No abstract

PurposeWine has been produced for thousands of years and nowadays we have seen a spread in the wine culture. E-commerce sales of wine have increased considerably and online customer's satisfaction is influenced by quality and price. This paper presents a case study of the company “QuieroVinos, S.L.”, an online wine shop founded in 2015 that sells Spanish wines in two main marketplaces.Design/methodology/approachWith the final target of increasing the company profits it has been designed and developed an application to track the prices of competitors for a set of products. This information will be used to set the product prices in order to offer the products both competitively and profitably in each Marketplace. This application must check, by tacking into account information such as the product cost or the minimum product margin, if it is possible to decrease the price in order to reach the top cheapest position and as a consequence, increase the sales.FindingsThe application improved in a notorious way the company's results in terms of sales and shipping costs. It must be said that without the use of the presented application, performing the price comparison process within each one of the marketplaces would have taken a long time. Moreover, as prices change very frequently, the obtained information has a very limited time value, and the competitors prices should be analyzed daily in order to take accurate decisions regarding the company's price policy.Originality/valueAlthough the application has been designed for the wine sector and the two named marketplace, it could be exported to other sectors. For that, it should be implemented new modules to collect information regarding the competitor's price of the products selling on each corresponding marketplace.

Leather industry is facing the consequences of their historic lack of communication and now are under an increasing pressure to communicate their position and policies with regards to corporate social responsibility (CSR), informing consumers about the corporations’ good intentions and actions to recover clarity and be able to affirm without doubts that responsibly manufactured leather is sustainable. Under this context, this paper aims to examine CSR communication in the leather sector on Twitter identifying the main topics of CSR and the main participants in the creation of content and thus contribute to the development of CSR strategies for the leather industry. A software framework has been implemented in order to manage big text data in the study of CSR and sentiment computational content analysis to classify the tweets as positive, negative, or neutral. The results show that the general public associates leather with the environment, sustainability, and fashion. The general opinion about the leather industry’s CSR is rather neutral. Nonetheless, negative opinions occupy a close second place, and positive opinions are rare. Lastly, alternative bio-materials sneak in the industry reshaping the opinions to more positive ones.

Reasons to adopt Corporate Social Responsibility reporting by leather tanning companies must primarily be sought in the specific nature of the industry, where leather is a material from renewable sources, however part of its manufacture process might pose one of the gravest environmental hazards in the world. The tanning industry appears, therefore, as a sector compiling CSR reports expected to confirm its environment-friendly actions. The purpose of this research is to examine and understand CSR roles and diffusion in the small and medium enterprises of the leather tanning industry in Catalonia (Spain), especially in relation with the adoption of other management systems. It identifies the most distinguished CSR practices, procedures and metrics and the profiles of companies more prone to adopt them. We used a qualitative approach to fulfill this aim. Results show that leather companies are familiar with CSR practices, but there is further scope for improvement in terms of formalization of CSR procedures and measurement systems. Results show that the majority of socially responsible practices are related to environmental issues and consequently there is a relation between CSR and the application of environmental management systems. The analysis reveals that the management of CSR activities improves with the diffusion of knowledge on CSR practices.

External influences or behavioral biases can affect the way risk is perceived. This paper studies the prediction of VaR (Value at Risk) as a measure of the risk of loss for investments on financial products. Our aim is to predict the percentage of loss that a financial product would have in the future to assess the risks and determine the potential loss of a security in the stock market, thus reducing reasoning influenced by feelings for bank and financial firms seeking to deploy AI and advanced automation. We used the IFM (inference function for margins) method in different market scenarios, with particular emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of it. The study is assessed on single product level with the skewed studen-t GARCH(1,1) model and portfolio level with t-copulas for the inter-dependencies. It has been shown that under normal market conditions the risk is predicted properly for both levels. However, when an unexpected market event occurs, the prediction fails. To address this limitation, a combined model with sentiment analysis and regression is proposed for further investigation as a future work.