Predicting the antecedents of consumers' intention toward purchase of mutual funds: A hybrid PLS‐SEM‐neural network approach

The current study intends to identify the behavioural antecedents of investors' attitude and investment intention toward mutual funds using a robust SEM‐ANN approach. It focuses on novel factors in the purview of the COVID‐19 pandemic, increasing digitalization and social media usage. The research outcome indicates that attitude (ATB), awareness (AW) and investment decision involvement (IDI) have a significant positive relation with investment intention (BI). In contrast, perceived barrier (PBR) negatively relates to investment intention. Herd behaviour (HB) and social media influence (SMI) do not influence investment intention toward mutual funds. Moreover, all the tested predictors share direct relation with the attitude toward mutual fund investment, barring perceived risk (PR), which has an inverse relationship. As per the outcome of ANN sensitivity analysis, attitude is the most crucial determinant of investment intention. It is followed by awareness (AW), perceived barriers (PBR) and investment decision involvement (IDI). Among the significant determinants of attitude, self‐efficacy (SE) is the most important determinant, followed by perceived usefulness (PU), perceived emergency (PEMER), subjective norms (SN) and perceived risk (PR).

Impact of reproduction number on the multiwave spreading dynamics of COVID-19 with temporary immunity: A mathematical model.

OBJECTIVES: The recent discoveries of phylogenetically confirmed COVID-19 reinfection cases worldwide, together with studies suggesting that antibody titres decrease over time, raise the question of what course the epidemic trajectories may take if immunity were really to be temporary in a significant fraction of the population. The objective of this study is to obtain an answer for this important question. METHODS: We construct a ground-up delay differential equation model tailored to incorporate different types of immune response. We considered two immune responses: (a) short-lived immunity of all types, and (b) short-lived sterilizing immunity with durable severity-reducing immunity. RESULTS: Multiple wave solutions to the model are manifest for intermediate values of the reproduction number R; interestingly, for sufficiently low as well as sufficiently high R, we find conventional single-wave solutions despite temporary immunity. CONCLUSIONS: The versatility of our model, and its very modest demands on computational resources, ensure that a set of disease trajectories can be computed virtually on the same day that a new and relevant immune response study is released. Our work can also be used to analyse the disease dynamics after a vaccine is certified for use and information regarding its immune response becomes available.