Competing during a pandemic? Retailers’ ups and downs during the COVID-19 outbreak

The COVID-19 pandemic (that started in early 2020) is causing several disruptions in the short- and mid-term, to which businesses have to adapt. Some retailers have reacted to the emergency immediately, displaying a plethora of different intervention types. The authors aim to synthesize the challenges that retailers are facing during the COVID-19 emergency. We do this from the perspective of both consumers and managers, with the goal of providing guidelines on and examples of how retailers can handle this unprecedented situation

Digital technologies and privacy: State of the art and research directions

Digital technologies have transformed every aspect of marketing and have brought consumer privacy front and center of research and discourse over the last two decades. Whereas companies and consumers have arguably benefited through the availability and use of data made possible by digitalization, consumer privacy-related concerns raise compelling questions that researchers, companies, and policymakers are addressing. In this Review Paper, we review privacy related to digital technologies in marketing, highlighting the constantly evolving nature of the field. We provide an overview of the rich contributions made by the articles in the special issue on digital technologies and privacy, and the original insights they provide for researchers and practitioners in four domains – communication, retailing, pricing, and product personalization. We identify and outline future research directions in each of these four domains to expand our understanding of privacy at the intersection of psychology and marketing by motivating new scholarly research and providing actionable insights to managers and policymakers

Permeation of Ternary Mixture Containing H2S, CO2 and CH4 in Aquivion® Perfluorosulfonic Acid (PFSA) Ionomer Membranes

Aquivion (R) E87-12S Perfluorosulfonated acid ionomer material (PFSA) has been studied as a membrane technology for natural gas sweetening from CO2 , H2S due to its interesting chemical and mechanical stability and good separation performance for polar compounds in humid environments. In the present work, permeation of the H2S/CO2/CH4 ternary mixture in this short-side PFSA chain was investigated at pressures up to 10 bar, temperatures up to 50 degrees C, and in a range of relative humidity (RH) from 20% to 90%. The results obtain confirm the strong dependence of Aquivion (R) on water activity and temperature, and its ability to separate gases based on their water solubility without substantial differences between pure and mixed gas experiments. Indeed, even when tested in ternary mixture, the permeation behavior remains similar to that observed for pure components and binary mixtures. In particular, the permeability of H2S is higher than that of CO(2 )and methane CH4, reaching values of 500 Barrer at 50 degrees C and 80% RH, against 450 and 23 Barrer for the other two gases respectively. Additionally, when tested at higher pressures of up to 10 bar under humid conditions, the membrane properties remained largely unchanged, thus confirming the overall stability and durability of Aquivion (R) E87-12S in acid environments

Intersections of self-gravitating charged shells in a Reissner-Nordstrom field

We describe the equation of motion of two charged spherical shells with tangential pressure in the field of a central Reissner-Nordstrom (RN) source. We solve the problem of determining the motion of the two shells \textsl{after} the intersection by solving the related Einstein-Maxwell equations and by requiring a physical continuity condition on the shells velocities. We consider also four applications: post-Newtonian and ultra-relativistic approximations, a test-shell case, and the ejection mechanism of one shell. This work is a direct generalization of Barkov-Belinski-Bisnovati-Kogan paper.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figure;v3 added reference

On the semiclassical treatment of Hawking radiation

In the context of the semiclassical treatment of Hawking radiation we prove the universality of the reduced canonical momentum for the system of a massive shell self gravitating in a spherical gravitational field within the Painlev\'e family of gauges. We show that one can construct modes which are regular on the horizon both by considering as hamiltonian the exterior boundary term and by using as hamiltonian the interior boundary term. The late time expansion is given in both approaches and their time Fourier expansion computed to reproduce the self reaction correction to the Hawking spectrum.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, Corrected typo