Delicious promoter of the restaurant business: measuring impact of supply chain, brand personality and CSR on brand equity development

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to discuss the importance of customer-based brand equity (CBBE) and identify the critical attributes of how to develop CBBE during the most difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: This study collected 386 restaurant managers' viewpoints to examine the mutual relationships among CBBE and other critical attributes of corporate social responsibility (CSR), electronic word of mouth (EWOM) and brand personality. Furthermore, structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to examine the proposed moderation and mediation hypotheses. Findings: The results show that corporate social responsibility (CSR) mediates the relationship between brand personality and brand image. Furthermore, the mutual relationship among CBBE is discovered in that brand image may indirectly affect brand loyalty through perceived quality and brand awareness. Furthermore, with the reliance on social media, the moderating roles of electronic word of mouth (EWOM) are also revealed that strengthen the indirect effect of brand personality on brand awareness through CSR and brand image. Originality/value: With the increasing attention to CBBE, which aims at tourism destination brand equity, hotel branding from the customer perspective, restaurant managers' viewpoints are not considered. Further, because of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers are paying more attention to food safety and food delivery processes, which are important for CSR and connected to CBBE. However, until now, fewer studies have addressed these issues as such. The present study reflects the bidirectional effects of such a comprehensive viewpoint. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Robust Masked Face Recognition via Balanced Feature Matching

Wearing a facial mask has become a must in our daily life due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. However, the performance of conventional face recognition systems severely degrades for faces occluded by masks. How to combat the effect of occlusion on face recognition is an important issue. However, the performance of existing methods developed for masked face recognition unpleasantly degrades when dealing with unmasked faces. To address this issue for real-world applications, where the gallery image or the probe image may be a masked or unmasked face, we propose the concept of balanced facial feature matching and, based on it, design a robust masked face recognition system. The matching is balanced because it is performed on features extracted from corresponding facial regions. The system consists of a classification network and two feature extractors. The classification network classifies an input face image into a masked face or an unmasked face. One feature extractor extracts the feature of a full face, and the other uses a guided perceptual loss to focus the feature extraction on the non-occluded part of the face. The system is tested on both synthetic and real data. The face verification accuracy is improved by 2.4% for the synthetically masked LFW dataset, 1.9% for the MFR2 dataset, and 5.4% for the RMFD dataset. The results further show that the system improves masked face recognition while preserving the performance of unmasked face recognition. © 2022 IEEE.

Perspectives on the Barriers to and Needs of Teachers’ Professional Development in the Philippines during COVID-19

Due to COVID-19, remote or distance education has become the norm in the Philippines. Yet even in its second year, remote teaching and learning still face ongoing challenges, as does the need for teachers’ professional development. This paper describes a study that examined teachers’ perspectives on barriers and needs in professional development. The study involved 174 teachers who were teaching online courses in the National Capital Region. The participants completed a survey detailing their professional development frequency, perspectives, barriers, and needs, while eight teachers agreed to participate in a follow-up interview. Results from hierarchical multiple regression analysis have shown that teachers’ pedagogical and information technology skills requirements are influenced primarily by their prior professional development experiences and their need to apply active learning and innovative teaching ideas. Qualitative analyses indicate that teachers’ professional development needs are mostly focused on skills related to online teaching, information technology literacy, and conducting research. In addition, data indicated that barriers to professional development were primarily caused by financial and time constraints and a lack of teacher motivation and logistical support. In summary, for remote education to be sustainable, teachers need ongoing professional development as well as adequate logistical support. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Vulnerable Company's Triumphs in M&A Negotiation under the Impact of COVID-19 - An Empirical Study of Asian Companies

The worldwide lockdown caused by COVID-19 has led to the complete suspension of shipping, land transportation, and aviation. As a result of the redistribution of global resources, governments have recently advocated acquisitions and mergers with strategic alliances and vertical integrations to revitalize the economy. This study aims to investigate how the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) were negotiated and how the equilibrium price was achieved with game theory and information economics in agricultural and fishery biotechnology industry. The findings in the present study propose that by adopting investment valuation (asset-based approach, revenue method, market method) and presenting three patents (globally unique nondrug-denatured pure male tilapia and GPS -25C cloud cold chain logistics), the more the vulnerable company is able to attain a triumphant price during the negotiation of M&A. © 2021 World Scientific Publishing Co.