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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and circular economy (CE) have assumed considerable importance in the efforts for sustainable development. However, some consumers do not positively respond to CSR and CE activities, and few studies have analyzed the consumers' perspective about the topics. This study investigates consumer knowledge and perception about CSR and CE and their willingness to pay (WTP) for products from companies that follow these concepts, examining differences according to demographic characteristics. We carried out a survey with 302 Brazilian and Italian consumers of cosmetic products. Our results show that most consumers have a low understanding of CSR and CE and a low perception of the socio-environmental initiatives of companies that follow CSR and CE concepts. Nevertheless, most consumers show WTP for products from companies that follow these concepts. We identified demographic variables that allowed us to relate the profile of consumers with their knowledge about CSR and CE and their WTP. We provide insights for companies and policymakers in advancing toward CSR and CE.

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Recent research advances in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing have introduced novel tasks that are paving the way for solving AI-complete problems. One of those tasks is called Visual Question Answering (VQA). This system takes an image and a free-form, open-ended naturallanguage question about the image, and produce a natural language answer as the output. Such a task has drawn great attention from the scientific community, which generated a plethora of approaches that aim to improve the VQA predictive accuracy. Most of them comprise three major components: (i) independent representation learning of images and questions; (ii) feature fusion so the model can use information from both sources to answer visual questions; and (iii) the generation of the correct answer in natural language. With so many approaches being recently introduced, it became unclear the real contribution of each component for the ultimate performance of the model. The main goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis regarding the impact of each component in VQA models. Our extensive set of experiments cover both visual and textual elements, as well as the combination of these representations in form of fusion and attention mechanisms. Our major contribution is to identify core components for training VQA models so as to maximize their predictive performance.

The 14000 series comprises a set of international environmental standards that enable environmental certification for organizations that implement the Environmental Management System (EMS). The study identified, through a systematic literature review, the advantages obtained with the ISO 14000 standardization, as well as the motivators and the barriers involved in implementation process. As main advantages, the improvement of organization's image, the reduction of waste and pollutants and, consequently, the accomplishment of environmental standards and regulations can be cited. These aspects were also motivators for the acquirement of the series by the companies. However, the most mentioned barrier was the high cost involved in maintenance and implementation of the EMS. The results obtained allowed the proposal of many hypothesis for future research, mainly as guide to legislative professionals and industry managers, getting practical and academic research closer.

Studies developed in the last two decades indicate that environmental product innovations can potentially generate competitive advantages. However, the ethical dimension, now increasingly involved in evaluations for consumer decision-making, has received less attention in academic research. Considering the above, our study investigates the mediating role of ethical aspects in the relationship between environmental product innovation and perceived brand value. To this end, we carried out a quantitative study with 336 university students who are end users of Apple and Microsoft products and services. In addition to investigating the main effect of environmental product innovations on perceived brand equity, we explore the possible mediating effects of ethical behaviors: (i) open-mindedness and (ii) concerns with privacy practices. Our results indicate that environmental product innovations need to be supported by the ethical aspects of companies to have a positive effect on perceived brand equity. Crucially, customers perceive value in environmental product innovation when they can confirm that organizations exhibit ethical correctness, particularly in the sector under study. We understand that our research provides advancement in the field of sustainable innovation. The study confirms that broader approaches, mainly centered on corporate commitments beyond environmental issues, are critical for environmental product innovations to generate perceived brand value.