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The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of brand origin (BO) misperception (hereafter BOM) or non-identification on brand equity. Besides, the current study investigates the moderating role of brand strength in the relationship between BOM and brand equity.

The current study adopted a 4 (BO identification: favorable BOM vs adverse BOM vs non-identification vs correct identification) × 2 (brand strength: strong vs weak) between-subjects design. A total number of 547 participants performed assessments on the automotive brand. The current study selected three strong brands and three weak brands for tests. In the experiment, respondents had to associate the brand with its country of origin. The assignment of BO conditions was based upon respondents' natural responses provided. ANOVA was used for data analysis.

The results indicate that as compared to correct BO identification, BOM (either adverse or favorable) or non-identification exerts a more negative impact on brand equity. Moreover, the study demonstrates that brand strength moderates the effect of perceived BO on brand equity.

This study provides empirical support to the notion that BOM is detrimental to brand equity. Specifically, when adverse BOM occurs, a strong brand suffers more from the negative consequences resulted than a weak brand does. Conversely, when consumers misattribute the BO to a country with a stronger image than its real origin (i.e. favorable BOM), the resulting negative effect is reversed. Moreover, the non-identification of BO hurts the brand equity of both strong and weak brands.

This study aims to analyze the determinants influencing Chinese manufacturing companies in implementing lean manufacturing (LM).

The determinants to be explored in this study consist of technological, organizational and environmental (TOE) dimensions. A questionnaire survey was conducted on Chinese manufacturing companies, and 208 samples were analyzed.

The findings show that the relative advantage of LM and organizational support have significantly positive effects on Chinese manufacturing firms’ adoption of LM. The complexity of LM, quality of human resources, organizational readiness, customer pressure, international situation, governmental support and environmental uncertainty do not have significant effects.

This paper contributes to the literature by using the TOE model to explore the factors influencing LM adoption in the Chinese manufacturing industry.

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that affect managers’ ethical decision-making in export-oriented readymade garments in Bangladesh.

This is an empirical study based on the quantitative approach undertaking a cross-sectional survey method where a convenience sampling technique was applied. The analysis was done using partial least square structural equation model applying Smart-PLS version 3.0.

This study confirmed that all the components of cognitive appraisal processes, including perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, response efficacy and self-efficacy, have a significant influence on attitude. Attitude, in turn, mediates the relationship between these variables and the behavioural intention of ethical practice, except for perceived vulnerability. Besides, moral obligation is found to mediate the relationship between attitude, self-efficacy and the behavioural intention of ethical decision-making. The study also found that ethical climate and subjective norms have a direct influence on behavioural intention. Furthermore, behavioural intention, ethical climate and self-efficacy are positively related to actual decision-making behaviour. However, this study did not find any direct effect of subjective norms on moral obligation.

The organization should include an emphasis on building ethical culture and setting an ethical code of conduct within the organization to sustain ethical practice within employees. However, the practitioner should work on enhancing self-efficacy to curb unethical practices by individuals.

This research contributes to the management of garments manufacturers by a practical and theoretical understanding of what influences the ethical behavioural decision-making process. Valuable guidelines are provided on the ethical decision-making process in the garments manufacturing companies for future researchers.

While many companies begin to promote ethically produced products, much remains to be known about consumers' buying intention toward these products. This paper attempts to integrate the theory of planned behavior and the Hunt–Vitell theory of marketing ethics to explore the buying intention toward ethically produced food products in a developing economy.

Data were collected through a questionnaire survey in Bangladesh. Structural equation modeling technique was used to test the research model.

Research findings showed that deontological evaluation and teleological evaluation have significantly positive effects on perceived behavioral control and subjective norm. Perceived behavioral control, subjective norm, attitude, hedonic and utilitarian value have significantly positive effects on buying intention toward ethically produced foods.

The results are practically and theoretically meaningful because the integrated model holds well explanatory power to predict consumers' intention toward buying ethical foods and thereby understand consumers' ethical decision-makings.

