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This research seeks to understand the drivers of outward foreign direct investments (FDIs) by state-owned emerging economy firms, the characteristics of their overseas FDI projects and investment locations, and the effects of home and host institutions on the market entry strategies, taking into account the legitimacy of state ownership.

The discussion is based on a comprehensive review of conceptual and empirical literature, as well as case studies available from recognized journals in the field.

State-owned emerging economy firms pursue outward FDIs to respond to policy incentives of the home government and to reduce its political influence over the firm. FDI projects are often large and risky and have low business values. They often enter countries where state ownership is perceived as more legitimate while engaging in legitimacy-building activities in these countries. When their home country has a high level of institutional restrictions, they are less likely to use acquisitions or hold high levels of equity control in foreign subsidiaries. To strengthen local legitimacy, they often use greenfield investments or share equity control with local firms in foreign subsidiaries, particularly when the host country is endowed with strategic assets or when it has a high level of institutional restrictions. However, when having high levels of state ownership or strong political connections, they often commit a high level of resources and hold a high level of equity control in foreign subsidiaries.

The literature mostly investigates the FDI of firms that are structurally separate from the institutions. When the institutions are endogenous as presented in this research, their strategic choices are substantially influenced by noncommercial political motives and perception on their political image.

Over the past decade internationalisation by banks from emerging market economies has accelerated. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of government and home country institutions in the international expansion process of Chinese commercial banks (CCBs).

By employing qualitative research method, data was collected via interviews from 30 senior managers based on a sample of 10 CCBs involved in international expansion over the 2001–2013 period.

The study finds that the Chinese government and home institutions play an important role in motivating CCBs’ internationalisation. Evidence from this research illustrates the effect institutional factors have in emerging economy firms’ internationalisation.

The managerial implication of these findings is that CCBs could take great advantage of government policy by developing proper internationalisation strategies and capabilities that would enhance CCBs’ competitiveness in global market. On the institutional front, removal of the institutional constraints imposed on Chinese banking industry is required. Using market-oriented management and regulatory rules rather than imposing administrative restrictions could therefore accelerate CCBs’ adaption and integration in the international market and enhance their competitive power.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the behaviors coordination mechanism, to maintain the system's long time‐scale and stable competitive capability, when the agents in the system focus on cooperating with each other.

Effort level for every agent, whose dynamics can be described as a stochastic partial differential equation, and the incentive of effort as the control of the corresponding agent, are introduced to describe agents' behavior abstracted. The cooperative stochastic differential game model is constructed: first, the optimal resolve trajectory mapping with profit maximization of the system are obtained, then the transitory imputation coupled with effort initial state of the system by introducing dynamic Shapley value imputation method. Based on the results obtained, the profit distribution strategies and the equilibration incentive compensation mechanism are given, due to the evolution law of the payoff and the state variable.

It is concluded that: the transitory compensation to agent for efforts and incentive, which can be changed with the system state at current and in history and in future changed, would guarantee the realization of the Shapley value imputation throughout the game horizon.

In this paper, the interactivity between agents in the system is considered first. The dynamical Shapley imputation mechanism and the transitory compensatory mechanism are provided to make the imputation more stable and feasible.

One challenge for tourism recommendation systems (TRSs) is the long-tail phenomenon of ratings or popularity among tourist products. This paper aims to improve the diversity and efficiency of TRSs utilizing the power-law distribution of long-tail data.

Using Sina Weibo check-in data for example, this paper demonstrates that the long-tail phenomenon exists in user travel behaviors and fits the long-tail travel data with power-law distribution. To solve data sparsity in the long-tail part and increase recommendation diversity of TRSs, the paper proposes a collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation algorithm combining with power-law distribution. Furthermore, by combining power-law distribution with locality sensitive hashing (LSH), the paper optimizes user similarity calculation to improve the calculation efficiency of TRSs.

The comparison experiments show that the proposed algorithm greatly improves the recommendation diversity and calculation efficiency while maintaining high precision and recall of recommendation, providing basis for further dynamic recommendation.

