This study aims to examine the effect of business strategies to improve the competitive advantages of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Further, our study considers the importance of performance and innovation as mediating variables in the relationship between business strategies and competitive advantage. The sample of the study consists of 150 SMEs in the construction and real estate industry. Our findings show that business strategies have a positive impact on competitive advantage. Better business strategies improve the competitive advantage of SMEs. Further, business performance and innovation also mediate the relationship between business strategies and competitive advantages. These results provide evidence of the importance of performance and innovation to improve the competitive advantage. It is suggested that SMEs improve their performance and innovation capability to strengthen their competitive advantages.
Intermediaries are central to complex transactions. In housing markets, real estate brokers coordinate information flows, reduce search costs, and guide lay buyers and sellers through legal and financial steps. Despite this importance, scholarship on brokerage is dispersed across disciplines and methods. This paper presents a semi-systematic review of peer-reviewed articles published between 1970 and 2021. We map (i) study characteristics (country of origin and field), (ii) the distribution of units of analysis (individual, firm/organization, market), and (iii) the most frequently examined topics. Our synthesis indicates steadily rising academic interest but a fragmented knowledge base. We conclude by highlighting gaps—especially the scarcity of cross-country comparisons and the relative lack of qualitative and mixed-method studies on brokers’ practices and experiences.
This research focuses on the effect of locational factors on condominium capital gains investment in Thailand. It employed secondary data selected through judgmental sampling. Capital gains data spanning 5 to 15 years were collected quarterly from 1,381 condominium projects in Thailand. ANOVA and Pearson correlation were conducted to study the relationship between locations, capital gains, and price per square meter.
The thesis discusses topics related to the development of business process management systems. Business process management systems have evolved on the basis of workflow management systems through incremental inclusion of standard information system functions, for example, resource and client management. The application of model driven development is required to deal with the complexity of business management systems and to increase development efficiency. In contrast to conventional information systems, the behavior of business management systems is strongly affected by the business models that they execute. Thus, business process models also can be used for designing and developing business management systems using sequentially applied model transformations that adapt models to a specific execution platform.
В научной работе освещается вопрос нынешнего уровня развития технического регулирования в строительстве, в частности регулирования предпроектной стадии инвестиционно-строительного проекта (ICP). За последние годы в инвестиционно-строительной деятельности прочно укоренилась концепция управления жизненным циклом объекта недвижимости, подразумевающая сфокусированность на менеджменте каждого состояния системы — от идеи до ликвидации объекта. Тем не менее на практике участники строительных проектов осуществляют управление предпроектной стадией ICP без должного внимания и ответственности. Автором подчеркивается, что пренебрежительное отношение к работам предпроектной группы вызвано рядом причин, одна из которых — отсутствие понимания структуры и содержания предпроектной фазы и осознания возможной пользы ее результатов. Предполагается, что выступить в качестве теоретической базы и оказать содействие субъектам ICP в реальных условиях могло бы нормативное обеспечение. Для оценки предположения был проведен анализ системы отечественной нормативной базы и выделены элементы содержимого, которые будут полезны в применении при реализации предпроектной стадии ICP. По результатам проведенного анализа выяснилось, что нормативное обеспечение предпроектной фазы ICP несовершенно в объективе актуальной ступени эволюции строительной отрасли. Сегодня разработка универсального механизма для регламентирования предпроектной стадии ICP трудноосуществима, так как нас окружает колоссальное множество разнообразных и абсолютно не похожих друг на друга зданий и сооружений. Автором предлагается внедрение на организационном уровне нормативного и методического обеспечения (NMS), основанного на уже закрепленных нормах и правилах, имеющихся методиках и практических рекомендациях и выработанных корпоративных механизмах. Для формирования организациями строительной отрасли собственной модели ведения предпроектной стадии ICP автором разработана пирамида свойств NMS, доступно отражающая основные принципы, которыми должны обладать документы и информация, применяемая участниками ICP в практической деятельности. Учитывая векторы развития строительного сектора и национальной экономики России, предложенная авторская инициатива способна оказать всесторонний положительный эффект.
