Increasingly, companies’ attempts to become more sustainable are framed in terms of transitioning towards sustainable business models (SBMs), whereby central logic of how the company offers value to customers is challenged (Yang & Evans, 2019). This transition requires companies to rethink the way value and resource consumption are coupled in their operations (Pieroni et al., 2019), as well as consider different ways of connecting with customer needs (Laukkanen & Tura, 2020).

The availability of digital distribution channels raises many new challenges for managers in the media industries. This is particularly true for movie studios where content can be stolen and released through illegitimate digital distribution channels before, or shortly after, the legitimate release date. In response to this potential threat, movie studios have spent millions of dollars attempting to protect their content from unauthorized release, to prosecute those who might distribute or consume pirated content, and to lobby governments to strengthen anti-piracy laws. However, there has been very little rigorous research to analyze whether, and how much, movie piracy cannibalizes legitimate box-office sales. In this paper, we analyze this question in the context of post-release movie piracy. We also consider whether going to the movies is substitutable by watching a pirated version at home. Even though there is a lag between the release in cinema-theaters and a DVD-release (that is when a pirated copy of a good quality is made available), we consider making decision at the certain moment, so time lag does not make any difference. Our study contributes to the growing literature on piracy and digital media consumption in the online community by presenting evidence of the impact of digital piracy, by differentiating the effect of post-release movie piracy from the other types of piracy that the extant literature has previously considered.

Real estate housing market in former USSR was highly regulated and standardized in terms of product offering. Transition economy slightly changes this situation – consumers start to demand the new quality of housing while developers begin to implement the advanced building technologies and change the product attributes. The structure of consumers’ preferences forms product utility, which could be measured by using decompositional methods. We implement hierarchical information integration approach that let us represent the real estate housing object utility as a sum of part-worth utilities of various attributes. Using special research design we estimate the utility of current market offer. The results highlight that the reason of poor sales performance could underlie in the gap between consumers’ preferences and real estate housing items configuration.

Small- and medium-sized industrial companies in Germany and Russia mostly attach little importance to brand management and practice it only fragmentarily. Against this background, the relevance of brand management for these firms in B2B-markets is demonstrated. Beginning with a look at the importance of B2B brands for corporate success, relevant starting points for a successful brand management in B2B settings are shown, as far as these are supported by empirical research. The findings indicate the importance of internal as well as external dimensions of B2B brand management.

The aim of present work is to link geometrical parameter of maximum area of structural defect (proposed by Y. Murakami, 1983) with surface fatigue mechanisms. Determined relations allow making predictions of surface fatigue properties of cemented carbides (WC-Co hardmetal - H15 - 85wt% WC and 15wt %Co, TiC-based cermets - T60/8 - 60wt %TiC and Fe/8wt% Ni and T70/14 - 70wt %TiC and Fe/14wt% Ni) in conditions of rolling contact and impact cycling loading. Pores considered being equivalent to small defects. Three comparative defects conditions are distinguished: surface pore, just below free surface and interior pores. The Vickers hardness of binder (as main responsible for the fracture mechanism of hardmetal and cermets) assumed to be the basis of such assumption. The estimate of this prediction has been done by analyzing the pore sizes using the statistics of extremes. The lower bound of fatigue properties can be correctly predicted by considering the maximum occurring pore size.