Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The shrinking space for civil society and the increasing number of unfavorable legislation affecting the work of non-governmental organizations continue to be burning issues for global philanthropy. Using a case study approach, this thesis explores how democracies regulate the operation of foreign-funded non-governmental organizations in Hungary and Israel. This thesis examines what the presumed and real motivations of democratic governments are to adapt such regulations and how the political, economic and socio-cultural environments might influence their enactment. This thesis also compares the Hungarian and Israeli regulations to the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Administrative Sanctions in The Field of Gambling Abstract The dissertation "Administrative Sanctions in the Field of Gambling" focuses on the description and analysis of the extent to which the specificity of the regulation of gambling is reflected in the interpretation and application of the administrative criminal law in this sector. In this regard, the main attention is paid to how the principles of administrative punishment are applied in dealing with gambling offences, and this analysis is based mainly on specific administrative rulings of relevant administrative authorities, i.e., the Ministry of Finance and customs authorities. The basic aim of this thesis is to assess how the administrative sanctions are applied in the operation of gambling games from the point of view of fulfilling the basic principles and institutes of the administrative criminal law as well as to evaluate the extent to which the administrative punishment contributes to the fulfilment of the point and purpose of this public-law regulation, that is always with specific cases and situations in which the facts of the case of individual gambling offences are presented. Another goal is to assess, inter alia, how the social perception of gambling is reflected in the decision-making activities of administrative bodies responsible for...

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(地域研究) / 甲第17839号 / 地博第157号 / 新制||地||53(附属図書館) / 30654 / 京都大学大学院アジア・アフリカ地域研究研究科東南アジア地域研究専攻 / (主査)教授 小林 繁男, 教授 河野 泰之, 准教授 竹田 晋也, 准教授 古澤 拓郎 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Area Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

Mergers and acquisitions bring convenient solutions for organizations who are looking to broaden their scales. These activities are being pushed towards cross- border activities due to increased globalization. While strategic and financial perspectives are carefully evaluated before an M&A, the human factor is oftentimes neglected. This results in a high rate of failure and dissatisfaction. Managing a cross-border M&A comes with the responsibility of achieving employee satisfaction. While prior research has noted the importance of managerial approaches in post-merger states it failed to compare transformational and transactional leadership styles.  This paper examines the achieved employee satisfaction under transformational/transactional leaders in post-merger environments. The purpose is to compare these two managerial styles to denote how they achieve said satisfaction.  A qualitative approach with exploratory purpose and a grounded theory methodology was followed in our study. We build upon a relativist ontology paired with a social constructivist epistemology. Nine open-ended interviews were conducted with employees from three different merged organizations.  The results show that transformational and transactional leaders both carry essential virtues when it comes to achieving employee satisfaction in a cross-border, post- merger environment. Our research indicates this state is achieved when the leaders use the two approaches complementary and frequently adjusted to the situation, thus are ambidextrous.

Background: Digital platforms include various business models and represent a large and growing part of the economy empowered by digitalization. The added value of platforms depends crucially on their user interactions, which is why adopting new users is crucial. In the internationalization process, digital platforms differ from traditional companies because it is not their own presence that matters, but the users’ location.   Problem: To join a digital platform, the size of the existing user base has been discussed as a decisive feature by the literature. This assumption is based on the concept of network effects. However, these can lose their effect when national borders are crossed and/or digital platforms are location-bound. In the overall discussion about digital platforms, the relevant sub-category of digital marketplaces, especially in the B2B area, has not yet been taken into account and no alternatives for the size of the existing user base have been discussed.   Purpose: This study aims to investigate the attractiveness of digital platform attributes for potential international users of digital B2B marketplaces when the latter enter a foreign market.   Research Question: Which attributes and which of their levels do potential users prefer in a cross-border digital B2B marketplace?   Method: The study is a quantitative, inductive research with an exploratory purpose. An internal realist ontology and a positivist epistemology are applied. Data are collected and analyzed by using the traditional rating-based conjoint analysis. Four attributes with two times two and two times three levels are queried in nine company profiles using an Internet survey questionnaire with n = 159.    Conclusion: This study extends the existing literature on digital platforms by capturing identifying characteristics of digital B2B marketplaces and exploring potential users' preferences for such platforms. We conclude a high importance of distance to users who are already active on the platform, as well as the language of the platform. This is followed by the location of active users and rounded off with a lower importance of user verification.