Said Rosli, Sulaimi Mardhiati, Majid Rohayu Ab
et al.
This study fills a significant research gap in Malaysian government-led homeownership and affordability. Centered on crucial market attributes influencing these initiatives, insights from low-income groups were obtained. The primary aim of this study was to assess the importance of various market attributes on government homeownership initiatives in Malaysia. The data were collected from low-income groups using a structured questionnaire, providing valuable insights into the unique challenges faced by this demographic. A Relative Importance Index (RII) was employed to analyze the data, revealing that Financial Market Factors, Household Financial Capacity, Housing Affordability and Accessibility, and Government Housing Policies were the market attributes of the highest importance in shaping government homeownership efforts. The results of the exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that the Financial Market Factor was the most influential component, as indicated by its mean rank. This study sought to incorporate the valuable perspectives of respondents regarding integrating future value into financing models. Respondents' opinions reflected a significant level of support for such innovative approaches. This study examines the crucial market attributes influencing government homeownership initiatives in Malaysia. The findings underline the potential of incorporating future value into financing models to enhance housing affordability for low-income groups and promote broader homeownership objectives.
Fabrizio Fornari, Ivan Compagnucci, Massimo Callisto De Donato
et al.
Modern organizations necessitate continuous business processes improvement to maintain efficiency, adaptability, and competitiveness. In the last few years, the Internet of Things, via the deployment of sensors and actuators, has heavily been adopted in organizational and industrial settings to monitor and automatize physical processes influencing and enhancing how people and organizations work. Such advancements are now pushed forward by the rise of the Digital Twin paradigm applied to organizational processes. Advanced ways of managing and maintaining business processes come within reach as there is a Digital Twin of a business process - a virtual replica with real-time capabilities of a real process occurring in an organization. Combining business process models with real-time data and simulation capabilities promises to provide a new way to guide day-to-day organization activities. However, integrating Digital Twins and business processes is a non-trivial task, presenting numerous challenges and ambiguities. This manifesto paper aims to contribute to the current state of the art by clarifying the relationship between business processes and Digital Twins, identifying ongoing research and open challenges, thereby shedding light on and driving future exploration of this innovative interplay.
Empirical business cycle studies using cross-country data usually cannot achieve causal relationships while within-country studies mostly focus on the bust period. We provide the first causal investigation into the boom period of the 1999-2010 U.S. cross-metropolitan business cycle. Using a novel research design, we show that credit expansion in private-label mortgages causes a differentially stronger boom (2000-2006) and bust (2007-2010) cycle in the house-related industries in the high net-export-growth areas. Most importantly, our unique research design enables us to perform the most comprehensive tests on theories (hypotheses) regarding the business cycle. We show that the following theories (hypotheses) cannot explain the cause of the 1999-2010 U.S. business cycle: the speculative euphoria hypothesis, the real business cycle theory, the collateral-driven credit cycle theory, the business uncertainty theory, and the extrapolative expectation theory.
The simulation hypothesis suggests that we live in a computer simulation. That notion has attracted significant scholarly and popular interest. This article explores the simulation hypothesis from a business perspective. Due to the lack of a name for a universe consistent with the simulation hypothesis, we propose the term simuverse. We argue that if we live in a simulation, there must be a business justification. Therefore, we ask: If we live in a simuverse, what is its business model? We identify and explore business model scenarios, such as simuverse as a project, service, or platform. We also explore business model pathways and risk management issues. The article contributes to the simulation hypothesis literature and is the first to provide a business model perspective on the simulation hypothesis. The article discusses theoretical and practical implications and identifies opportunities for future research related to sustainability, digital transformation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Sarah Weber Hertel, Jana Stupavsky, Kristine Alford
et al.
