New Insights on Trust in Business-to-Business Relationships provides readers with advanced original insights on trust antecedents, processes and consequences within the B2B marketing context and offers practical tools alongside suggestions for future research.

Can You Be Trusted?

A ground-breaking exploration of the changing nature of trust and how to bridge the gap from where you are to where you need to be. Trust is the most powerful force underlying the success of every business. Yet it can be shattered in an instant, with a devastating impact on a company’s market cap and reputation. How to build and sustain trust requires fresh insight into why customers, employees, community members, and investors decide whether an organization can be trusted. Based on two decades of research and illustrated through vivid storytelling, Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta examine the economic impact of trust and the science behind it, and conclusively prove that trust is built from the inside out. Trust emerges from a company being the “real deal”: creating products and services that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not. When trust is in the room, great things can happen. Sucher and Gupta’s innovative foundation for executing the elements of trust—competence, motives, means, impact—explains how trust can be woven into the day-to-day and the long term. Most importantly, even when lost, trust can be regained, as illustrated through their accounts of companies across the globe that pull themselves out of scandal and corruption by rebuilding the vital elements of trust.

This two-volume handbook presents a collection of novel methodologies with applications and illustrative examples in the areas of data-driven computational social sciences. Throughout this handbook, the focus is kept specifically on business and consumer-oriented applications with interesting sections ranging from clustering and network analysis, meta-analytics, memetic algorithms, machine learning, recommender systems methodologies, parallel pattern mining and data mining to specific applications in market segmentation, travel, fashion or entertainment analytics. A must-read for anyone in data-analytics, marketing, behavior modelling and computational social science, interested in the latest applications of new computer science methodologies. The chapters are contributed by leading experts in the associated fields.The chapters cover technical aspects at different levels, some of which are introductory and could be used for teaching. Some chapters aim at building a common understanding of the methodologies and recent application areas including the introduction of new theoretical results in the complexity of core problems. Business and marketing professionals may use the book to familiarize themselves with some important foundations of data science. The work is a good starting point to establish an open dialogue of communication between professionals and researchers from different fields. Together, the two volumes present a number of different new directions in Business and Customer Analytics with an emphasis in personalization of services, the development of new mathematical models and new algorithms, heuristics and metaheuristics applied to the challenging problems in the field. Sections of the book have introductory material to more specific and advanced themes in some of the chapters, allowing the volumes to be used as an advanced textbook. Clustering, Proximity Graphs, Pattern Mining, Frequent Itemset Mining, Feature Engineering, Network and Community Detection, Network-based Recommending Systems and Visualization, are some of the topics in the first volume. Techniques on Memetic Algorithms and their applications to Business Analytics and Data Science are surveyed in the second volume; applications in Team Orienteering, Competitive Facility-location, and Visualization of Products and Consumers are also discussed. The second volume also includes an introduction to Meta-Analytics, and to the application areas of Fashion and Travel Analytics. Overall, the two-volume set helps to describe some fundamentals, acts as a bridge between different disciplines, and presents important results in a rapidly moving field combining powerful optimization techniques allied to new mathematical models critical for personalization of services. Academics and professionals working in the area of business anyalytics, data science, operations research and marketing will find this handbook valuable as a reference. Students studying these fields will find this handbook useful and helpful as a secondary textbook.

Low-carbon transition is a shift from an economy that depends heavily on fossil fuels to a sustainable, low-carbon energy economy. This book analyzes the role of renewables in driving the low-carbon transition in agriculture, explores the circular bio-based economy, and examines policies and strategies designed to facilitate low-carbon transition in agriculture, greenhouse gas mitigation, and adaptation trends in the European Union agriculture sector. It provides new knowledge and understanding about the impact of low-carbon energy transition, emphasizes the key role of renewable energy in a wide range of agricultural activities, and offers alternative sustainable solutions to current practices. Features Discusses a novel approach on low-carbon transition that is not considered by the majority of studies Emphasizes the urgent need to minimize the carbon and environmental footprint of the EU agriculture and food system through low-carbon energy transition Provides theoretical background of sustainable agriculture and explains the decarbonization path of agriculture. Investigates the role of renewables, new technologies, business models, and practices in agriculture while assessing their socioeconomic and environmental effects. Presents a case study on the applications of low-carbon transition policies in selected EU member states and analyses in details various implications. This book is suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate students, professionals in agriculture, researchers, and policy makers interested in sustainable agriculture and renewable energy usage and their economics.

The business world consists of interlinked entities, which require acting cooperatively in order to reach the desired aims. Individuals are at the core of business-to-business (B2B) marketing and are responsible for making decisions, negotiating, networking, branding, and all other of the firm’s vital processes. Especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the role of individuals is important, as those in charge of the SMEs are often the face and the mind of a company. However, the role of the individual in B2B marketing literature has often been overlooked. This book covers the gap by providing a variety of novel perspectives that involve individuals as central figures in the B2B marketing environment. This book will provide practical implications on the topics in focus, which will bring the role and importance of individuals to the fore in the understanding of how B2B marketing works. It introduces readers to the role of embedded individual managers in developing and changing business systems and networks and consists of three core sections: cognition (individual sensemaking within a business environment), action (decision-making in business networks), and finally, contextualization (interrelation between micro- and macro-levels). Each section is supported with case studies to exemplify the research ideas presented. Individuals in B2B Marketing offers a comprehensive investigation into this much overlooked topic and will be a valuable resource for marketing, entrepreneurship, and international business scholars and graduate students in particular.

New Insights on Trust in Business-to-Business Relationships provides readers with advanced original insights on trust antecedents, processes and consequences within the B2B marketing context and offers practical tools alongside suggestions for future research.