Sustainable business models: integrating employees, customers and technology

This Special Issue of the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing has the same title as the 23rd International Conference CBIM 2018 (June 18-20, 2018, Madrid, Spain) “Sustainable Business Models: Integrating Employees, Customers and Technology”. In this edition of International Conference, following a competitive blind review process, papers from 126 authors and 25 countries were ultimately accepted. The best papers of the Conference were invited to submit to this Special Issue and we were also open to direct submissions from other authors. We present here the 17 accepted papers for publication in this Special Issue

A Relativistic Version of the Two-Level Atom in the Rest-Frame Instant Form of Dynamics

We define a relativistic version of the two-level atom, in which an extended atom is replaced by a point particle carrying suitable Grassmann variables for the description of the two-level structure and of the electric dipole. After studying the isolated system "atom plus the electro-magnetic field" in the electric-dipole representation as a parametrized Minkowski theory, we give its restriction to the inertial rest frame and the explicit form of the Poincar\'e generators. After quantization we get a two-level atom with a spin 1/2 electric dipole and the relativistic generalization of the Hamiltonians of the Rabi and Jaynes-Cummings models.Comment: 23 page

Internal Market Orientation: a solution to strategy implementation in organisations

Take care of your people and your people will take care of your business. Internal Market Orientation as business logic facilitates job satisfaction and commitment

El compromiso organizacional: un valor personal y empresarial en el marketing interno

Organizational commitment has been extensively studied and has a great importance for companies. In this research an analysis of relevant scientific literature has been done in order to answer the question: what is commitment and what kind of commitment exists? Tridimensional model of commitment is shown and a groundbreaking example of the relation of this model with ethical aristothelical tradition. Theory of value has also been analyzed. To answer the question what factors contribute most to compromise?, the results of an empirical research on Spanish hotel sector are shown, within the scope of internal marketing. This research concludes that factors with greater correlation with commitment are: internal communication, management concern, training and family work balance

Hall response of interacting bosonic atoms in strong gauge fields: from condensed to FQH states

Interacting bosonic atoms under strong gauge fields undergo a series of phase transitions that take the cloud from a simple Bose-Einstein condensate all the way to a family of fractional-quantum-Hall-type states [M. Popp, B. Paredes, and J. I. Cirac, Phys. Rev. A 70, 053612 (2004)]. In this work we demonstrate that the Hall response of the atoms can be used to locate the phase transitions and characterize the ground state of the many-body state. Moreover, the same response function reveals within some regions of the parameter space, the structure of the spectrum and the allowed transitions to excited states. We verify numerically these ideas using exact diagonalization for a small number of atoms, and provide an experimental protocol to implement the gauge fields and probe the linear response using a periodically driven optical lattice. Finally, we discuss our theoretical results in relation to recent experiments with condensates in artificial magnetic fields [ L. J. LeBlanc, K. Jimenez-Garcia, R. A. Williams, M. C. Beeler, A. R. Perry, W. D. Phillips, and I. B. Spielman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109, 10811 (2012)] and we analyze the role played by vortex states in the Hall response.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Explorations in price (un)fairness.

Consumers may use multiple reference points-including cost of goods, past prices, and competitive prices-to judge price fairness. Across a series of studies we show that consumers are inclined to overestimate profits, often to an extreme extent. We further demonstrate that prices are perceived to be unfair because consumers fail to take into account vendor costs, underestimate the effects of inflation, and attribute competitive price differences to profits. Potential corrective interventions by marketers-such as cueing costs, providing historical price information, and explaining price differences-were insufficient to eliminate unfairness perceptions. In addition, prices for goods were found to be stickier than prices for services and therefore were especially susceptible to these systematic perceptions of unfairness.Prices; Studies; Costs; Effects;

Generating Interpretable Fuzzy Controllers using Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Programming

Autonomously training interpretable control strategies, called policies, using pre-existing plant trajectory data is of great interest in industrial applications. Fuzzy controllers have been used in industry for decades as interpretable and efficient system controllers. In this study, we introduce a fuzzy genetic programming (GP) approach called fuzzy GP reinforcement learning (FGPRL) that can select the relevant state features, determine the size of the required fuzzy rule set, and automatically adjust all the controller parameters simultaneously. Each GP individual's fitness is computed using model-based batch reinforcement learning (RL), which first trains a model using available system samples and subsequently performs Monte Carlo rollouts to predict each policy candidate's performance. We compare FGPRL to an extended version of a related method called fuzzy particle swarm reinforcement learning (FPSRL), which uses swarm intelligence to tune the fuzzy policy parameters. Experiments using an industrial benchmark show that FGPRL is able to autonomously learn interpretable fuzzy policies with high control performance.Comment: Accepted at Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2018 (GECCO '18

Customer Orientation in Highly Relational Services

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to investigate the antecedents, importance, and consequences of the customer orientation of service employees (COSE) in highly relational services (HRS). This study challenges the traditional vision of COSE and its sole focus on transactional services. The paper also examines and confirms new outcomes of COSE. Then, a revised COSE model adapted to HRS is proposed. Design/methodology/approach – The private banking (PB) service is chosen to represent a HRS setting. The qualitative study is comprised of 25 semi-structured interviews with PB practitioners. The results are analysed using NVivo 11. Findings – This study confirms the validity of the construct. COSE is proven to have notable importance in HRS. Various dimensions of COSE have different grades of importance. New consequences are elicited for HRS, including trust, loyalty, and co-creation. Practical implications – The results show that most private banking firms do not have standardised processes in place to measure COSE. This study proves how COSE can be used for several purposes by practitioners as a means of customer relationship management and in co-creation strategies. Originality/value – This study expands on the potential of the COSE construct by the use of HRS for the first time and introduces new consequences from the original COSE model