Abstract Surveys assessing attitudes and values about the environment can help predict human behavior toward wildlife and develop effective conservation goals alongside local communities. Coastal Alabama, in the southeastern United States, is a hotspot for biodiversity and endemism and needs protection. Land and wildlife management practices in Alabama have moved from indigenous‐led, which is more in harmony with the environment, to larger‐scale exploitative uses for agriculture and plantations. We therefore predicted that a large proportion of the population has a dominant view of the environment in which land and wildlife are primarily for human benefit. To test this hypothesis, we surveyed over 1300 residents in Mobile and Baldwin counties—the two southernmost counties in Alabama—to assess attitudes toward local vertebrate wildlife, knowledge of the region's biodiversity, and whether individuals value protected areas where they live and/or work. As hunting is generally considered a dominant behavior, we used self‐identified hunters versus non‐hunters to examine the relationship between humans and the environment. Overall, hunters would kill or kill to eat more often than non‐hunters, and would kill even when it is not for food. Furthermore, regardless of hunting status, most participants in our survey would kill a snake, indicating that targeted environmental education is needed for this group. Both hunters and non‐hunters, independently of demographic differences including education and income levels, were not familiar with the especially rich biodiversity of the area and would not be willing to invest money to protect it. Our results indicate that targeted education about the unique and rich biodiversity of southern Alabama compared to the rest of the United States is needed to support successful environmental management, conservation actions, and local participation.
Ecology, General. Including nature conservation, geographical distribution
Akshita Singh, Shailendra Kumar, Utkarsh Goel
et al.
Abstract Psychological aspects of human nature cause behavioural biases and can lead to decisions that differ from what is expected based solely on rational analysis. The effects of behavioural biases on financial markets like stocks and mutual funds have been studied previously, but real estate has yet to receive much attention. The existing works in the real estate domain have focused on different biases, but no study has examined the works already done to provide concise documentation of these past works. Thus, this article is an earnest attempt to fill that gap. This paper reviews the articles which were sourced from Scopus and the Web of Science database, published between 1980 and 2022. The PRISMA model led to the inclusion of 86 articles for the review. Analysis revealed that anchoring bias, loss aversion, and herding bias have been studied extensively. On the other hand, biases like gambler’s fallacy, familiarity bias, framing bias, home bias, confirmation bias and mental accounting have been less explored. The paper identifies the substantial gaps in the existing studies, giving avenues for future exploration. The key ones are, firstly only a few biases have been studied extensively and many biases are less explored, particularly using primary data. This provides a vast available space for future work. Secondly, studies in developing countries are fewer, which needs to be addressed. Lastly, studies need to explore the interplay of different biases to create a more robust model that can explain the effect of these biases. The paper gives a conceptual understanding of different biases and what factors affect them. Also, it will help policymakers strategize their business and mitigate the negative effects of biases.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
Azian Fatin Umaira Muhamad, Khair Nurhayati, Yoong Tum Choo
et al.
In order to accommodate the city’s growing population and land shortage, more vertical buildings are being built nowadays, and mixed-use buildings, as opposed to those with a specific purpose, like residences and businesses, are being developed. Due to the structure’s complexity, this building nonetheless presents several issues to property management. Property management companies must comprehend people’s current needs and wishes to keep up with satisfaction levels and service quality. As a result, this study aims to ascertain how well a building’s services are provided in relation to how satisfied its residents are. A total of 500 respondents were surveyed, and a partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) analysis was performed to determine the relationships between the variables. The empirical results of this study revealed that four out of the five independent variables, i.e. tangibles, reliability, assurance, and empathy, show a significant relationship with occupants’ satisfaction. These research findings may give current insight for property management firms and personnel to improve the quality of their services by implementing corrective measures and prioritizing work, which increases resident satisfaction.
Prateek Chhikara, Harshul Kuhar, Anil Goyal
et al.
