This study presents a review of 85 peer-reviewed publications of cross-cultural variations in consumer behavior. The objectives of this study are to systemize conceptual and methodological approaches to research of cross-cultural variations in consumer behavior; to present an extended understanding of consumer behavior in related industries; to identify conceptual and methodological gaps and empirical issues in these studies; and by fulfilling the objective of this paper to develop an agenda guiding further research ...

Manual assembly operations are the endmost place of the production process and with it represent a melting pot for organizational, time-related and qualitative errors of manufacturing. Because competitive advantages are increasingly determined in the manual assembly, the creation of economical and reliable work steps is of fundamental importance for future business success. For that reason, at the institute of the authors, a procedure has been developed to use the knowledge of the Expert System for Task Taxonomy that ...

Drawing upon recent insights into the role of Goal preference as reflector of cross-linguistic differences, this paper investigates the factors affecting the realization of Goals in motion event descriptions. In particular, it examines the interplay between the lexicalization pattern of a language, on the one hand, and grammatical viewpoint aspect, on the other – factors which have commonly been treated in isolation. In so doing, three typologically distinct languages were examined: English, German and Greek. The ...

The internationalization of firms has mainly been analyzed and explained by considering observations in a pre-digital business environment. Thus, the applicability of the internationalization theories to digital ways of conducting business needs to be challenged. Recent research on the internationalization of digital firms attempts to adapt existing international business literature to the digital market. However, these studies consider internet-based companies predominantly as a homogeneous group. It is a popular ...

The following paper illustrates the conception of an Excel-based software tool developed to predict human error probabilities in manual assembly lines. In this regard, the paper clearifies how reliable risk analyses of manual work tasks can be carried out with the help of a software tool. Furthermore, to initiate a high user-friendliness, a high acceptance and a high level of dissemination, this paper deals with a Kano survey concerning customer requirements on the developed software tool. As a result, it will be ...

The Fusarium solani species complex (FSSC) has been studied intensively but its association with legumes, particularly under European agro-climatic conditions, is still poorly understood. In the present study, we investigated phylogenetic relationships and aggressiveness of 79 isolates of the FSSC collected from pea, subterranean clover, white clover and winter vetch grown under diverse agro-climatic and soil conditions within Temperate and Mediterranean Europe. The isolates were characterized by sequencing tef1 and ...

Children younger than 3 years of age often fail to track hidden objects that are rotated together with identical hiding containers, which might be due to relatively complex paradigms. We examined whether 2-year-olds (N = 28) are already able to track spatial rotations (i.e., by 90° and 180°) if the task is facilitated by increasing the visual discriminability of the hiding containers by means of different shapes and different colors. Children performed above chance level in all conditions except for the condition in ...

The food industry is a large energy consumer and most heat demands in food processing are low-temperature. The aim of this study is to develop and simulate innovative retrofits or redesigns that unlock the heat recovery potential of industrial batch sterilisation processes. The case study focuses on the whey cream process, although the method and results apply to similar batch sterilisation processes. The initial situation is compared to energy efficient designs based on “Energy Storage” and “Rescheduling”. Using a ...

Adults’ mental rotation performance with body‐like stimuli is enhanced if these stimuli are anatomically compatible with a human body, but decreased by anatomically incompatible stimuli. In this study, we investigated these effects for kindergartners and first‐graders: When asked to mentally rotate cube configurations attached with human body parts in an anatomically compatible way, allowing for the projection of a human body, children performed better than with pure cube combinations. By contrast, when body parts ...

Sustainable rangeland management is crucial for maintaining forage resources in pastoral systems, globally. However, pastoral regions are often remote and therefore data poor when it comes to resource monitoring. We tested participatory mapping as a means to rapidly assess rangeland use to identify areas with high grazing pressure. Participatory geographic information system data and herbaceous biomass production data were collected and georeferenced to establish a grazing pressure index for a summer pasture in the ...