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After three decades of development, the Chinese electric vehicle industry became the world’s largest electric vehicle market in 2015. However, little is understood about how the Chinese electric vehicle industry, as a latecomer in this strategic newly emerged industry, could catch up with international incumbents. The purpose of this paper is to study how the windows of opportunity emerge and interactively influence the catch-up process of Chinese electric vehicle industry.

This paper conducted a case study to examine how Chinese electric vehicle latecomers use the windows of opportunity along with the development of a sectoral system of innovation to reduce the gaps.

The results indicate that windows of opportunity appeared in the introduction stage (2005) and the transition from the introduction stage to the growth stage (2015) because of the sectoral changes in technologies, demand, policies and the interaction among these factors. Domestic electric vehicle latecomers currently follow the catch-up pattern of duplication, creative imitation and innovation.

To capture the previous windows of opportunity, domestic electric vehicle latecomers rely on technology transfer through international joint ventures, government support and local advantages from cheap labor. To seize future windows of opportunity, apart from progressively accumulating innovation capabilities, it is also essential for managers to recognize, break through and extend the windows of opportunity by anticipating and monitoring the process of changes of the sectoral system.

This paper provides a fine-grained study on how latecomers in a new industry with emerging markets can seize windows of opportunities to catch up with the international leaders.

This study aims to explore the gaps concerning the organizational operant resources (OORs) of logistics service providers (LSPs) expected in outsourcing relationships. The study considers the views of both manufacturing firms (M-firms) and LSPs in India and DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) seeking gaps within and across regions.

This research employed a survey targeting executives from large M-firms and LSPs in both India and DACH. The perceptions about the importance and improvement expectations of 17 OORs are analyzed. A modified version of importance-improvement analysis (A-B), a novel comparative A-B analysis (CABA) method, has been proposed to identify the importance and improvement gaps in OORs between M-firms and LSPs within and across India and the DACH region.

There are more gaps between M-firms and LSPs in India compared to DACH. Cross-country comparisons reveal that LSPs in India and DACH have similar perceptions concerning the OORs, but M-firms in India have significantly higher improvement expectations than those in DACH.

This study proposes an analytical approach that enables managers to identify improvement areas and better align with their outsourcing relationship partners. It also highlights aspects that need to be considered while entering emerging markets such as India.

The analysis approach using CABA is novel. Also, among the cross-country studies, this is the first to compare outsourcing relationships in India with the DACH region while involving both users' and service providers' perspectives.

This study aims to explore the differences in the tourists’ perceived destination image on travel e-commerce platforms (e.g. Ctrip and Fliggy) and social media platforms (e.g. Xiaohongshu and Weibo).

This study investigates the role of source familiarity in moderating the effect of service adaptive behavior (SAB) on customer satisfaction. Applying the accessibility–diagnosticity framework and situated cognition theory as the theoretical basis, this research hypothesizes that when customers are familiar with the source that provides the service (i.e. brand familiarity for Study 1 and personal familiarity for Study 2), customer satisfaction responses to SAB would be more moderate than when customers are not familiar with the source. Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses.

Two experiments manipulating SAB and the brand name familiarity (Study 1) and personal familiarity with the service staff (Study 2) as the source familiarity were conducted. Customer satisfaction as a function of source familiarity was measured to test the hypothesis that source familiarity moderates the relationship between SAB and customer satisfaction.

Compared to unfamiliar sources, familiar sources generated a more moderate response in customer satisfaction as a function of SAB. High familiarity with the brand and service staff induced top-down, memory-based processing that overrides external stimuli as the basis of satisfaction judgment; bottom-up, stimulus-based processing relying on SAB for judgment kicked in only when the source familiarity is low.

From a practical point of view, this study indicates the importance of SAB, especially for brands with low awareness, and alludes to the comparative importance of relationship building in service delivery processes.

This study contributes to the literature by validating the role of contextual factors in influencing the impact of SAB on customer satisfaction.

This paper examines the profit distribution of engineering projects in the integrated project delivery (IPD) mode. IPD is a new delivery method that can ameliorate many of the disadvantages of traditional delivery methods and improve project results. In the implementation of IPD, the profit distribution is key for ensuring the success of IPD projects.

This paper described a new method for characterizing profit distribution in the IPD mode. The payment function and Shapley value of the cooperative fuzzy game of fuzzy alliance were defined by considering the Choquet integral of the fuzzy measure. The participation of each player was considered, and the influence of participation on the profit distribution was discussed. Lastly, changes in the profit distribution of core participants under different alliance combinations were studied.

A case from a report of The American Institute of Architects (AIA) was used to verify the fuzzy alliance model. There was a significant correlation between the degree of participation of the owner, architect and builder and the profit distribution among these three participants.

The theoretical research in this paper has some limitations. Initially, this paper selects a case with only three key participants in order to simplify the research. When there are many core participants, how to establish the alliance in the IPD mode and how to establish the corresponding profit distribution model, further work is certainly required to disentangle these complexities in models. Second, in this case, BIM technology has little impact on the income of the whole project. Therefore, this paper does not consider the impact of BIM technology on the marginal effect of the IPD project. Third, the contract type in the case is a custom tri-party based on IFOA. There is no classified discussion of the impact of different contracts on the profit distribute in the paper.

