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In construction projects, engineering variations are very common and create breeding grounds for opportunistic claims. This study investigates the complementary effect between an inspection mechanism and a reputation system in deterring opportunistic claims, considering an employer with limited inspection accuracy and a contractor, which can be either reputation-concerned or opportunistic.

This paper applies a signaling game to investigate the complementary effect between the employer's inspection and a reputation system in deterring the contractor's possible opportunistic claim, considering the information-flow influence of claiming prices.

This study finds that in the exogenous-inspection-accuracy case, the employer does not always inspect the claim. A more stringent reputation system complements a less accurate inspection only when the inspection cost is lower than a threshold, but may decline the employer's surplus or social welfare. In the optimal-inspection-accuracy case, the employer always inspects the claim. However, only a sufficiently stringent reputation system can guarantee the effectiveness of an optimal inspection in curbing opportunistic claims. A more stringent reputation system has a value-stepping effect on the employer's surplus but may unexpectedly impair social welfare, whereas a higher inspection cost efficiency always reduces social welfare.

This article contributes to the project management literature by combing the signaling game theory with the reputation theory and thus embeds the problem of inspection mechanism design into a broader socio-economic framework.

Given the popularity of online health communities (OHCs) and medical question-and-answer (Q&A) services, it is increasingly important to understand what constitutes useful answers and user-adopted standards in healthcare domain. However, few studies provide insights into how health information characteristics, provider characteristics and recipient characteristics jointly influence user information adoption decisions. To fill this research gap, this study examines the combined effects of physicians' certainty tone as information characteristics, seniority as provider characteristics and disease severity as recipient characteristics on patients' health information adoption.

Drawing on dual-process theory and information adoption model, an extended information adoption model is established in this study to examine the effect of attitude certainty on patients' health information adoption, and the moderating effects of online seniority and offline seniority, as well as patient motivation level—disease severity. Utilizing logit regression models, the authors empirically tested the hypotheses based on 4,224 Q&A records from a popular Chinese OHC.

The results show that (1) attitude certainty has a significant positive impact on patients' health information adoption, (2) the relationship between attitude certainty and information adoption is negatively moderated by physicians' online seniority, but is positively moderated by offline seniority; (3) there is a negative three-way interaction effect of attitude certainty, online seniority and disease severity on patients' health information adoption.

This study extends the information adoption model to examine the two-way interaction between argument quality and source reliability, as well as the three-way interaction with user motivation level, especially for health information adoption in the healthcare field. These findings also provide direct practical applications for knowledge contributors and OHCs.

The aims of this study are to conduct a systematic review of public–private partnership (PPP) studies published from 2009 to 2019, to compare the results with Ke et al. (2009) who reviewed the PPP literature published from 1998 to 2008, and to trace the evolution of the PPP knowledge in the past two decades. This study also presents the possible directions that the PPP research may go towards in the future, arguably.

This study carried out a top journal-based search to identify the quality PPP articles published from 2009 to 2019. A total of 12 top-tier construction journals were systematically searched in the database of web of science (WOS), from which 279 PPP articles were identified for review.

The number of the identified articles, the titles of the journals, institutions, the most cited papers, and prevalent research methods were analyzed and compared. The existing PPP studies in construction journals were classified into seven streams. Through analysis of the PPP research status and gaps, five future research directions were revealed.

This study contributes to the current body of knowledge by revealing the research trend of PPP from 2009 to 2019. It presents the change of PPP development trend in the past decade through comparison with Ke et al. (2009). It also reveals the major research streams and points out the directions that the PPP research may go towards in the future. Moreover, this study is helpful to the practice as well. It can enhance the practitioners' understanding of the PPP development in the past decade. In addition, it identified the research institutions contributing the most in the area of PPP, which may serve as valuable reference for practitioners to locate the best institutions for consultancy or collaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the design of automated fabric defect detection based on cascaded low-rank decomposition and to maintain high quality control in textile manufacturing.

