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The shape of a product plays a crucial role in shaping consumer behavior. Despite the voluminous research on factors influencing consumers’ shape preferences, there remains a limited understanding of how the busy mindset, a mentality increasingly emphasized by marketing campaigns, works. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between a busy mindset and the preference for angular-shaped versus circular-shaped products and brand logos.

This research consists of seven experimental studies using various shape stimuli, distinct manipulations of busy mindset, different assessments of shape preference and samples drawn from multiple countries.

The findings reveal that a busy mindset leads to a preference for angular shapes over circular ones by amplifying the need for uniqueness. In addition, these effects are attenuated when products are scarce.

This research represents one of the pioneering efforts to study the role of a busy mindset on consumers’ aesthetic preferences. Beyond yielding insights for practitioners into visual marketing, this research contributes to the theories on the busy mindset and shape preference.

In this paper, an attempt is made to obtain buckling loads, ultimate bearing capacity and other required structural characteristics of grid structure panels. The numerical method for post-buckling behavior analysis of panels involving multiple invisible damages is also presented.

In this paper, two bidirectional stiffened composite panels are manufactured and tested. Multiple discrete invisible damages are introduced in different positions of the stringers, and the experimental and simulation investigation of buckling and post-buckling were carried out on the damaged stiffened panels.

The simulation load–displacement curves are compared with the experimental results, and it is found that the simulation model can well predict the occurrence of buckling and failure loads. The strain curve shows that the rate of strain change at the damaged site is greater than that at the undamaged site, which reflects that the debond is more likely occurred at the damaged site. The simulation verifies that the panel is usually crushed due to matrix compression and fiber–matrix shear.

In this paper, post-buckling tests and numerical simulations of bidirectional stiffened composite panels with impact damage were carried out. Two panels with four longitudinal stringers and two transverse stringers were manufactured and tested. The buckling and post-buckling characteristics of the grid structure are obtained, and the failure mechanism of the structure is explained. This is helpful for the design of wall panel structure.

For an entrant platform in the on-demand service market, choosing an appropriate employment model is critical. This study explores how the entrant optimally chooses the employment model to achieve better performance and investigates the optimal pricing strategies and wage schemes for both incumbent and entrant platforms.

Based on the Hotelling model, the authors develop a game-theoretic framework to study the incumbent's and entrant's optimal service prices and wage schemes. Moreover, the authors determine the entrant's optimal employment model by comparing the entrant's optimal profits under different market configurations and analytically analyze the impacts of some critical factors on the platforms' decision-making.

This study reveals that the impacts of the unit misfit cost of suppliers or consumers on the pricing strategies and wage schemes vary with different operational efficiencies of platforms. Only when both the service efficiency of contractors and the basic employee benefits are low, entrants should adopt the employee model. Moreover, a lower unit misfit cost of suppliers or consumers makes entrants more likely to choose the contractor model. However, the service efficiency of contractors has nonmonotonic effects on the entrant's decision.

This study focuses on an entrant's decision on the optimal employment model in an on-demand service market, considering the competition between entrants and incumbents on both the supplier and consumer sides, which has not been investigated in the prior literature.

Information technology-enabled gig platforms connect freelancers with consumers to provide short-term services or asset sharing. The growth of gig economy, however, has been accompanied by controversy, and, recently, food delivery platforms have been criticized for using data-driven techniques to set strict delivery time limits, resulting in negative externality. This study aims to provide managerial implications on the decisions of delivery time and subsidy for food delivery platforms.

The authors develop an analytical framework to investigate the optimal delivery time and subsidy provided to delivery drivers to maximize the gig platform's profit and compare the results with those of a socially optimal outcome.

The study reveals that it is optimal for the platform to shorten the delivery time and raise the subsidy when the food price becomes higher; nevertheless, the platform should shorten the delivery time and lower the subsidy in response to a higher delivery fee. Increases in the food price or delivery fee have non-monotonic effects on the number of fulfilled orders and the platform's profit. In addition, the authors solve the socially optimal outcome and find that a socially optimal delivery time is longer than the platform's preferred length when the delivery fee is high and the negative externality is strong.

The food delivery platform's optimal decision on delivery time is derived after taking negative externality into account, which is rarely considered in the prior literature but is a practically important problem.