Based on the in-depth study of cooperative game with alliance structure, this paper promotes the classic cooperative game with alliance structure. The authors define the payoff function of fuzzy cooperative games by Choquet integral of fuzzy measure, and introduce the idea into the field of IPD. It aims at extending the solution to a cooperative game without a core. It can be obtained through a simple calculation. In the IPD alliance, the fuzziness and uncertainty of the participation degree of each participant will affect the profit of the whole project. The authors find that the higher the participation rate of players, the more profit each participant has. The greater the influence weight of the designer on the alliance, the lower the influence weight of the contractor on the alliance, the lower the participation of the contractor and the designer, and the lower the income distribution value of the three core participants. It shows a monotonous decline status.

For any construction enterprise, it can make more profits if it joins the grand alliance. In the IPD alliance, each participant can maximize their own interests, which can also promote the enthusiasm of construction enterprises to participate in the alliance and increase the application of IPD mode in AEC industry. This research method provides a new fast, effective, and more realistic solution method for cooperative countermeasures. It can be further extended to other cooperative game fields and advance a new research perspective and solution for the distribution of cooperative interests.

The contribution of this paper is the development of a fuzzy alliance model that provides a tool for measuring the profit distribution in IPD. This is the first quantitative model to connect the degree of participation with the profit distribution in IPD using fuzzy alliance.

This paper aims to design a vision-based non-contact real-time accurate heart rate (HR) measurement framework for home nursing assistant.

The study applied Second-Order Blind Signal Identification (SOBI) algorithm to extract remote HR signal and analyzed it with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Multiple regions of interest are chosen and analyzed to obtain a more accurate result.

An accurate non-contact hear rate (HR) measurement framework is proposed and proved to be efficient.

The contributions of this HR measurement framework are as follows: accurate measurement of HR, real-time performance, robust under various scenes such as conversation, lightweight computation which is suitable and necessary for home nursing assistance. This framework is designed to be flexibly used in various real-life scenes such as domestic health assistance and affectively intelligent agents and is proved to be robust under such scenes.

Food packaging pictures are one of the most important extrinsic cues for consumers to evaluate food products before purchasing. Over the past decades, marketers have used exaggerated pictures to attract consumers' attention, enhance their attitude toward a product and increase their purchase intention. This study examined the interplay of “puff-up” product picture, food type and picture type in influencing consumers' responses via persuasion knowledge.

The research comprises two 2 × 2 factorial experiments. Study 1 tested the interaction effect of puffery (high vs low) and food type (utilitarian vs. hedonic) on consumers' responses using two fictitious brands of prepared food, whereas Study 2 tested the interaction effect of puffery (high vs. low) and picture type (ingredients vs. cooked food) using a fictitious brand of Chinese delicacy.

Results demonstrated that the degree of picture puffery did not influence consumers' responses to utilitarian food and ingredient image. Conversely, consumers were sensitive to puffery when they see hedonic food and cooked-food image. Our findings also suggested that consumers' persuasion knowledge mediates the relationship between puffery and their responses.

The presented findings facilitate marketers to know consumers' attitude about food puffery pictures.

This research is one of the first efforts to empirically explore the influences of persuasion knowledge on food puffery pictures. The importance of this work is underscored by the fact that a growing number of visual exaggerations are adopted on food packaging.

This chapter focuses on pedagogies of working with diversity centers on West-East reciprocal learning through a Reciprocal Learning Program in preservice teacher education between a Canadian university and a Chinese university. By presenting our initial analysis of fieldwork with our Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program participants through excerpts from newsletters, surveys, and interviews, we explore how participants from both China and Canada made sense of their learning from the other cultural and educational system through the Reciprocal Learning Program within broad educational, social, and cultural contexts. We argue that both global and multicultural dimensions are cultivated in reciprocal learning that infused the lived experiences of both Canadian and Chinese preservice teacher candidates. We discuss the pedagogic implications for working with diversity and believe that reciprocal learning can take place while working with people from different cultures with an attitude of mutual respect and appreciation and an appetite for learning in our increasingly interconnected world.

The deficiency of the mapping between fashion color (FoCo) value and linguistic color expression causes the difficulty of machine-based fashion understanding tasks that are heavily associated with color matching. The purpose of this paper is to propose the FoCo system and construct it with four steps, in order to bridge this gap.

The color distribution in HSB color space is analyzed to estimate the rough number of color categories. Similar color values are grouped to obtain the initial HSB value range for each color category. The intra-category color differences are calculated to determine their final HSB value ranges and Pantone color is used for fine-tuning.

With practical applications in mind, the FoCo system is designed as a hierarchical structure with three layers.

The FoCo system is designed as a hierarchical structure with three layers: color units for color matching-related tasks, color categories for style analysis tasks and color tones for color recognition tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the FoCo system.