Developing attention-aware systems and interfaces based on eye tracking technology could revolutionize mainstream human–computer interaction to make the interaction between human beings and computers more intuitive, effective and immersive than can be achieved traditionally using a computer mouse. This paper aims to propose an eye-controlled interactive reading system (ECIRS) that uses human eyes instead of the traditional mouse to control digital text to support screen-based digital reading.

This study uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of an experimental group and a control group of learners who, respectively, used the ECIRS and a mouse-controlled interactive reading system (MCIRS) to conduct their reading of two types of English-language text online – pure text and Q&A-type articles on reading comprehension, cognitive load, technology acceptance, and reading behavioural characteristics. Additionally, the effects of learners with field-independent (FI) and field-dependence (FD) cognitive styles who, respectively, used the ECIRS and MCIRS to conduct their reading of two types of English-language text online – pure text and Q&A-type articles on reading comprehension are also examined.

Analytical results reveal that the reading comprehension of learners in the experimental group significantly exceeded those in the control group for the Q&A article, but the difference was insignificant for the pure text article. Moreover, the ECIRS improved the reading comprehension of field-independent learners more than it did that of field-dependent learners. Moreover, neither the cognitive loads of the two groups nor their acceptance of the technology differed significantly, whereas the reading time of the experimental group significantly exceeded that of the control group. Interestingly, for all articles, the control group of learners read mostly from top to bottom without repetition, whereas most of the learners in the experimental group read most paragraphs more than once. Clearly, the proposed ECIRS supports deeper digital reading than does the MCIRS.

This study proposes an emerging ECIRS that can automatically provide supplementary information to a reader and control a reading text based on a reader’s eye movement to replace the widely used mouse-controlled reading system on a computer screen to effectively support digital reading for English language learning. The implications of this study are that the highly interactive reading patterns of digital text with ECIRS support increase motivation and willingness to learn while giving learners a more intuitive and natural reading experience as well as reading an article online with ECIRS support guides learners’ attention in deeper digital reading than does the MCIRS because of simultaneously integrating perceptual and cognitive processes of selection, awareness and control based on human eye movement.

With the fast growth in China's economy and China's accession into WTO, the demand for logistics services has been growing significantly in China. China's logistics service providers need to pay more attention to adopt more efficient logistics technologies to provide better services for their customers. The purpose of this paper is to study the factors affecting the innovation in logistics technologies for logistics service providers in China.

Questionnaire survey on logistics service providers in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen is conducted to study the innovation in logistics technologies by China's logistics industry. Logistics technologies are classified into four types: data acquisition technologies, information technologies, warehousing technologies, and transportation technologies. The influencing factors include internal and external factors. Regression analysis is used to analyze the influences of these factors on technological innovation.

The innovation in logistics technologies is significantly positively influenced by organizational encouragement, quality of human resources, environmental uncertainty, and governmental support for logistics service providers in China.

Owing to the lack of empirical research on the adoption of logistics technologies in China, this paper provides an empirical study on the factors influencing the innovation in logistics technologies by logistics service providers in China. Our research results can help China's logistics companies develop better strategies to adopt innovative logistics technologies, and can make them become innovation‐based logistics service providers.

The purpose of this paper is to study the factors influencing the adoption of RFID technology and the relation between RFID technology adoption and supply chain performance for logistics companies.

Determinants of RFID technology adoption are analyzed from the technological, organizational and environmental perspectives. Supply chain performance measurements consist of financial and non‐financial indices. Data were collected by means of delivering questionnaires to logistics service providers in China. A total of 574 logistics companies were analyzed.

Logistics companies' willingness to adopt RFID technology are significantly influenced by the explicitness and accumulation of technology, organizational encouragement for innovation, quality of human resources, and governmental support. There is a positive association between the willingness to adopt RFID technology and supply chain performance for logistics service providers.

As a single‐country and single‐industry study, the current research may be limited in its generalizability.

The growth of China's economy hinges to a large extent on the ability of the logistics industry to operate efficiently and effectively in the global supply chain system. China's logistics service providers need to adopt more efficient logistics technologies to provide better supply chain services for their customers. This paper provides some suggestions for governmental officials, logistics companies, and RFID technology providers in advancing the application of RFID in supply chains.

