Omnichannel Business

The widespread diffusion of digital technologies along with evolving consumer behaviors and requirements have fostered the emergence of omnichannel businesses, i.e., firms that can exploit integrated processes and information systems to realize a seamless and consistent consumer experience across a plenitude of digital and physical channels. To date, omnichannel research has been cluttered and characterized by significant terminological ambiguity that creates unnecessary challenges for researchers and markeeters trying to navigate and advance research and practice in this area. This fundamentals article seeks to address this problem by presenting a definition of omnichannel business that is grounded in its unique characteristics involving technology, organizational, and market perspectives and clearly distinguishes omnichannel from other terms, such as multi-channel or cross-channel. We leverage this conceptual clarity to analyze and structure the previous research on omnichannel business and conclude with an integrated framework that signifies fields of interest for future omnichannel business research.

NEGATIVE POWERS OF INTEGRATED PROCESSES

This paper derives the limit distribution of the rescaled sum of the absolute value of an integrated process with continuously distributed innovations raised to a negative power less than $-$ 1, and of the analogous statistic that is obtained using the same function of an integrated process but only considering positive values of the integrated process. We show that the limit behavior of this statistic is determined by the values of the integrated process that are closest to 0, and find the limit behavior of the values of the integrated process that are closest to 0.

Monitoring Cointegrating Polynomial Regressions: Theory and Application to the Environmental Kuznets Curves for Carbon and Sulfur Dioxide Emissions

This paper develops residual-based monitoring procedures for cointegrating polynomial regressions (CPRs), i.e., regression models including deterministic variables and integrated processes, as well as integer powers, of integrated processes as regressors. The regressors are allowed to be endogenous, and the stationary errors are allowed to be serially correlated. We consider five variants of monitoring statistics and develop the results for three modified least squares estimators for the parameters of the CPRs. The simulations show that using the combination of self-normalization and a moving window leads to the best performance. We use the developed monitoring statistics to assess the structural stability of environmental Kuznets curves (EKCs) for both CO2 and SO2 emissions for twelve industrialized countries since the first oil price shock.

Heartbeat-evoked potentials during interoceptive-exteroceptive integration are not consistent with precision-weighting

Interoceptive-exteroceptive integration is fundamental for a unified interactive experience of the world with the body. Predictive coding accounts propose that these integrated signals operate predictively, with regulation by precision-weighting. Heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs) are one means to investigate integrated processing. In a previous study, consistent with predictive coding characterisations of precision-weighting, we observed modulation of HEPs by attention. However, we found no evidence of HEP modulation by participants’ interoceptive ability, despite the characterisation by predictive coding theories of trait abilities as a similar reflection of differential precision-weighting. In this study, we sought to more sensitively test the hypothesised trait-precision influences on HEPs by using an individually-adjusted measure of interoceptive performance. However, contrary to a precision-weighted predictive coding framework, we failed to find evidence in support of the HEP modulations by attentional-precision or trait-precision. Nonetheless, we observed robust HEP effects indicative of an expectation of a sound on the basis of a heartbeat -i.e. interoceptive-exteroceptive integration. It is possible that under our more individually-tailored task, participants relied less on attentional-precision to ‘boost’ predictions due to an enhanced perception of cardio-audio synchrony. Furthermore, assessing interoceptive ability is challenging, thus variations in performance may not accurately reflect trait-precision variations. Nevertheless, in sum, our findings are inconsistent with a precision-weighted prediction error view of the HEP, and highlight the need for clearer definitions of the manipulation and measurement of precision in predictive coding. Finally, our robust interoceptive-exteroceptive integration HEP effects may provide a valuable tool for investigating such integration in both clinical conditions and cognition.Impact statementWe investigate heart-evoked potentials during interoceptive-exteroceptive integration to determine whether cross-modal integrated processes operate under a precision-weighted predictive coding framework. Using a more sensitive individually-tailored task, we found no evidence of the modulation of cardio-audio expectation by attention or individual differences in interoceptive perception (i.e. by state or trait measures of precision). Nonetheless, we replicate evidence of cardiac-driven predictions of auditory stimuli, providing a potential tool for investigating their relationship with emotion and embodied selfhood.