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This study investigates how a firm's structural embeddedness, the structural position in a supply network that consists of major customers, influences the acquisition of supplier trade credit. Specifically, this study examines how network interconnectedness, network integration and network independence of a firm affect its ability to acquire supplier trade credit.

This study utilizes financial data from Compustat to build a longitudinal dataset of manufacturing firms from 1998 to 2013. Customer segment disclosure data are used to construct firm-level network variables. A fixed effect regression approach is used for estimation.

The study results show that network interconnectedness is negatively associated with supplier trade credit, while network integration is positively associated with supplier trade credit. Network independence does not influence the extent of supplier trade credit. The post hoc analysis shows that the effects of the hypothesized factors vary under different product categories and credit ratings.

This study broadens the supply chain finance literature by showing how a firm's embedded network structural position can influence its ability to obtain supplier trade credit.

Prior studies on major customer relationships (i.e. embedded ties) focus mostly on the ties between a focal firm and its immediate customers, hindering the understanding of the influence of indirect ties (both upstream and downstream) on a focal firm's operational performance. In this study, the authors analyze how a focal firm's upstream and downstream connectedness and network location affect its productive efficiency.

Utilizing Compustat segment files, the authors constructed large-scale major customer networks covering the period 2007–2013. The authors applied a fixed-effect panel stochastic frontier model to conduct estimation. Moreover, the authors applied an endogenous panel stochastic frontier model to ensure the robustness of the main analysis.

The authors found that a focal firm's upstream and downstream connectedness both have a positive influence on a firm's productive efficiency, whereas a focal firm's centeredness in the major customer network has a negative influence on productive efficiency. Moreover, it was found that centeredness lessens the positive influences of upstream and downstream connectedness on productive efficiency. The post hoc analysis further confirmed that a focal firm's indirect ties, both upstream and downstream, positively influence a focal firm's productive efficiency.

This study contributes to the literature by evaluating the relative effectiveness of a focal firm's direct and indirect major customer ties, both upstream and downstream. More importantly, this study suggests potential exploitation–exploration trade-offs (i.e. productive efficiency vs. innovation) triggered by a firm's network location.

This study aims to explore the relations among inter‐organizational, organizational, technical factors, inter‐organizational systems (IOS) use, IOS performance and long‐term relationship.

To test the research hypotheses, this study primarily used LISREL 8.52 to do the SEM in order to ensure the relation across various dimensions. After SEM, path analysis is applied to test each of the hypotheses.

The findings of this study show that organizations exerting more power on suppliers are more likely to be aggressive in expanding the extent of IOS use. Organizations with strong executive support for IOS are more likely to be aggressive in expanding the extent of IOS use, and the extent of IOS use has significant and positive moderating effects on long‐term relationships and IOS performance.

Future studies may focus on competition pressure and IS compatibility. It may increase the number of samples, while including small companies for the study, in order to achieve generality.

This study found that IOS will not only improve a company's productivity, product quality and costs, but also strengthen the long‐term relationship with their partner. Both buyers and suppliers can pay attention about how to improve and expand the extent of IOS use by three major factors: inter‐organizational, organizational, and technological perspectives.

This study is the first to examine three dimensions of factors (inter‐organizational, organizational, and technical factors) and their interaction with the use of IOS. This study is also the first to simultaneously discuss the relationships among IOS usage, IOS performance and long‐term relationships.

This paper is a study of the current trends and conditions of electronic resources for Chinese studies, based on a recent survey on the Internet of 29 Chinese libraries in North America and eight Chinese libraries in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The survey discussed current electronic resources for Chinese studies, with a union list of major Chinese language databases currently used in libraries in Asia and the US. Current views on the use and development of electronic resources for Chinese studies were summarised.

Looks at consumer research in Greater China including Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Maps out the contributions within this area and guides future research. Examines the state of the art over the 1979‐97 period, with particular emphasis on the topics that have been researched, the extent of the theory development in the field and the methodologies used in conducting research. Uses content analysis to review 75 relevant articles. Suggests that, while a considerable breadth of topics have been researched, there remains much to be done, there is further room for theoretical development in Chinese consumer behaviour studies; and the methodologies used need improvement and further refinement.

