As the COVID-19 has exposed the shortcomings of globalized supply chains and logistics networks, the numerical optimization of an offshore supply base with lower-risk suppliers is receiving significant attention from buying firms to consider as a practical option for resilience improvement and risk mitigation. Firms may improve their resilience performance by reducing their foreign supplier dependency and diversifying suppliers in number. However, reshaping their supply base with the increased foreign supplier redundancy may not be equally effective to every firm, and resilience improvement may not always result in greater economic returns. Therefore, business enterprises should have the ability to evaluate whether the chosen number of offshore suppliers will present the optimum conditions for the cost-effective resilience level they need to minimize supply disruption risks. To address this issue, we propose a risk-resilience-based supplier optimization model under short- and long-term contract procurement situations and assess the numerical optimization solutions against their impact on the financial performance of the buyers’ offshore supply chain. Focusing on the simultaneous effect of wholesale price uncertainty and the number of suppliers held in an offshore supply chain, we provide essential conditions and properties of the resulting optimization functions with decision rules to determine the best supplier choice set that can generate resilience for risk mitigation while maximizing supply chain profitability. We further show how buying firms can make optimum-number-of-offshore-supplier decisions with supply base resilience in different supplier preference ratings and unforeseeable supply disruption circumstances.

Papa Johns is a multinational publicly traded company that previous operated out of Louisville, KY with new operations now taking place in Atlanta, GA. Papa Johns focuses and operates in the pizza delivery and servicing industry. The purpose of this analysis is to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats throughout Papa Johns business model while also offering strategic alternatives. These alternatives are used as guidance to allow Papa Johns to garner increased profits for shareholders and a larger market presence in a heavily saturated pizza delivery industry. Papa Johns has been one of the major players in the food delivery industry but has historically been dominated by other pizza delivery brands such as Dominos, Pizza Hut, and Little Caesars Pizza. Many of the opportunities and threats identified in this analysis stem from Papa Johns position in the pizza delivery market.

The ecommerce has various methods how to attract the consumers and use various models of manipulating consumers that are called dark patterns. The topic of manipulating consumers has been analysed in the scientific literature; the research on the impact of manipulating consumers has been carried out, but the scope of research is not sufficient. This article serves to expand understanding the consumers attitude to manipulating consumers in e-commerce, to find out the scope of manipulation they consider to be applied on them, and to analyse the encountered manipulation situations and their impact. The results reveal the strength of impact of manipulative situations and the degree of manipulations.

This study examines the financial literacy and fragility of African Americans in the state of Arkansas. The National Financial Capability Study (NFCS) is administered by FINRA Investor Foundation. The NFCS is a survey designed to establish key indicators of Americans’ financial capability. The survey is nationally representative with more than 27,000 observations. The 2018 NFCS survey also contains data from the TIAA Institute-Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC) Personal Finance Index (P-Fin Index) to examine the current state of financial literacy among African Americans. The NFCS was administered in Arkansas to 500 respondents. Data was extracted from the 500 respondents to obtain only African Americans. There were 59 African American respondents. The sample includes 36 females (61%) ages 18 to over 65 and 23 males (39%) within same age range. This study identified the financial well-being of African Americans was well below that of the U.S. population prior to Covid-19. The national results showed that personal finance knowledge is lowest among African Americans. In Arkansas, 18% of respondents reported over the past year, their household spent more than their income. Nationally, African Americans (19%) reported spending more than their income. In Arkansas, 50% of individuals lack emergency funds and 53% of African Americans lack emergency funds. Study participants were asked six questions from the P-Fin Index. Arkansas respondents answered there or fewer questions correctly. Over 50% of African Americans in Arkansas answered two questions correctly and over 50% indicated they didn’t know.