to Pay for Sustainable Mobile Phones: An Adaptive Choice‐Based Conjoint and Market Simulation Approach Testing a Multi‐Level Eco‐Score
Full text linkABSTRACT
This study investigates the impact of a multi‐level eco‐score on willingness to pay for sustainable mobile phones. Using adaptive choice‐based conjoint analysis and market simulation, the study evaluates the effectiveness of a traffic light‐colored multi‐level eco‐score in a realistic market scenario. Results reveal that higher eco‐score levels significantly enhance consumer preferences and willingness to pay for sustainable mobile phones, with top‐tier eco‐scores (“A” and “B”) being notably preferred. The study highlights that improvements in eco‐score levels lead to a stronger increase in consumer preference shares compared to other product attributes. Additionally, consumers exhibit a progressively higher willingness to pay for mobile phones with superior eco‐score levels, indicating potential financial benefits for manufacturers investing in higher environmental performance. This study makes an important contribution by addressing the under‐researched area of multi‐level eco‐labelling in consumer electronics and demonstrating the practical relevance of multi‐level labels in influencing market dynamics and driving sustainable consumer behavior
Tax system characteristics and country-level differences in earnings management
No full textAbstract
We examine the extent to which European listed firms use deferred tax accounting to manage their GAAP earnings in order to meet financial analysts’ earnings forecasts. The cross-country nature of our data allows us to compare the use of this earnings management channel across countries and to relate these differences to certain country characteristics, in particular country-specific features of the tax system. Our results clearly document that European listed firms use deferred tax assets to inflate earnings when pre-manipulated earnings fall below the average analyst forecast. On average, they increase their return on assets by 0.2 percentage points (or 3 percent) through this channel. Our results also show a large variation in this effect across countries. Firms that face larger deviations between tax and financial accounting, higher tax rates, a stricter tax enforcement and a more lenient tax loss offset may, to some extent, make greater use of this earnings management channel.H25;M4
The Potential of the Sociology of Emotions and Affect Studies for Understanding Ageing Processes
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In everyday life as well as in scientific discourses, ageing as a social process is often associated with the highly affective term of loss—e.g. of autonomy, choice, self-efficacy, social networks, or physical losses—and, therefore, age and ageing are commonly linked to emotions and affects such as grief or anger. Even though loss in older age might be an emotional experience, sociological theories of ageing rarely consider emotional and affective dimensions of ageing processes in their theoretical and conceptual thinking. We propose to link ageing with the theoretical concepts of emotional capitalism and emodities (Illouz 2007 , 2017 ) as an example for the sociology of emotions, and resonance (Rosa 2019 ) as an example of affect studies. By applying these theoretical lenses to the field of ageing research, we aim to get a deeper understanding of how ageing and the losses associated with it appear through the lenses of the sociology of emotions and affect studies. Additionally, we link those perspectives to gerontological approaches and highlight how they might be enriched by including concepts that explicitly deal with emotions and affect. Through this reflexive exploration, we seek to renegotiate how the understanding of ageing in the social sciences is characterised by preconceptions about the associated emotional and affective processes, and we highlight the potential of theoretically sensitising existing gerontological perspectives with insights from the sociology of emotions and affect studies. @Alter(n) als sozialer Prozess wird sowohl in der Alltagskommunikation als auch in wissenschaftlichen Diskursen häufig mit dem affektiven Begriff des Verlustes – beispielsweise von Autonomie, Wahlmöglichkeiten, Selbstwirksamkeit, sozialen Netzwerken oder körperlichen Fähigkeiten – assoziiert. Alter und Altern werden daher häufig mit Emotionen und Affekten wie Trauer oder Wut in Verbindung gebracht. Doch wenngleich die mit Altern assoziierten Verluste emotionale Erfahrungen darstellen können, berücksichtigen soziologische Alternstheorien nur selten emotionale und affektive Dimensionen von Alterungsprozessen. Vor diesem Hintergrund verbinden wir theoretische und konzeptuelle Überlegungen zu Alternsprozessen exemplarisch mit den Konzepten des emotionalen Kapitalismus und der Emodities (Illouz 2007 , 2017 ) als Beispiel für die Emotionssoziologie sowie der Resonanztheorie (Rosa 2019 ) als Beispiel für Affect Studies. Indem wir diese theoretischen Perspektiven