Dr Ekaterina Murzacheva

Purpose: The expansion of online shopping aligned with challenging economic conditions have contributed to increasing fraudulent retail product returns. Retailers employ numerous interventions typically determined by embedded perspectives within the company (supply side) rather than consumer-based assessments of their effectiveness (demand side). This study aims to understand how customers evaluate counter-fraud measures on opportunistic returns fraud in the UK. Based on the Fraud Triangle and the Theory of Planned Behaviour, we develop an empirically informed framework to assist retail practice. Design/methodology/approach: We collected 485 valid survey responses about consumer attitudes regarding which interventions are effective against different types of returns fraud. First, a principal component section evaluates the policies' effectiveness to identify any policy grouping that could help prioritise specific sets of policies. Second, cluster analysis follows a two-stage approach, where cluster size is determined, and then survey respondents are partitioned into subgroups based on how similar their beliefs are regarding the effectiveness of anti-fraud policies. Findings: We identify policies relating to perceived effectiveness of interventions and create customer profiles to assist retailers in conceptualising potential opportunistic fraudsters. Our product returns fraud framework adopts a consumer perspective to capture the perceived behavioural control of potential fraudsters. Results suggest effectiveness of different types of interventions vary between different types of consumers, which leads to the development of managerial implications to combat the fraud. Originality/value: This study is unique in assessing the perceived effectiveness of a range of interventions based on data collection and advanced analytics to combat fraudulent product returns in omnichannel retail.

This paper re-visits the traditional model of the finance escalator, which outlines alternative financial pathways for entrepreneurs depending on their aspirations and stage of development. Building on social, spatial and institutional embeddedness perspectives, the dynamic and interactional challenges of financial decisions are captured through an exploratory interpretivist approach. Ten early funding journeys of entrepreneurs in Scotland, all of whom sought external funding, were scrutinized with the objective of revealing motivations, reasoning, and patterns behind funding decisions. Surprisingly, these entrepreneurs all initially sought value-added financial capital, but issues including control (perceived as ownership), speed of access, and external environmental pressures caused them to accept offers (often unsolicited) from familiar sources. As a result, a revised finance escalator is proposed. The extent to which these findings are context specific is discussed.

This paper examines the disruptive nature of financial innovations available to small firms by the growing range of online platforms that have emerged in the United Kingdom since the financial crisis. It is unveiled that finance provided to small firms via such mechanisms is not identical to more traditional sources, and its adoption therefore cannot be said to be simply a question of direct substitution based, for example on a price comparison. These offer a series of important advantages over more traditional sources of early-stage capital for entrepreneurs seeking funding. Service innovations around security, flexibility of terms, speed of access and transparency of pricing are as important as price considerations for many users, as are innovations made possible by the way, these online markets are structured and in particular in the way these innovative structures allow important types of risk to be dispersed and mitigated.

Drawing on human capital, intersectionality and mixed embeddedness theory, we test hypotheses on the relationship between gender differences in human capital and gender differences in nascent entrepreneurial activity across geographical space, and the moderating effect of spatially concentrated deprivation on this relationship. Using UK data from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, we find that the disadvantaged position of female nascent entrepreneurs arises from social exclusion, and specifically that the gender differences in nascent entrepreneurial activity are directly related to differences in general and specific human capital across locales. Moreover, in deprived locations, women as a group do not gain from any human capital advantage they might have over men, causing a double disadvantage for women. Our results make a novel contribution to the literature on disadvantage entrepreneurship, and we discuss policy options to tackle double disadvantage in deprived locales.