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This study attempts to recognize the effects of the Pakistan–China free trade agreements (PCFTA) on promoting trade between the two economies.

Following the concept of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and free trade agreements, the study first identifies those commodities in which Pakistan and China have a robust RCA and then analyze the effect of PCFTA on the export value of those commodities for the bilateral trade between Pakistan and China. The study used the panel data in which more than the top 150 importers (j) have been selected for each case of Pakistan and China for the period of 2003–2015.

The study concludes that even with the higher convergence rate, the good RCA does not guarantee a positive effect of the free trade agreement on the commodities.

The study contributes to the existing literature by integrating RCA with the gravity model by adopting a sequential mode for Pakistan–China free trade agreement.

Supply chain management has become such a popular topic in modern business management and researches. It brings the revolutionary philosophy and approach to manage the business with the sustained competitiveness. However, the existing performance measurement theory fails to provide its necessary support in strategy development, decision making, and performance improvement. This paper attempts to propose an innovative performance measurement method to contribute to the development of supply chain management. A process‐based systematic perspective is employed to build an effective model to measure the holistic performance of complex supply chains. Fuzzy set theory is introduced to address the real situation in judgment and evaluation processes. The main framework of this method is outlined with some suggestions and a simple example.

The purpose of this study is to propose a new consumer value segmentation method for low-dimensional dense market datasets to quickly detect and cluster the most profitable customers for the enterprises.

In this study, the comprehensive segmentation bases (CSB) with richer meanings were obtained by introducing the weighted recency-frequency-monetary (RFM) model into the common segmentation bases (SB). Further, a new market segmentation method, the CSB-MBK algorithm was proposed by integrating the CSB model and the mini-batch k-means (MBK) clustering algorithm.

The results show that our proposed CSB model can reflect consumers' contributions to a market, as well as improve the clustering performance. Moreover, the proposed CSB-MBK algorithm is demonstrably superior to the SB-MBK, CSB-KMA and CSB-Chameleon algorithms with respect to the Silhouette Coefficient (SC), the Calinski-Harabasz (CH) Index , the average running time and superior to the SB-MBK, RFM-MBK and WRFM-MBK algorithms in terms of the inter-market value and characteristic differentiation.

This paper provides a tool for decision-makers and marketers to segment a market quickly, which can help them grasp consumers' activity, loyalty, purchasing power and other characteristics in a target market timely and achieve the precision marketing.

This study is the first to introduce the CSB-MBK algorithm for identifying valuable customers through the comprehensive consideration of the clustering quality, consumer value and segmentation speed. Moreover, the CSB-MBK algorithm can be considered for applications in other markets.

This paper revisits the recent work of Chan and Qi which proposed an innovative performance measurement method for supply chain management. While the measurement method has many advantages, it can be unwieldy in practice. This paper aims to address these limitations and to propose a more user‐friendly alternative performance measurement model.

The performance measurement model described in this paper is a combination of two existing methods: Chan and Qi's model and the supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model. To demonstrate the applicability of the combined approach, actual SCOR level 1 performance data and the measurement information from a case supply chain (SC) are collected and processed by Chan and Qi's measurement algorithm.

These two methods complement each other when measuring SC performance.

This paper develops a practical and efficient measurement model that can resolve SC performance problems by incorporating the strengths of two different measurement models to create a synergistic new model.

To achieve stable gait planning and enhance the motion performance of quadruped robot, this paper aims to propose a motion control strategy based on central pattern generator (CPG) and back-propagation neural network (BPNN).

First, the Kuramoto phase oscillator is used to construct the CPG network model, and a piecewise continuous phase difference matrix is designed to optimize the duty cycle of walk gait, so as to realize the gait planning and smooth switching. Second, the mapper between CPG output and joint drive is established based on BP neural network, so that the quadruped robot based on CPG control has better foot trajectory to enhance the motion performance. Finally, to obtain better mapping effect, an evaluation function is resigned to evaluate the proximity between the actual foot trajectory and the ideal foot trajectory. Genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization are used to optimize the initial weights and thresholds of BPNN to obtain more accurate foot trajectory.

The method provides a solution for the smooth gait switching and foot trajectory of the robot. The quintic polynomial trajectory is selected to testify the validity and practicability of the method through simulation and prototype experiment.