auf das Feld der Alternsforschung anwenden, möchten wir ein fundierteres Verständnis dazu herausarbeiten, wie Altern und die damit verbundenen Verluste in Rückgriff auf die Emotionssoziologie und die Affect Studies definiert werden können. Darüber hinaus integrieren wir diese Perspektiven mit gerontologischen Ansätzen und zeigen auf, wie diese von der Verknüpfung mit Konzepten, die explizit Emotionen und Affekte theoretisieren, profitieren könnten. Durch diese reflexive Annäherung zeigen wir auf, wie das Verständnis des Alter(n)s in der Soziologie durch implizite Annahmen über die damit verbundenen emotionalen und affektiven Prozesse geprägt ist. Weiterhin weisen wir auf das Potenzial einer theoretischen Sensibilisierung bestehender gerontologischer Perspektiven mit Konzepten aus der Emotionssoziologie und der Affect Studies hin
Ethical Issues in International Business Research
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This article examines the ethical challenges in international business research, emphasizing how cultural diversity and socio-economic disparities intensify the risk of questionable and unethical practices. Various unethical practices are identified across stages of the research process, including conceptualization biases, data manipulation, and publication misconduct. Specific issues such as ethnocentric bias, idea theft, selective measurement, p-hacking, plagiarism, and coercive citation are critically discussed. Four approaches to enhance ethical research are proposed: researcher ethics, institutional ethics, professional ethics, and publication ethics. Intercultural sensitivity, transparency, and adherence to ethical guidelines are essential for the credibility and integrity of international business research
Semantic 3D product modelling for automated inspection in remanufacturing processes
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Remanufacturing is a key process for enabling a circular economy by restoring used products, often referred to as cores, to a like-new condition. It still heavily relies on manual work. One exemplary manual task is the visual inspection of cores before further processing. This manual effort arises from uncertainties, such as varying product conditions, a broad variety of product variants, and the lack of product information to support automation. To address these challenges and to enable the automation of visual inspection tasks, flexible and adaptive inspection systems are required. These systems must be capable of automatically detecting defects and performing product-specific inspections across a wide range of product variants. Therefore, this work introduces a semantic 3D product modelling method that integrates two-dimensional (images) and three-dimensional (point cloud) data. With the resulting semantic 3D model, the semantic information, such as detected defects and components requiring closer inspection, can be encoded on a geometric product model. This model provides the information basis for an adaptive inspection approach. Using semantic (U-Net) and instance segmentation approaches (Mask-RCNN), the proposed method assigns each surface point of the 3D model to a specific component, thereby creating the semantic 3D product model during the inspection process. The results show that the method presented can achieve semantic 3D modelling both in accuracy and model completeness, encoding component information on the geometric product model. Furthermore, we show that the U-Net architecture used to detect components is also able to detect corrosion as one exemplary defect type, enabling the encoding of various semantic information into the semantic 3D product model. This semantic 3D product model then enables targeted individual inspection of these semantically mapped components and defects on the product model in a later stage of an automated inspection procedure
Gestaltung resilienter Verkehrssysteme: Funktionale Musteranalyse von Mensch–Automation-Interaktionen im Mischverkehr
No full textZusammenfassung
Jüngste Fortschritte in der Fahrzeugautomatisierung versprechen mehr Sicherheit und Effizienz. Gleichzeitig macht die sogenannte „Freigabefalle“ bestehende Lücken im Sicherheitsnachweis für hochautomatisiertes Fahren deutlich. Umso dringlicher sind neue Ansätze zur Erprobung und Risikobewertung, insbesondere im gemischten Verkehr. In diesem Kapitel wird die Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) auf ein Überholszenario auf einer Landstraße angewandt, um die Interaktionen zwischen menschlichen Fahrern und automatisierten Fahrzeugen zu untersuchen. Durch die Identifikation von Mustern, die zu Unfällen führen oder diese verhindern, soll die Systemstabilität verbessert werden. Zudem werden methodische Weiterentwicklungen von FRAM vorgestellt, darunter neue Kennzahlen zur Erfassung von Komplexität und Interaktion, die für ein praxisorientiertes Fachpublikum aufbereitet sind. Praktische Relevanz : Die Ergebnisse bieten konkrete Ansatzpunkte für die Gestaltung sicherer Mensch–Automation-Interaktionen