https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01102-x

The impact of digital technology has altered consumers’ choices for decades, which has fostered large amounts of eCommerce, including in the home furnishing business. Furthermore, due to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, consumer behaviours have changed, with consumer satisfaction influencing purchasing initiatives and decision-making online. There is insufficient research on online purchasing behaviours in the home furnishing sector in the context of Singapore. The advent of digitisation and the emergence of marketing through digital platforms compared to offline marketing have changed purchasing behaviours regarding home furnishing in Singapore. Research designs and methods, including realism philosophies, deductive approaches, a quantitative research method, a cross-sectional analysis in a descriptive research design and a questionnaire research instrument, were applied to the current study. The findings show a critical trend: consumers prefer an omnichannel approach when purchasing furniture, thereby enhancing competitive costs and personalisation designs and services. Consumers expect advantages both online and offline to maximise the benefits of their purchasing. © 2022, The Author(s).

Faced with an increasingly complex policy environment, policymakers have sought to leverage upon non-state resources and expertise to supplement their policy efforts. What have emerged are collaborative efforts at policymaking, founded upon close relations between public and private actors. This paper focuses on policy co-creation in Singapore’s financial sector, differentiating between formal and informal processes of policy co-creation. In doing so, it aims to provide a policy-oriented approach to understanding government-business relations that can both expand on and contribute to existing corporatist studies of economic development in Asia.

This paper examines the impact of fiduciary duties on collective asset sales in the case of owners acting as delegates for other owners, thereby potentially inducing conflicts of interests. Our identification strategy exploits a unique legal shock in Singapore, which established fiduciary duties in those transactions in the real estate market known colloquially as en bloc sales. The imposition of fiduciary duties caused the price premium of units sold via en bloc sales to increase over units ineligible for en bloc sale, as well as over units that, although eligible for en bloc sale, are sold individually. In addition, this valuation effect is stronger for projects with especially severe agency problems as proxied by high ownership turnover. This legal reform also affects the general private housing market beyond the en bloc premium: findings show that residential owners are increasingly willing to participate and reduce condominium turnover. Finally, we find that the stock price of public real estate developers responded positively to the legal reform, which indicates a possible overall positive welfare effect. Our study highlights the importance of judicial oversight for addressing agency conflicts in non-consensual asset-sale mechanisms. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.