This paper may be the first empirical research in analyzing the adoption of RFID technology and its association with supply chain performance in the logistics industry, especially for China's logistics industry.

This study aims to investigate how radio frequency identification (RFID) is used and opinions about RFID in two world-leading logistics companies and four organisations in their supply network. Operations strategy was used to understand the sources of operations improvement and associated competitive advantage. However, the complexity of operations strategy hampers an evaluation of the benefits of RFID for logistics processes. We can evaluate RFID applied in logistics processes by thoroughly applying the theories of operations strategy.

Participants were recruited based on their roles and level of experience using non-probability purposive sampling. The findings were checked with participants to confirm interpretations and to ask confirming questions as necessary. Interviews were conducted as video chats. NVivo Pro was used for the fragmentation, classification, management and analysis of the primary and secondary data, allowing themes and relationships to emerge inductively. The literature was compared with the primary data.

The findings reinforce the argument that a firm can improve more than one performance objective at a time; show the relevance of technology and an operations performance objective; support the argument that top management strategies to implement technology should be aligned with the operations strategy and business aspirations.

This research area would benefit from more detailed investigation to strengthen the arguments for the relationships between RFID capabilities and elements of operations strategy for logistics processes. The findings indicate that top management support of strategically aligned RFID projects will have the best chance of success if they create and leverage valuable data whilst addressing identified competitive priorities.

Smart connected devices, such as RFID, give firms access to big data, which can be used to develop long-term processes, to achieve competitive advantage and access new forms of economic value. RFID cumulatively influences the operations performance objectives of cost, quality, flexibility, speed, dependability and technology. Business strategies based on technology should align with operations strategy.

The sharing of operational performance results, both before and after the implementation of RFID, will help to build learning within operations, increase the support of senior management and improve the performance of logistics processes with the associated benefits for society at large.

RFID is often evaluated in terms of theoretical technical or cost benefits. This research evaluates RFID by assessing and suggesting how it can contribute to operations strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between the cost of debt (COD) and auditor industry expertise using Taiwanese data. Since previous studies (Li et al., 2010) have only examined the relation between industry specialization and COD at the audit firm level in western countries, the authors further examine the association between industry specialization and COD at the individual auditor level in an Asian context.

The authors use the interest rate on the firm’s debt as a proxy variable for the COD (Francis, Khurana and Pereira, 2005). The authors adopt three different methods to measure industry specialization, which consist of the auditors’ market share in terms of client sales and number of clients, and client assets.

The results indicate that the clients of industry specialists at individual auditor levels have a lower COD.

First, the authors extend the research of Li et al. (2010) and find that the clients of individual auditor industry specialists also have a lower COD. Second, the authors also believe the evidence on the effects of industry expertise at the individual auditor level may have policy implications for regulators and public investors. Finally, in contrast to works carried out in the US market, the authors provide empirical evidence for the relation between industry specialization and COD in an Asian market.

The purposes of this paper are 1) to develop model of long term financial health for logistics companies in Thailand 2) to identify factors that determine long term financial stability. Many researchers currently provide factors affecting financial health. Most factors refer to financial ratios, not many non-financial ratios such as age and size have been mentioned. This paper considers both financial and non-financial ratios that affect financial performance of Logistics companies in Thailand. The study has covered some interesting non-financial ratios such as Nationality of Shareholders, type of network in Logistics Company, growth rate (consisted of sales growth rate/profit growth rate/asset growth rate / Liability growth rate) and variable of growth rates. The target group is 110 logistics companies in Thailand enlisted from Department of International Trade Promotion Ministry of Commerce, Royal Thai Government. The group is divided into three categories according to financial health of company; Healthy financial, Unhealthy (Distress) and normal situation. The Multidiscriminant Analysis (MDA) is applied to analyze the differentiations among the three categories. Significant variables from MDA will be used as the independent variables for Multimonial Logistic Regression Analysis (MLRA) to identify factors that determine long terms financial stability. This paper find CF/D, RE/TA, BE/TL, Size, Age, Type of network, Nationality of Shareholders and Number of Shareholders are significant factors determine long term financial stability of Logistics company in Thailand.