A virtual or digital tour is a form of virtual reality technology which allows a user to experience a specific location remotely. Currently, these virtual tours are created by following a 2-step strategy. First, a photographer clicks a 360 degree equirectangular image; then, a team of annotators manually links these images for the "walkthrough" user experience. The major challenge in the mass adoption of virtual tours is the time and cost involved in manual annotation/linking of images. Therefore, this paper presents an end-to-end pipeline to automate the generation of 3D virtual tours using equirectangular images for real-estate properties. We propose a novel HSV-based coloring scheme for paper tags that need to be placed at different locations before clicking the equirectangular images using 360 degree cameras. These tags have two characteristics: i) they are numbered to help the photographer for placement of tags in sequence and; ii) bi-colored, which allows better learning of tag detection (using YOLOv5 architecture) in an image and digit recognition (using custom MobileNet architecture) tasks. Finally, we link/connect all the equirectangular images based on detected tags. We show the efficiency of the proposed pipeline on a real-world equirectangular image dataset collected from the Housing.com database.
The economic problems of mortgage takers, especially in light of the global financial crisis, is a very important issue, both from the point of view of housing policy and the stability of the banking sector. The analysis of the situation of mortgagors is usually limited to determining the percentage of mortgages in default. We compared the revealed mortgage repayment problems among Poles (arrears) with the unrevealed ones (such as high housing cost burden, inability to bear unexpected expenses), which we defined as housing cost stress. Next, we compared these problems with those of tenants at market rates. We found that, although we observe only a small percentage of mortgagors who are in arrears with their housing costs in Poland (about 3%), a large proportion of borrowers (about half of them) are in a difficult financial situation. At the same time, we noticed that their situation is still better than that of market rent tenants, because only one in five renters did not experience problems with covering housing costs. Among tenants, singles were much more likely to suffer from housing cost stress.
The aim of this piece of work is to present the recent developments of the discipline of Real Estate Appraisal and Economic Evaluation of Projects in relation to Sustainable Architecture and its design. The focus is on the principles borrowed from economics and, in particular, on the transition from a linear to a circular thinking and the related impacts on estimative theories and practices. Starting from the urgency of the underlying problems, Life Cycle Thinking is recalled within which the theories of the Green Economy, the Circular Economy and, recently, the Helical Economy are developed. The reasoning then recalls some passages of disciplinary evolution to include the public, environmental and social dimension. A methodological survey follows with attention to the recent – and now almost consolidated – approaches for projects evaluation and market analysis, attributable to international energy-environmental policies. In terms of the evaluation of new construction projects or retrofitting existing assets, the transition from the financial perspective, in terms of Linear Economy, to the perspective of economic-energy-environmental sustainability, from a Circular Economy perspective, is a central point. From the point of view of market analysis, the importance of exploring the impact of sustainable architecture on the values and dynamics of supply and demand is underlined. The results of the work show that the use of life cycle valuation is essential for the reuse of resources, but also for the containment of their consumption in the production phase. The use of tools capable of jointly analyzing energy and costs could guide decision-making processes between different design options, encouraging conversion and efficiency strategies, even in contexts of weak sustainability.
One major change in the modern construction industry worldwide in recent years is moving toward prefabricated buildings (offsite construction) to achieve sustainable development. Despite an increase in attention to ESG due to global stock markets’ requirements and prefabricated buildings aid industries in achieving the ESG goal, few or even no research investigated the ESG attributes of the prefabricated buildings. Additionally, ESG subitems in different industries receive varying attention. Developed countries are primarily subject to ESG rules, but ESG laws in developing countries are at their infant stages. No study examined the effects of economic progress on prefabricated buildings’ ESG attributes. The research gaps are filled by visualising and clustering the WoS and Scopus articles’ keywords, themes, and authors’ locations. This article also studied the evolution of this field. Based on the science map modularity cluster analysis, cost control is the most concerned issue in developed and developing countries. There are far more articles related to sustainability and environmental aspects of prefabricated buildings. Although the governance aspects of prefabricated buildings have not been thoroughly studied, inadequate governance increases bond yields. Therefore, future research on prefabricated buildings may expand to governance aspect to benefit industry and academia.
