Editorial

I have a pleasure to welcome you to the first issue of the International Journal of Management and Economics in 2018. We continue our efforts to maintain the high academic profile, diversity, and international recognition of our Journal. We have greatly increased our presence in indexing and full text data bases. Currently the IJME is covered by over 30 different services, including among others ProQuest, EBSCO, and EconLit. We are also proud to announce that since the beginning of this year we operate ScholarOne Manuscripts, the peer review and submission software by Clarivate Analytics. We hope that thanks to this fully integrated on-line publishing platform we will be able to process the increasing volume of submissions in a timely manner and to deliver better solutions for our authors and reviewers.

We have also enlarged our Editorial Board by inviting Thematic Editors for each of the disciplines covered by IJME: Prof. Izabela Kowalik will be helping us with submissions in management, Prof. Mariusz Próchniak and Dr. Piotr Maszczyk with papers in economics, and Dr. Katarzyna Sum will cover papers in finance.

This issue contains six papers covering various areas in economics and management. Four of them are based on empirical research and there are also two original conceptual works.

Andrea Szalavetz in the first article entitled “Sustainability-oriented cross-functional collaboration to manage trade-offs and interdependencies” identifies the barriers to environmental performance improvement that can be mitigated through cross-functional collaboration (CFC). She argues that CFC can effectively address trade-offs and interdependencies among different aspects of sustainability, and it fosters the architectural components of green capabilities. The reasoning is illustrated with adequate real-life cases of trade-offs and interdependencies encountered by practitioners.

In the second paper, “Leader Power, Conflict Handling Styles, and Subordinate Compliance: A Study on Information Technology Professionals in Turkey”, Ada T. Cenkci examines the impact of leaders’ power sources and styles of conflict management on subordinate behavioral and attitudinal compliance. Employing a large convenience sample of IT professionals in Turkey, the study reveals that subordinates’ behavioral compliance is positively influenced by leaders’ cooperative and dominating conflict management styles (CMS), expert and referent power, and legitimate power. Attitudinal compliance is positively affected by expert and referent power, and legitimate power, but negatively influenced by avoiding and dominating CMS.

The third article lays in the field of neural-science, namely neuromarketing. Urszula Garczarek-Bąk in the paper entitled “Eyetracking and EEG Research on Explicit and Implicit Factors Determining Private Labels Possible Purchase” applies modern methods of brain research in a managerial context in order to investigate private label purchase decisions of customers in five different retail chains. She finds that the greater left frontal activation (i.e. higher approach motivation) during the pre-decision period is positively correlated with an affirmative purchase decision. The eye-tracking study did not reveal the difference between women’s and men’s aesthetics sensitivity toward presented products. What is particularly interesting, the EEG research showed that decision makers were not influenced by price – this is contradictive to common intuition that cost is an important factor for private label products customers.

The next paper, entitled “A Concept for Ontology-Based Value of Cybersecurity Knowledge”, is by Adiel Aviad, Krzysztof Węcel, Witold Abramowicz. The authors argue that cybersecurity knowledge may have a value of its own and they suggest a market mechanism to foster the creation of this kind of value. They conceptually demonstrate how it is possible to increase the accessibility of knowledge and observe externalities from sharing thereof. A market mechanism like one described in the paper encourages creation of value by sharing the benefits. The process of value creation is additionally accelerated by mechanizing it. The proposed model also promotes the benefits of economy of scale by augmenting a lot of sources in parallel and makes the market and the competition more perfect through sharing of knowledge.

The fifth article, “Should Income Be Taken for Granted as a Sole Driver of Welfare? Bayesian Insight on the Relevance of Non-Income Drivers of Welfare”, is an interesting voice in a discussion on the relevance of non-income drivers of welfare within a general concept of welfare perception by individuals. Tomasz P. Wiśniewski takes a position that income should not be seen as the only driver of welfare, as there are also non-income factors (uncorrelated with income) that may affect individuals’ perception of welfare. The key issue of his approach depends on converting a subjective perception into a methodological Bayesian probability assessment. It turns out that the relevance of non-income factors for people’s perception is higher than the assumed 50% probability (i.e. almost 65%) of their conviction on that matter.

The final article of this issue, “Agglomeration Economies and Foreign Direct Investment in Advanced Business Services in Poland”, is by Artur Klimek. The paper focuses on a distinctive type of services, i.e., advanced business services (ABS) that have recently become an important part of the foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Central and Eastern Europe. The author points out the importance of agglomeration economies in the decision of the firms investing in Poland in ABS, in particular the concentration of supply factors, like availability of well-skilled and educated employees. On the other hand, local demand factors play a less important role due to specific features of ABS that typically are targeted to foreign markets anyway.

The last position of this issue is a book review. Włodzimierz Januszkiewicz reviews the work by Andżelika Kuźniar entitled “Międzynarodowy handel produktami wiedzy” (International Trade in Knowledge Products”). The book has been recently published in Polish by Warsaw School of Economics Print. The review in English is a unique opportunity to present its content to our international Readers.

We hope you will find many interesting facts and a lot of inspiration in the current issue of the International Journal of Management and Economics. Please enjoy reading!