The paper solved the incorrect duty cycle under the walk gait of CPG network constructed by Kuramoto phase oscillator, and made the robot have a better foot trajectory by mapper to enhance its motion performance.

This paper examines the impact of state control on stock price crash risk given whether and how ownership structure affects stock price crash risk is relatively underexplored.

The sample includes 2,285 Chinese firms listed in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. Panel data is used for conducting the analysis and endogeneity is addressed with instrumental variable estimation and by testing how stock price crash risk is affected when the ultimate controller changes from a private-owned company to a state-owned enterprise.

The authors find that state control is negatively associated with future stock price crash risk. The mechanism analysis shows that state control reduces stock price crash risk through the implementation of conservative corporate policies. Furthermore, the impact of state control is more pronounced with more intensive state involvement, e.g. in strategic industries and when a company's ultimate controller is a non-corporate government agency or the central government.

This paper enriches the literature on the controversy of the role of state control and the results of this study highlight the importance of the conservatism of state control on reducing stock return tail risk. The authors also add to the literature on the importance of the policy-risk sharing effect of state ownership.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how venture capital (VC) backing influences the board size and independence and how VC backing and board structure impact firm performance in China.

Using hand-collected data from 924 initial public offering (IPO) prospectuses covering the period from January 2004 to December 2012, the authors investigate the impact of VC backing on board size, board independence and firm market performance through regression analysis. A two-stage approach is also used to address the endogeneity issue.

The authors find robust evidence that VC-backed IPOs have more independent boards, after controlling for CEO and firm characteristics, and the potential endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, firms backed by VCs with management political ties (PTs) have more independent directors with industry relevant expertise than other firms. While no significant relationship is found between board independence and firm performance, the authors present some evidence that IPOs which have a larger percentage of independent directors with industry relevant expertise exhibit higher long-term stock returns, and VCs with management PTs also improve IPO long-run stock performance.

Although VC is new in China and the Chinese capital market has relative poor corporate governance and weak minority shareholder protection, the authors find support in this paper that VC backing is valuable to IPO firms in China not only through providing funding but also by providing political ties and industry experience. However, Chinese regulatory and institutional settings have strong impact on test results and they change rapidly, so the results may not apply to other period in Chinese markets.

This paper sheds lights on the influences of VC backing on corporate governance and firm performance in a transitional and emerging economy. It discovers the value of VC investors in a transitional economy as of providing political ties and industry experience. The new definition of independent directors suggested by Suchard (2009) is first used by our paper in the Chinese context.

Sports events are tourist attractions and their image components can relate to the destination image concept and structure. This study examined sports event images held by active and passive sports tourists at four marathon races in Germany. Some differences in the perception of event images were found for active and passive sports tourists as well as for different types of destinations. For active sports tourists, emotional, physical and organisational image associations were clustered closer. For passive sports tourists, social and historical image associations were clustered closer. The type of destination elicited different event images among active and passive sports tourists.

This paper presents the concerns in manufacturing supply chain. Further this study investigates the role of information technology (IT) and information sharing (IS) in manufacturing supply chain and determines its impact towards supply chain integration (SCI), supply chain performance (SCP), and manufacturing firm performance (FP) in Malaysia. The theoretical framework was proposed for the study on the basis of existing literature. The study administered a survey questionnaire to collect data from manufacturing firms in Malaysia with 112 respondents. A multiple regression analysis is conducted to establish the relationship between IT, IS, SCI, and FP. The study finds that IT and sharing has significant positive effect towards and performance. Firms that use IT and practice IS across partners in the supply chain are more likely to integrate their internal and external value chain for better performance both within and across the manufacturing firms in the supply chain. This study can be of interest to the manufacturing industry as well as other industry practitioners interested in improving the performance of the organization and supply chain in total. For supply chain practitioners, this results indicate that the firms should adopt IT and IS practices to strategically improve SCI. This in turn will also improve the supply chain network and firm’s performance. This study employs a newly developed framework which depicts the causal relationship between IT, IS, SCI, Supply Chain Performance, and FP in Malaysia. Furthermore, it closes a gap in existing literature by examining the effect IT and communication (ICT) practices toward manufacturing firms’ performance and SCP in a single setting. In addition, the current study attempted to construct a model which would estimate and interpret SCP and FP simultaneously, and to evaluate this model in an empirical fashion.