TRSs provide a better solution to the problem of information overload in the tourism field. However, based on the historical travel data over the whole population, most current TRSs tend to recommend hot and similar spots to users, lacking in diversity and failing to provide personalized recommendations. Meanwhile, the large high-dimensional sparse data in online social networks (OSNs) brings huge computational cost when calculating user similarity with traditional CF algorithms. In this paper, by integrating the power-law distribution of travel data and tourism recommendation technology, the authors’ work solves the problem existing in traditional TRSs that recommendation results are overly narrow and lack in serendipity, and provides users with a wider range of choices and hence improves user experience in TRSs. Meanwhile, utilizing locality sensitive hash functions, the authors’ work hashes users from high-dimensional vectors to one-dimensional integers and maps similar users into the same buckets, which realizes fast nearest neighbors search in high-dimensional space and solves the extreme sparsity problem of high dimensional travel data. Furthermore, applying the hashing results to user similarity calculation, the paper greatly reduces computational complexity and improves calculation efficiency of TRSs, which reduces the system load and enables TRSs to provide effective and timely recommendations for users.

Accurate presentation of the rock microstructure is critical to the grain-scale analysis of rock deformation and failure in numerical modelling. 3D granite microstructure modelling has only been used in limited studies with the mineral pattern often remaining poorly constructed. In this study, the authors developed a new approach for generating 2D and 3D granite microstructure models from a 2D image by combining a heterogeneous material reconstruction method (simulated annealing method) with Voronoi tessellation.

More specifically, the stochastic information in the 2D image is first extracted using the two-point correlation function (TPCF). Then an initial 2D or 3D Voronoi diagram with a random distribution of the minerals is generated and optimised using a simulated annealing method until the corresponding TPCF is consistent with that in the 2D image. The generated microstructure model accurately inherits the stochastic information (e.g. volume fraction and mineral pattern) from the 2D image. Lastly, the authors compared the topological characteristics and mechanical properties of the 2D and 3D reconstructed microstructure models with the model obtained by direct mapping from the 2D image of a real rock sample.

The good agreements between the mapped and reconstructed models indicate the accuracy of the reconstructed microstructure models on topological characteristics and mechanical properties.

The newly developed reconstruction method successfully transfers the mineral pattern from a granite sample into the 2D and 3D Voronoi-based microstructure models ready for use in grain-scale modelling.

This study aims to the complex and unpredictable terrain environment of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau scientific research station, such as cement road, wetland, gravel desert, snowfield, ice surface, grassland, slimy ground, steep slope, step, etc., a reconfigurable walking mechanism based on two movement modes of wheel and triangular crawler was proposed.

By analyzing the deformation mechanism of the walking mechanism, a reconfigurable wheel-crawler-integrated walking mechanism and the configuration scheme are designed. The analysis of the kinematics and mechanical properties of the swing arm system and the deformation mechanism of the walking mechanism.

The reconfigurable wheel-crawler-integrated walking mechanism can be switched between the wheel and triangular crawler modes by driving the deformation mechanism. Through the numerical simulation of its movement process, and the trial production and experiment of the prototype, indicates the validity of the reconfigurable wheel-crawler-integrated walking mechanism design.

The work of this paper provides a reconfigurable wheel-crawler-integrated-walking mechanism, which can be used by robots in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau scientific research station. It has excellent reconfigurability and can effectively improve the robot’s adaptability to complex terrain.

This study aims to examine the international joint venture (IJV) partnership strategy in Europe from an institutional perspective. A firm operating in a foreign country via an IJV can partner with a local firm from the host country, a firm from the same home country or a firm from a third country. This study takes the first step in examining the determinants of these partner choices.

This study tests hypotheses based on a data set of 637 IJVs in Europe.

Foreign firms are less likely to operate in a partnership with a firm from the home country or from a third country (compared to operate in a partnership with a local firm) when the host country institutions are weaker or institutional distance is larger. Also, foreign firms’ disinclination to operate in a partnership with a firm from the home/third country when the host country institutions are weaker or institutional distance is larger will diminish with greater host-country experience.

This study provides important insights for firms for evaluating partner choice and potential collaborations in the European region with heterogenous institutions.

The partner choice among the above three forms has been neglected in the literature. This study first conceptualized that the institutional profile of the host country and institutional distance between the host country and the home country can determine the partner choice.