Theories frequently used by researchers’ only offer limited insight, they do not explain why some multinationals continue to invest in some countries despite being rated low on the reasons explained by economic and comparative advantage theories. The paper examines the attractiveness of Australia as an investment destination for US based multinational corporations. By using Porter’s national advantage theory and other variables of country attractiveness, it examines what makes Australia an attractive destination. Within the fast moving consumer goods industry, Australia was found to be attractive for three reasons: incentives offered by the government, low risk and cultural distance. There is evidence that culture has an effect on the choice of foreign investment venture structure well ahead of market size, tariffs, growth and location to cultural similarity. The aim was not only to generate ideas for future more rigorous research but also to investigate the impact critical to elements, such as culture, that make foreign investments attractive.

The Communist revolution in China has led to the appearance in this country of increasing numbers of Chinese books in Russian translation. The Chinese names in Cyrillic transcription have presented many librarians and students with a new problem, that of identifying the Cyrillic form of a name with the customary Wade‐Giles transcription. The average cataloguer, the first to meet the problem, has two obvious lines of action, and neither is satisfactory. He can save up the names until he has a chance to consult an expert in Chinese. Apart altogether from the delay, the expert, confronted with a few isolated names, might simply reply that he could do nothing without the Chinese characters, and it is only rarely that Soviet books supply them. Alternatively, he can transliterate the Cyrillic letters according to the system in use in his library and leave the matter there for fear of making bad worse. As long as the writers are not well known, he may feel only faintly uneasy; but the appearance of Chzhou Ėn‐lai (or Čžou En‐laj) upsets his equanimity. Obviously this must be entered under Chou; and we must have Mao Tse‐tung and not Mao Tsze‐dun, Ch'en Po‐ta and not Chėn' Bo‐da. But what happens when we have another . . . We can hardly write Ch'en unless we know how to represent the remaining elements in the name; yet we are loth to write Ch'en in one name and Chėn' in another.

Among developing countries, the Republic of China in Taiwan (hereinafter Taiwan) has been experiencing economic growth accompanied by improving income distribution. Between 1964 and 1980, the average annual growth rate of the real gross national product was 9.92 per cent (Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD), 1982, p. 23). In the same period, the income ratio between the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent of families dropped from 5.33 to 4.17 and the Gini coefficient decreased from 0.36 to 0.30 (CEPD, 1982, p. 54; Directorate‐General of Budget Accounting and Statistics, 1980, (DGBAS), p. 44). To put it somewhat dif‐ferently, in 1964 the lowest fifth of households received 7.71 per cent of total personal income, and the highest fifth 41.07 per cent. But in 1980, the income share of the lowest fifth increased to 8.82 per cent while that of the highest fifth decreased to 36.80 per cent. The condition of greater equality in income distribution appears more obvious in the capital city of Taipei. In 1981, for instance, its Gini coefficient was estimated to be only 0.28 (Taipei Bureau of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, 1981, (TBBAS), P. 24).

In this chapter, Mousumi De presents the principles and implications of CRT in the context of Asian and Asian American experiences including the perspective, features, strategies, and new directions on how to facilitate the preparation of teacher candidates and work with all teachers to understand the complexity of the Asian and Asian American identity, their racialized experiences, and their sociohistorical, transnational contexts that continue to influence their lived experiences. This chapter highlights the important issues and challenges facing Asians and Asian Americans that have been camouflaged by their stereotypical treatment as model minorities. It also shares the work of many scholars on approaches for promoting diversity and inclusion, such as implementing anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and inclusive history curricula, cultural citizenship education, teaching for social justice, and culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teaching for addressing the marginalization of Asians and Asian Americans.

It is always of great importance for managers in organizations to evaluate their staff members and create incentive systems, using instruments such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and DEA-R (DEA models based on ratio analysis). The purpose of this paper is to propose a two-stage network incentives system for commercial banks.

Centralized Resource Allocation (CRA) models make it possible to project all decision-making units (DMUs) onto the efficient frontier by solving a single linear programming model. In this paper, we use our proposed DEA-R-based CRA models to evaluate commercial banks in a two-stage case when the only ratios available are the assets-to-costs and income-to-assets vectors.

Thirteen commercial banks modeled as two-stage networks were evaluated by the models proposed in two different cases of ratio data. Results suggest that the proposed methodology yields more accurate efficiency scores, thus allowing better discrimination among DMUs. Furthermore, evaluating the DMUs when they are structured as two-stage (or even three-stage) networks makes it possible to examine the incentives system in more detail. Therefore, the use of incentive systems by managers would allow a better focus on the priority activities of commercial banks and a faster movement toward the frontier of best practices.

The super-efficiency scores of a number of commercial banks are evaluated based on the CRA model, as a cornerstone criterion for the two-stage evaluation in DEA-R, thus allowing the rank of each commercial bank in terms of the incentives system rather on the performance of the productive process.