Purpose The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively assess the essential trends of existing research on “puffery in advertising” through bibliometric analysis. Design/methodology/approach This study uses citation data collected through Scopus and Google Scholar for the research area “puffery in advertising” to investigate the most productive journals, top countries of affiliation and prominent years with maximum citations. The study analyses the 87 articles related to “puffery in advertising,” published during 1840 to 2018. Moreover, this study also presents graphical analysis through network maps. Findings “Puffery in advertising” has remained an under-researched area. However, records of past ten years indicate marginal growth in the number of publications. USA dominates this research area with most numbers of articles published till date. Through clustering of subject areas, it is found that majority of articles have been published under the subject area of “Business, Management and Accounting.” Interestingly, the results of the network maps slightly differ from that of citation table. Practical implications This paper is useful for any reader or researcher who wants to understand the trends of “puffery in advertising” in terms of citation analysis, authors and affiliation countries, and prominent years with maximum citations, which would further enable them to discover emerging research areas, potential research collaborations and publications. Originality/value To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first ever bilbiometric study on “puffery in advertising” providing a bird’s-eye view of the essential trends.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted existing educational systems worldwide. Due to lockdowns in several countries, the educational institutions have been directed by governments to move towards online learning. The challenge for educational institutions and faculty members is to assess the influence of various factors that would enable adoption of online learning by students in higher education. This study investigates the influence of awareness of COVID-19 (AOC19), computer & internet self-efficacy (CISE), and online communication self-efficacy (OCSE) on perceived net benefits (NB) of the students and their intention towards the online learning (INT). The study further analyzes the mediating role of students’ attitude towards online learning (ATOL). Data of 1023 students of higher education across multiple universities in India were collected and analyzed using structural equation modelling through AMOS 24 and mediation analysis through ‘PROCESS’ macro for SPSS. The findings revealed that, AOC19 positively influenced students’ NB and INT; CISE had a significant inverse relationship with NB, and partially significant positive relationship with INT; OCSE was observed to be a significant predictor of NB with positive direct relationship; ATOL had a significant full mediation among CISE and NB, and acted as significant partial mediator between CISE and INT, AOC19 and NB, AO19 and INT, OCSE and NB, and OCSE and INT. This paper would be useful for the faculty members, institutions and education technology companies in the higher education domain by enabling an understanding of the attitude, perception and intention of the students towards online learning during the COVID-19 scenario.

Purpose The purpose of the present study is to synthesize the extant literature on augmented reality and virtual reality in the apparel industry using bibliometric and network visualization techniques. This paper also highlights the existing gaps in the literature and sets out the future research trajectory. Design/methodology/approach This study investigated research articles in the domain of augmented and virtual reality in the apparel industry to assess global trends in research production in this area, and top contributors to research by way of authors, journals, countries and institutions. The study carried out an analysis of 239 research articles from the Scopus database during the period 1995 to 2021. The study used open-source bibliometric tools such as Biblioshiny and VOSviewer to analyze the research literature over the search period and also identify emerging research avenues. Findings The bibliometric analysis reveals that there is significant interest in this research domain. A total of 673 authors contributed to the 239 research articles analyzed and the number of multi-author documents exceeded those by single authors. Research in this domain is led by China with the maximum number of articles in the data set followed by the USA and France. However, the USA has received the highest number of citations. Donghua University from China is the largest contributor to research in this domain with 13 articles in the data set. The keyword co-occurrence analysis indicates that “virtual reality” has the most number of co-occurrences and linkages with other keywords. Other important keywords include “augmented reality,” “virtual try-on” and “cloth simulation.” The network visualization exercise also revealed significant collaboration between different countries in this research domain. Practical implications The gaps highlighted in this study will act as a reference point for researchers to conduct future studies in the field of augmented and virtual reality in apparel industry. Practitioners will also gain a comprehensive understanding of this research domain. Originality/value This study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first attempt to integrate the disjoint literature of augmented and virtual reality in apparel industry through a mapping of the intellectual structure of this research domain. The study also contributes by way of providing a snapshot of future research avenues in the knowledge domain of augmented and virtual reality in the apparel industry.

PurposeGround handling services are important for effective aircraft operations in the air transportation system. Airlines often outsource these services to ground handling agents through business-to-business (B2B) marketing decisions. Therefore, this paper aims to address the problem of ground handling agent selection in the airline industry.Design/methodology/approachA real-world case study was carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the integrated Best Worst Method and fuzzy multi-attribute ideal real comparative analysis (F-MAIRCA) approach to solve ground handling agent selection problems under uncertainty and imprecision. A two-stage sensitivity analysis was also conducted to ensure the credibility and validity of the application.FindingsIn the weighting stage, “Quality” was determined as the most important criterion in terms of supplier performance. With regard to the performance of the ground handling agents, A2 was found as the optimal supplier in terms of both credibility and validity.Practical implicationsThis study enumerated several criteria that ground handling agents must meet in order to effectively supply services for the airlines. In addition, this study provides a novel framework from which managers can gain additional benefits from their businesses. Finally, it is concluded that this approach will help airline managers quantitatively in choosing the most appropriate ground handling agent.Originality/valueThe contributions of this study to the existing literature are in twofold. First, the authors propose a novel multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) approach to address the problem of supplier selection for airlines under uncertainty and imprecision. Second, the selection of ground handling agents from the B2B perspective is addressed for the first time in the literature.

In 1992, Naresh Goyal started on a journey to build the best airline in India, Jet Airways. With rising market share and revenues, Jet Airways began climbing up the ladder of success. It gradually became one of the household names in the Indian aviation sector. In 2005, it came up with an initial public offering (IPO) to reach greater heights with large investments from the funding raised. A ‘paradigm shift’ in the Indian airline business came in 2006 with the increased competition and entry of low-cost carriers. The rise in the competition impacted Jet’s turnover, which was ultimately reflected in the diminishing profitability margins. With a series of industry challenges and questionable managerial decisions, Jet became a debt-ridden and loss-making enterprise from being one of the leaders in the aviation sector. Eventually, in April 2019, Jet Airways temporarily ceased its operations because of a lack of funding available to sustain it. The consortium of lenders, led by State Bank of India (SBI), faced a serious dilemma; whether to revive the airline by looking for potential investors or declare Jet bankrupt and begin the bankruptcy proceedings.