im Straßenverkehr. Durch die Identifikation wiederkehrender Muster, die sowohl Risiken als auch Resilienzfaktoren abbilden, lassen sich gezielt Hebelpunkte für technische Unterstützung und Funktionsallokation zwischen Fahrer und Automation bestimmen. Damit können Entwickler frühzeitig einschätzen, welche Automatisierungsfunktionen sinnvoll sind und wo der Mensch unverzichtbar bleibt. Für Praktiker in Industrie und Regulierung eröffnet dies die Möglichkeit, komplexe Verkehrsdynamiken systemisch zu bewerten und Sicherheitsnachweise jenseits rein empirischer Testkilometer fundierter zu gestalten. @Recent advances in vehicle automation promise greater safety and efficiency. At the same time, the so-called “approval trap” highlights existing gaps in the safety evidence for highly automated driving. This makes new approaches to testing and risk assessment all the more urgent, especially in mixed traffic. In this chapter, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) is applied to an overtaking scenario on a rural road to examine the interactions between human drivers and automated vehicles. By identifying patterns that lead to or prevent accidents, system stability can be improved. In addition, methodological advancements of FRAM are presented, including new metrics for capturing complexity and interaction, tailored to a practitioner-oriented audience. Practical Relevance : The findings provide concrete guidance for designing safe human–automation interactions in road traffic. By identifying recurring patterns that capture both risks and resilience factors, key leverage points for technical support and function allocation between driver and automation can be defined. This enables developers to assess early on which automation functions are useful and where human involvement remains indispensable. For practitioners in industry and regulation, the approach offers a systemic evaluation of complex traffic dynamics and a more robust basis for safety assessment beyond purely empirical test mileage
A matheuristic for the split delivery capacitated profitable tour problem with incomplete service
No full textAbstract
This paper investigates the Split Delivery Capacitated Profitable Tour Problem with Incomplete Service (SDCPTP-IS), an extension of the Capacitated Profitable Tour Problem (CPTP) that introduces two key relaxations: split delivery (SD), allowing a request to be fulfilled by multiple vehicles, and incomplete service (IS), permitting partial fulfillment of request demands. The objective of the CPTP is to select a subset of requests and determine feasible tours for a fleet of homogeneous vehicles, maximizing the net collected prize (revenue minus delivery cost). We formulate the SDCPTP-IS as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP). A numerical study using benchmark instances from the literature to investigate the effect of split delivery or/and incomplete service in the CPTP with a state-of-the-art solver and a Matheuristic is conducted. This matheuristic exploits the problem structure of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) to solve the SDCPTP-IS as a MILP. More precisely, we use a Guided Local Search (GLS) heuristic to obtain a CVRP solution that is embedded in the matheuristic to solve the SDCPTP-IS. For managerial insights, we conduct a sensitivity analysis on the CPTP, CPTP with split delivery (SDCPTP), CPTP with incomplete service (CPTP-IS), and the SDCPTP-IS, which investigates a varying number of requests, vehicles, and vehicle capacity
Beyond lockdowns: work-from-home, mental health, and the moderating roles of intensity, job control and social support
Full text linkDuring and shortly after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns were expressed that working from home (WFH) was creating a 'mental health crisis'. Australia experienced a three-phase 'WFH experiment', with widespread high-intensity WFH imposed by lockdowns in 2020, deepened restrictions in 2021, and a transition to flexible work arrangements and more autonomy in 2022 as vaccination rates increased. Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, this study estimates the impact of WFH on worker mental health across these phases. Findings show that WFH led to a modest, statistically significant deterioration in average worker mental health outcomes during the lockdown years (2020-2021), particularly among women. Negative effects were present in workers across the social support and job control spectrum, suggesting limited buffering capacity to counter the stress of lockdown restrictions. However, by 2022, the negative effects of WFH dissipated with positive effects for those WFH 25-50% of time, indicating that pandemic-related lockdowns, rather than WFH itself, were primarily responsible for mental health declines. The exception was workers with low job control, and females with dependents, who continued to experience negative effects, highlighting that job autonomy and unequal caregiving responsibilities may shape longer-term wellbeing outcomes