Special issue: 2nd International Business Analytics Conference

The 2nd International Business Analytics Conference 2022, was organized by the Department of Business Analytics at KJ Somaiya Institute of Management in partnership with New Jersey City University (NJCU). The event brought together esteemed industry specialists and academicians for a look at the decision-making process through the lens of Machine Learning, AI and advanced Data Analytics.

The central theme of the conference was to foster a discussion in multidisciplinary avenues under the context of business analytics and how this field has evolved and what the upcoming developments mean for the future.

This year the conference was truly multidisciplinary with national and international paper submissions. Each paper was carefully evaluated by esteemed session chairs. ‘A Neural Network Approach to Examine the Continuous Usage of Mobile Food Delivery Apps’ by Ahmad A. Rabaa’i, Xiaodi Zhu, J. D. Jayaraman, Preeta P. Jha and Thi D. M. Nguyen bagged the best paper award. ‘Impact of Microfinance on Enhanced Wellbeing of Self-help Group Women in Post Covid Scenario’ by Dr. Rinku Jain, Dr. Rupali Paranjpe, Dr. Prerna Manik Mahindroo and Dr. Kirti Arekar was awarded the second best.

The nine full length papers for this special issue of MASA-KJ SIM were selected among all the accepted papers in the conference by the Guest Editors Dr. Shweta Dixit Kadam, Dr. Prerna Manik Mahindroo, Dr. J. D. Jayaraman, Dr. Sanjiwani Kumar, Dr. Rinku Jain, and Prof. Suvechcha Sengupta based on relevance to the objective of the journal. The papers were sent to domain experts for blind review process and upon the screening process the revised papers were selected. Research papers were also revised after the valuable feedback and suggestions by the Co-Editor-in-Chief Stan Lipovetsky. The papers which transform decision making through Machine Learning, AI, advance data analytics are selected. We highly appreciate the cooperation of the authors in organizing this special issue.

V. Agarwal, S. Malhotra and A. Kaul contribute a paper titled “What is Stopping us from Implementing Society 5.0?: A Mixed Method Study”. The study highlights the impediments to the implementation of society 5.0 in emerging economies. The research was carried out in two steps. In the first step, the themes were generated through NVIVO. Subsequently, the themes generated were taken as the factors to be prioritized in the cause-and-effect groups through a multi-criteria decision-making approach, namely Fuzzy-DEMATEL.

S. Sharma, M. Kalra and A. Sharma accord a paper titled “Amazon Customer Service: Big Data Analytics”. The paper discusses models which are an amalgamation of customer ratings, their respective reviews and a sentiment score derived from the same review and subsequently help in defining customer clusters with different personalities based on their reviews and ratings.

A. Bhute presents a paper titled “Financial Analytics for Interlinking Stock Market and Macroeconomic Performance- Post Financial Crisis 2008”. The paper made use of financial descriptive analytics to explore the interconnection between prominent macroeconomic indicators and stock market activity past ten years of the financial crisis of 2008.

A. A. Rabaa’i, X. Zhu, J. D. Jayaraman, Thi D. M. Nguyen and P. P. Jha contribute a paper titled “The Use of Machine Learning to Predict the Main Factors that Influence the Continuous Usage of Mobile Food Delivery Apps” which predicts the continuous use of Mobile Food Delivery Apps (MFDAs) and explores the variables that influence this utilization using a novel Machine Learning (ML) based approach.

N. Garg and N. Gupta present a paper titled “Industrial Adoption & Transition Towards Sustainable Renewable Energy”. The authors have identified many critical and influencing variables to most of the prominent questions today of rising carbon dioxide emissions and the need to increase the contribution of renewable energy to the total energy mix.

R. Jain, R. Paranjpe, P. M. Mahindroo and K. Arekar accord a paper titled “Impact of Microfinance on Enhanced Wellbeing of Self-Help Group Women in Post-Covid Scenario”. The study identifies the impact of Microfinance, Micro Credit and Micro Savings on Decision-making ability of SHG women in post COVID era.

S. Dangra, N. Pandey, S. Sengupta and S. D. Kadam present a paper titled “Application of Cluster Analysis for customer segmentation: Study on Menstrual cups”. The authors investigated the issues and the reasons behind the low acceptance rates of sanitary products in an urban setting.

K. A. Sood, A. K. Darekar, P. Mishra, B. Maharana and S. Kumar contribute a paper titled “Feel The Decibels Closely – Earphones Preference Study Using Conjoint Analysis”. The study seeks to understand the existing consumer preferences for different features of Bluetooth Earphones using Conjoint Analysis. The outcome of the analysis provides market stakeholders with a yardstick to guide their design decisions and formulate sustainable long-term business strategies.

H. Dong and X. Guo accord a paper titled “Option Price Predictability, Splines, and Expanded Rationality” in which they used the spline method to forecast option prices by using fifteen years of daily SPY American option contract prices.

We convey our special thanks to Dr. Sarjinder Singh, MASA Editor-in-Chief, and Dr. Stan Lipovetsky, Co- Editor-in-Chief, for their constant and unconditional support right from the inception of the conference to this Special issue.