This paper proposed a fabric defect detection algorithm based on cascaded low-rank decomposition. First, the constructed Gabor feature matrix is divided into a low-rank matrix and sparse matrix using low-rank decomposition technique, and the sparse matrix is used as priori matrix where higher values indicate a higher probability of abnormality. Second, we conducted the second low-rank decomposition for the constructed texton feature matrix under the guidance of the priori matrix. Finally, an improved adaptive threshold segmentation algorithm was adopted to segment the saliency map generated by the final sparse matrix to locate the defect regions.

The proposed method was evaluated on the public fabric image databases. By comparing with the ground-truth, the average detection rate of 98.26% was obtained and is superior to the state-of-the-art.

The cascaded low-rank decomposition was first proposed and applied into the fabric defect detection. The quantitative value shows the effectiveness of the detection method. Hence, the proposed method can be used for accurate defect detection and automated analysis system.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the research status and development trend of the field of event detection in social media (ED in SM) through a bibliometric analysis of academic publications.

First, publication distributions are analyzed including the trends of publications and citations, subject distribution, predominant journals, affiliations, authors, etc. Second, an indicator of collaboration degree is used to measure scientific connective relations from different perspectives. A network analysis method is then applied to reveal scientific collaboration relations. Furthermore, based on keyword co-occurrence analysis, major research themes and their evolutions throughout time span are discovered. Finally, a network analysis method is applied to visualize the analysis results.

The area of ED in SM has received increasing attention and interest in academia with Computer Science and Engineering as two major research subjects. The USA and China contribute the most to the area development. Affiliations and authors tend to collaborate more with those within the same country. Among the 14 identified research themes, newly emerged themes such as Pharmacovigilance event detection are discovered.

This study is the first to comprehensively illustrate the research status of ED in SM by conducting a bibliometric analysis. Up-to-date findings are reported, which can help relevant researchers understand the research trend, seek scientific collaborators and optimize research topic choices.

This paper aims to suggest the parameter identification of load frequency controller in power system.

The suggested control approach is established using fuzzy logic to design a fractional order load frequency controller. A new suitable control law is developed using fuzzy logic, and based on this developed control law, the unknown parameters of the fractional order proportional integral derivative (FOPID) controller are derived using an optimization technique, which is being used by minimizing the integral square error. In addition, to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control design approach, numerous simulation tests were carried out on an actual single-area power system.

The obtained results reveal the superiority of the suggested controller as compared to the recently developed controllers with regard to time response specifications and quantifiable indicators. Additionally, the potential of the suggested controller is also observed by improving the load disturbance rejections under plant parametric uncertainty.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the work is not published anywhere else.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the design of a dual-branch balance saliency model based on fully convolutional network (FCN) for automatic fabric defect detection, and improve quality control in textile manufacturing.

This paper proposed a dual-branch balance saliency model based on discriminative feature for fabric defect detection. A saliency branch is firstly designed to address the problems of scale variation and contextual information integration, which is realized through the cooperation of a multi-scale discriminative feature extraction module (MDFEM) and a bidirectional stage-wise integration module (BSIM). These modules are respectively adopted to extract multi-scale discriminative context information and enrich the contextual information of features at each stage. In addition, another branch is proposed to balance the network, in which a bootstrap refinement module (BRM) is trained to guide the restoration of feature details.

To evaluate the performance of the proposed network, we conduct extensive experiments, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on seven evaluation metrics. We also conduct adequate ablation analyses that provide a full understanding of the design principles of the proposed method.

The dual-branch balance saliency model was proposed and applied into the fabric defect detection. The qualitative and quantitative experimental results show the effectiveness of the detection method. Therefore, the proposed method can be used for accurate fabric defect detection and even surface defect detection of other industrial products.

To solve the above problems and ensure the stability of the ad hoc network node topology in the process of wireless signal transmission, this paper aims to design a robust adaptive sliding film fault-tolerant controller under the nonlinear distortion of signal transmission in an amorphous flat air-to-ground wireless ad hoc network system.

This paper designs a robust adaptive sliding film fault-tolerant controller under the nonlinear distortion of signal transmission in an amorphous flat air-to-ground wireless ad hoc network system.