This study examines the influence of host country economic development and cultural distance on the creation of firm value by UK-based firms through cross-border acquisitions, analyzing the announcement effect. To assess the announcement effect, the cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) of a seven-day trading window around the announcement date are used. The sample consists of 839 acquisitions by 280 firms in 41 countries from 1997-2019. The results show that more value is created when acquiring a target firm from a developing country and cultural distance negatively influences value creation. Further research is required to investigate if cultural distance has a moderating effect on the relationship between host country economic development and value creation.

Yes / We use data from in-depth interviews with business lobbyists in Brussels to investigate why they choose to join lobbying coalitions. We find that lobbyists face two competing institutional incentives. First, they are confronted with incentives to ally with other European organisations, develop multilateral policy messages, and communicate messages to the Commission and the Parliament. Simultaneously, they face inducements to join narrower coalitions, develop bilateral policy messages, and direct those messages at the Council. Lobbyists’ receptivity to these incentives – and thus their choices of lobbying coalitions – differs with their age, educational background, and with the type and ownership structure of the organisations they represent. Combined, our findings contribute to the limited, mainly American literature on interest coalitions by demonstrating that lobbyists operate in complex institutional environments, and that their interpretations of and reactions to institutional complexity are shaped by individual- and organisational-level factors.

Yes / The rapid rise of many e-commerce platforms for individual consumers has generated a large amount of text-based data, and thus researchers have begun to experiment with text mining techniques to extract information from the large amount of textual data to assist in sales forecasting. The existing literature focuses textual data on product reviews; however, consumer reviews are not something that companies can directly control, here we argue that textual product descriptions are also important determinants of consumer choice. We construct an artificial intelligence (AI) framework that combines text mining, WaveNet neural networks, multiple regression, and SHAP model to explain the impact of product descriptions on sales forecasting. Using data from nearly 200,000 sales records obtained from a cross-border e-commerce firm, an empirical study showed that the product description presented to customers can influence sales forecasting, and about 44% of the key phrases greatly affect sales forecasting results, the sales forecasting models that added key product description phrases had improved forecasting accuracy. This paper provides explainable results of sales forecasting, which can provide guidance for firms to design product descriptions with reference to the market demand reflected by these phrases, and adding these phrases to product descriptions can help win more customers. / The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 24 Feb 2025.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) are crucial strategies for global business expansion, but they often face high failure rates due to complex integration challenges, especially in cross-border deals. Cultural misalignment is a substantial factor in these failures, underscoring the need for effective cultural integration. This research investigated the impact of cultural alignment on the post-acquisition integration phase in cross-border M&As, aiming to provide insights into managing cultural dynamics to foster successful integrations and mitigate associated risks. The results of our analysis revealed that cultural alignment is highly influential on the success or failure of cross-border M&As. Three main aspects, leadership, communication, and employee engagement require specific attention as they are the most influential factors when blending the culture of two different companies into one unified entity. This study contributes to the literature on the impact of cultural alignment during the integration process of two companies, suggesting that new research in this field can be conducted to understand more in depth the effect of cultural variables during this integration process and to offer practical guidance for future merging companies.

The development of Property Technologies (PropTech) has been shown to have a disruptive effect within the traditional real estate sector. This study is aiming to provide an up-to-date overview of the PropTech landscape of the binational Öresund Region, and to analyse to which extent it can be characterised as a cross-border innovation ecosystem, a concept used as the key point of the theoretical framework. The analysis was conducted in the light of the stages of the real estate value chain to categorise the actors, and of the knowledge-intensive business services to explain among other the industry’s location patterns. The main findings of the study are that the Öresund PropTech industry is bringing together diverse companies while being characterised by a significant unbalanced between the Swedish and the Danish side in favour of the latter, in terms of both number of actors and range of activity. There is at the moment no sufficient evidence to qualify it as a cross-border innovation ecosystem, as the emerging PropTech network in the area is still to be structured. Coupled with this paper, the contribution of this research work is also including an interactive map accessible online.