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Retailers have recently leveraged store-loyal customers’ store attachment to maintain customer relationships and motivate patronage intentions. However, the COVID-19 outbreak has driven customer migration from offline to mobile channels. Mobile retail applications (APPs) have been used by numerous retailers to reach their customers. Nonetheless, it has yet to be determined (1) whether store attachment can facilitate (or impede) the adoption of mobile retail APPs and (2) whether store-loyal customers will continue visiting offline stores in the post-pandemic era. To address these questions, we propose a theoretical account using integrated theories on trust transfer and store attachment.

We conducted multi-stage, longitudinal field surveys in two cities of mainland China: Beijing and Guangzhou. From two rounds of data collection, 237 and 103 responses were obtained in March 2022. Hypotheses were tested by partial least squares – structural equation modelling (PLS–SEM).

Results showed that customer trust in an offline retailer can be transferred to the retailer’s mobile APP at the pre-adoption stage, facilitating APP adoption. Notably, store-loyal customers who exhibited a strong attachment to the physical store of a retailer were more inclined to transfer their trust to the mobile APP of the retailer. This occurrence leads to an increased adoption rate, enhanced post-adoption satisfaction and increased inclination to continue (rather than discontinue) usage.

This study is the first to investigate the changes in store-loyal customers' shopping behaviour in the mobile retail era and in the post-COVID-19 pandemic recovery. Our findings elucidate the role of physical store attachment in the trust-transfer mechanism. Furthermore, store attachment may not prevent customers’ channel migration behaviour. Retailers may have to re-consider how to manage channel cannibalisation issues in the post-pandemic recovery.

After two decades of village elections, the quality of village elections, rather than the utility of village elections, becomes the focus of current research. Based on nationally representative data at the village level, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of voting participation, focussing on the effect of election quality. The findings show that competitiveness, vote buying and manipulation are the key determinants significantly affecting village turnouts. The results are robust to alternative specifications.

As discussed, the authors take three measures for villagers’ willingness to vote, e.g. raw turnout (RT), voluntary turnout (VT) and direct turnout (DT). The authors include four types of elements which affect the willingness to participate, the electoral quality, procedure and implementation, individual rationality, village social structure and villages’ level of modernization. The causal mechanism of elements and turnout can be written as: Turnout=f (election quality and procedure, individual rationality, mobilization structure, modernization).

Competitiveness, vote buying and manipulation affect village turnout at significance level. More competitive elections tend to attract high participation of voting, and the effects on VT are the largest ones in magnitude, comparing with RT and DT, as well as manipulation. Village voters do not like to be fooled by nominal voting. If they recognize that elections are likely to be manipulated by township government, the turnout rates drop drastically. The effect associated with manipulation is larger than those associated with competitiveness and vote buying, indicating intervention from up-level government might block the improving process of election massively.

It is the first paper that address the effect of election quality on vote participation.

Gives a bibliographical review of the finite element meshing and remeshing from the theoretical as well as practical points of view. Topics such as adaptive techniques for meshing and remeshing, parallel processing in the finite element modelling, etc. are also included. The bibliography at the end of this paper contains 1,727 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with presented subjects that were published between 1990 and 2001.