The simulation results show that the amorphous flat wireless self-organizing network system has good nonlinear distortion fault-tolerant correction ability under the feedback control of the designed controller, and the system has the asymptotically stable convergence ability; the test results show: the node topology of the self-organizing network structural stability is significantly improved, which provides a foundation for the subsequent realization of long-distance transmission of ad hoc network nodes.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

The controller can extract the fault information caused by nonlinear distortion in the wireless signal transmission process, and at the same time, its feedback matrix K can gradually converge the generated wireless signal error to zero, to realize the stable transmission of the wireless signal.

Previous research on salesperson-customer proximity has yielded mixed results, with some studies documenting positive proximity effects on shopping responses and others demonstrating the reverse. To reconcile such mixed findings, this paper aims to test whether and how salesperson proximity influences a series of key customer outcomes in actual retail settings using sample sizes that are considerably larger than most former investigations.

We conducted two high-powered field studies (N = 1,312) to test whether salesperson‐customer proximity influences consumers’ purchase behavior and store loyalty. Moreover, we investigated whether the short-term effects on purchase behavior were moderated by the extent to which the consumption context had a clear connection to consumers’ own bodies.

Salesperson proximity increased purchase incidence and spending in consumption contexts with a bodily basis (e.g. clothes, beauty, health), suggesting that consumers “buy their way out” in these contexts when a salesperson is violating their personal space. If anything, such proximity had a negative impact on consumers’ purchase behavior in contexts that lacked a clear bodily connection (e.g. building materials, furniture, books). Moreover, the link between proximity and consumer responses was mediated by discomfort, such that a salesperson standing close-by (vs farther away) increased discomfort, with negative downstream effects on shopping responses. Importantly, the authors found opposite proximity effects on short-term metrics (purchase incidence and spending) and long-term outcomes (store loyalty).

Drawing on the nonverbal communication literature and theories on processing fluency, the current work introduces a theoretically relevant boundary condition for the effects of salesperson-customer proximity on consumers’ purchase behavior. Specifically, the bodily basis of the consumption context is discussed as a novel moderator, which may help to explain the mixed findings in this stream of research.

Salesperson-customer proximity may serve as a strategic sales tactic to improve short-term revenue in settings that are closely tied to consumers’ own bodies and characterized by one-time purchases. However, as salesperson proximity was found to be associated with lower store loyalty, irrespective of whether the shopping setting had a bodily basis, the risk of violating consumers’ personal space may have costly consequences from a long-term perspective.

The present field studies make three central contributions. First, we introduce a novel moderator for proximity effects in various sales and service settings. Second, we test the focal hypotheses with much higher statistical power than most existing proximity studies. Finally, we document that salesperson-customer proximity ironically yields opposite results on short-term metrics and long-term outcomes, thus underscoring the importance of not solely focusing on sales effectiveness when training frontline employees.

The conventional wisdom suggests that the lack of prior host country-specific experience and a higher institutional distance deter multinational enterprises (MNEs) from entering a foreign country. However, past studies report that Chinese MNEs show an unconventional risk-taking behavior choosing foreign locations, where they have no prior experience or there is an increased institutional distance. Drawing on the institutional theory, the purpose of this paper is to argue that Chinese Government official visits to the host country may act as a risk-reduction device, thus providing an explanation for such an unconventional behavior.

The authors develop two hypotheses regarding how Chinese Government official visits moderate the impact of host country-specific experience and institutional distance on the location choice of Chinese MNEs. The authors test the hypotheses using a sample of investment location decisions by Chinese MNEs in Latin America.

The authors find that government official visits mitigate the lack of firm’s prior host country experience. However, only high-level government visits reduce institutional distance.

The authors contribute to the international business literature by analyzing how home country government diplomatic activities may pave the way of host country institutional environment for foreign MNEs from that home country. In addition, the authors provide an additional explanation for the unconventional risk-taking behavior of Chinese MNEs. Finally, the authors also contribute to a better understanding of the decision-making process of emerging-market MNEs entering other emerging economies.