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A significant number of studies have been made in the area of agricultural economics; however, there is a paucity of work that investigates factors or determinants which influence the financial performance of agro cooperatives. This paper investigates determinants of financial performance for the United States (U.S.) agricultural cooperatives for the period 2009–2017. By using the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) database, we created a sample of 37 U.S. agro cooperatives. For analysis, we used panel regression analysis as it is suitable to deal with fixed effect or random effect error component presented in the model. Finding states that the U.S. agro cooperatives are found highly sensitive to economic policy uncertainty. The results provide evidence of a negative relationship between size and profitability. Moreover, the impact of growth and capital intensity is also reflected in the return on asset (ROA). In this study, we considered ROA as a proxy for firm performance. Implications and suggestions for further new research are also discussed.

Social news sites have enabled news identification and its promotion through crowdsourcing and provided users with the capabilities to discuss topics. Compared to social media, social news sites are information-rich and possess their own social network. Reddit has been classified as a social news website and possesses similar characteristics to other websites in the domain. These include Slashdot, Digg, and StumbleUpon. This paper provides a broad analysis of spectators' sentimental (or emotional) behaviour surrounding the 2020 Summer Olympics on Reddit. The study measures the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on spectator sentiments and proposes a scheme for sensitising Redditors' behaviour by crowdsourcing the influencers present in the Redditor pool.

PurposeThis paper takes a critical look at the meaning of corporate social responsibility (CSR) based on the available literature on the subject matter. As CSR is an evolving concept both in meaning and practice, this study aims to highlight CSR actions of the world's six largest organizations (Google, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, ExxonMobil and Walmart). The purpose of choosing these organizations and their CSR adoption was to examine the business-society relationship and the role of key stakeholders in establishing this association.Design/methodology/approachThis study examined CSR through the case study approach and provides valuable insights by showing that CSR is a connecting link between business and society. Specifically, the authors took a crucial look at various contentious, often ambiguous definitions, theoretical framework, brief historical development, issues and controversies surrounding it, the role of CSR in community development and summing it up with the future direction and managerial implications.FindingsThis study observed that there are some developmental strategies taking place today which are relevant to the issue at stake, such as: contributing to the world economy, corporations donating or engaging in a wide range of philanthropic gestures now than ever and contributing to the beauty of the society by meeting rising community expectations.Originality/valueBy analyzing the worlds' 6 largest companies' CSR initiatives, this study provides valuable insights by showing that CSR is a connecting link between business and society and is based on win-win collaborations between civil society, business, investors and government. These companies' CSR initiatives have been mostly unexplored in past studies.

PurposeThe paper aims to explore the influence of cybersecurity on the semantic orientation of the sports consumers. Focusing on both sport and esports, this study finds the social media factors contributing in the sentiment formation and commenting behavior on Twitter and proposes a scheme for attitude modulation through identification of highly engaged nano-influencers.Design/methodology/approachExperimental design was used as the research methodology. Data mining from Twitter using RStudio software was conducted using the keyword “cybersecurity” during the time of pandemic. Final corpus of 31,891 tweets were considered for the study. Initial sentiment analysis has been conducted to explore the consumer's emotional inclination towards cybersecurity. Further through generalized equation modeling the impact of social media attributes over the consumer's posting behavior has been analyzed.FindingsThe research findings reveal that users are inherently positive towards cybersecurity adoption in sports and the factors such as number of tweets, number of positive words contained in these tweets and the authenticity of the information source boost the pre-established tweeting behavior. However, the influx of information from non-organizational sources such as trending topics and discussions have negative impact over the users.Originality/valueThis study is first to explore the role of nano-influencers as communication moderators over digital social platforms. This study offers a new understanding of key contributing attributes of sentiments formation over social media and offers a scheme of selection of nano-influencers to modulate the pre-established sentiments of the users. Finally, the current study offers valuable insights into social media engagements and selection of nano-influencers for practicing marketing managers.