Research background: Innovative approaches to financing innovative projects are a very important part of innovation and project management in the current global environment, given the rapid pace of the market. The article submitted consists of four parts. The first part deals with the issue of project financing as well as innovative approaches to project financing. The second part describes them as current forms of financing in the form of individual forms of financing for innovative projects, but also as a combined form of financing for innovative projects with classic forms of internal and external financial resources. The third part of the article consists of an analysis of market developments, the volume of countries using innovative forms of crowdfunding project financing. Part three also includes a discussion. The fourth part deals with conclusions on the subject.
Purpose of the article: To describe innovative forms of project funding in a global innovation environment through entrepreneurial angels and crowdfunding. One of the objectives of the present article is to analyses the global development of the market, the volume of countries using innovative forms of project financing through crowdfunding.
Methods: In the processing of the present paper, a descriptive method, analysis, mathematical and statistical methods, graphic methods, comparison and synthesis were used.
Findings & Value added: Will provide an overview of the global market for crowdfunding. It includes financing models such as P2P consumer credit and P2P business loans, real estate crowdfunding, invoice trading, balance sheet loans, etc.
There is strong evidence that most land transactions in Nigerian urban areas take place in the private or informal land market and remain untitled. Only a small percentage of land transactions take place through government allocation even though it ensures greater tenure security. This study examines gender distribution in the allocation of government lands in Akure, Nigeria and the rate of land title registration in the private land market using secondary data of land allocation and Certificate of Occupancy for a period of 10 years (2009-2018) from the Lands Department of the Ministry of Works, Land and Housing, Akure. Close-ended questionnaires were administered to the officials in charge of the records and the Director of the Department was interviewed. Primary data were analysed using weighted mean scores, while secondary data were analysed using ratio and difference measures, trend analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Findings show that the number of registered land titles in private land was lower than the number of government land allocations even though more transactions took place in the private land market. The time taken to process land title registration and lack of awareness were ranked highest among factors affecting land title registration. Although there were no gender specific requirements in the process of land allocation and title registration, stereotypes appear to play a role in land distribution decisions and title registration across the study area. A risk ratio of as high as three to one (males to females) in land allocation and 10 to one in land title registration was observed in some years. The paper recommends educating people, especially women, about the importance of land titling and accessing government land, which is far more secure than private land. Recommendations are also made towards a better land registration process in the study area.
Alistair P. Barros, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Henderik A. Proper
et al.
By incorporating aspects of coordination and collaboration, workflow implementations of information systems require a sound conceptualisation of \EM{business processing} semantics. Traditionally, the success of conceptual modelling techniques has depended largely on the adequacy of conceptualisation, expressive power, comprehensibility and formal foundation. An equally important requirement, particularly with the increased conceptualisation of business aspects, is \EM{business suitability}. In this paper, the focus is on the business suitability of workflow modelling for a commonly encountered class of (operational) business processing, e.g. those of insurance claims, bank loans and land conveyancing. A general assessment is first conducted on some \EM{integrated} techniques characterising well-known paradigms - structured process modelling, object-oriented modelling, behavioural process modelling and business-oriented modelling. Through this, an insight into business suitability within the broader perspective of technique adequacy, is gained. A specific business suitability diagnosis then follows using a particular characterisation of business processing, i.e.\ one where the intuitive semantics and inter-relationship of business services and business processes are nuanced. As a result, five business suitability principles are elicited. These are proposed for a more detailed understanding and (synthetic) development of workflow modelling techniques. Accordingly, further insight into workflow specification languages and workflow globalisation in open distributed architectures may also be gained.