The goal of this work is to evaluate how digital transformation disclosure in corporate news and press releases affects stock prices. We examine American and Chinese companies from the energy and industry sectors for two periods: pre-COVID-19 and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To estimate the effects of disclosure of information related to digital transformation, we applied the bag-of-words (BOW) method. As the benchmark dictionary, we used Kindermann et al. (2021), with the addition of original dictionaries created via Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis. We also employed panel regression analysis and random forest.

For USA energy sector, all aspects of digital transformation were insignificant in pre-COVID-19 period, while sustainability topics became significant during the pandemic. As for the Chinese energy sector, digital strategy implementation was significant in pre-pandemic period, while digital technologies adoption and business model innovation became relevant in COVID-19 period. The results show the greater significance of digital transformation aspects for industrials sectors compared to the energy sector. The result of random forest analysis proves the efficiency of the authors’ dictionary which could be applied in practice. The developed methodology can be considered relevant.

The research contributes to the existing literature in theoretical, empirical and methodological ways. It applies signaling and information asymmetry theories to the financial markets, digital transformation being used as an instrument. The methodological contribution of this article can be described in several ways. Firstly, our data collection process differs from that in previous papers, as the data are gathered “from investor’s point of view”, i.e. we use all public information published by the company. Secondly, in addition to the use of existing dictionaries based on Kindermann et al. (2021), with our own modifications, we apply the original methodology based on LDA analysis. The empirical contribution of this research is the following. Unlike past works, we do not focus on particular technologies (Hong et al., 2023) connected with digital transformation, but try to cover all multi-dimensional aspects of the transformational process and aim to discover the most significant one.

This paper aims to propose a new transformer-less inverter structure to reduce the common-mode leakage current in grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems.

The proposed circuit structure is the same as the conventional full-bridge inverter with three additional power switches in a triangular structure. These three power switches are between the bridge and the output filter, and they mitigate the common-mode leakage current flowing toward the PV panels’ capacitors. The common-mode leakage current mitigation is done through the three-direction clamping cell (TDCC) concept. By clamping the common-mode voltage to the middle voltage of the DC-link capacitors, the leakage current and the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the injected current to the grid is effectively reduced. Therefore, the efficiency is improved.

The switching modes and the control method are introduced. A comparison is carried out between the proposed structure and other solutions in the literature. The proposed topology and its respective control method are simulated by PSCAD/EMTDC software. The simulation results validate the advantages of the presented structure such as clamping the common-mode voltage and reducing leakage current and THD of injected current to the grid.

Presenting a single phase-improved inverter structure with low-leakage current for grid-connected PV power systems represents a significant original contribution to this work. The proposed structure can inject a sinusoidal current with low THD to the AC grid, and the power factor is unity on the AC side. In the half positive cycle, one of the switches in the TDCC is turned off under zero current. Besides, one of the other switches in TDCC is turned on with zero voltage and, therefore, its turn-on switching losses are zero. The efficiency of the proposed topology is high because of the reduction of leakage current and power losses. Accordingly, the presented topology can be a good solution to the leakage current elimination.

The selective laser melting (SLM) technique, as a typical additive manufacturing process, is widely used for the fabrication of metallic biomedical components. In terms of biodegradability, zinc and its alloys represent an emerging generation of metallic materials for biomedical implants. The purpose of this paper is to obtain the Zn and Zn10Mg alloys with high mechanical properties using the SLM technology. The relationship between the processing parameters and the porosity of pure Zn and Zn10Mg alloy samples was investigated.

The samples were fabricated using SLM technology working in an inert gas closed chamber. Preliminary experiments were conducted to analyze the laser power and gas flow on evaporation, single track form and porosity. To evaluate the influence of factors on relative density, the response surface methodology was applied.

The satisfactory results of the proposed method were achieved, in which the relative density of the components reached up to 99.63%, and compression strength reached 214 ± 13 MPa under optimal processing conditions.

Zinc is categorized by its low melting and boiling point, which leads to the high porosity of the components. It is difficult to prepare the Zn alloy samples with high relative density using SLM technology. This work successfully achieved dense Zn and Zn10Mg samples and investigated their microstructure, mechanical properties and corrosion behavior.