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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how nonprofit service providers can better engage their customers through online communication. It identifies two communication styles and three communication functions, and examines their impact on customer commenting, customer liking and customer sharing.

Similar to Python for Facebook, a software package for the automatic retrieval of web page content was developed specifically for this study to extract data from the microblog Sina Weibo. Following the successful retrieval of 1,500 randomly selected messages from 34 universities in China, a two-level regression was performed using Mplus 7 to examine the association between the proposed relationships.

The findings reveal that messages with a friendly communication style increase both the number of comments and their positive tone; an authoritative style has no effect on customer engagement. The functions associated with message content (spreading information, building community or promoting action) influence customer liking and sharing. Building community tends to engage more customers than spreading information; promoting action often generates the least customer engagement in social media settings.

The study fills an important research gap in the service marketing literature as it pertains to nonprofit service organizations (i.e. universities) by identifying two types of online identities based on the communication style and the messages posted on social media. This study is the first to investigate the relationship between identity type and audience engagement, and to analyze the moderating factors of this relationship.

Drawing on the branded service encounters perspective, the purpose of this study is to investigate how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ brand evaluations.

The research conducted two experiments. The first experiment explored the effect of frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors on customers’ brand evaluations via corporate hypocrisy. The second experiment explored the moderation effect of employees’ prototypicality and the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) among customers.

Experiment 1 indicates that for firms with a green brand image, frontline employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors result in customers’ perception that the firm is hypocritical, thus reducing their brand evaluations. Experiment 2 shows that employee prototypicality and CSR importance to the customer enhance the negative impact of frontline employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors on customers’ brand evaluations through customers’ perception of corporate hypocrisy.

This study is one of the first efforts to explore how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ responses. It helps understand the impact of frontline employees’ counter-productive sustainable behaviors on customers’ brand perception, as well as the relationship between CSR and employees.

This study suggests that firms’ green brand image does not always lead to positive customer response. When frontline employees’ behaviors are inconsistent with firms’ green brand image, it can trigger customers’ perceptions of corporate hypocrisy and thus influence their brand evaluations. Therefore, firms should train frontline service employees to make their behaviors align with the firms’ green brand image.

This study is one of the first efforts to explore how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ responses. It helps understand the impact of frontline employees’ counter-productive sustainable behaviors on customers’ brand perception, as well as the relationship between CSR and employee.

This paper aims to demonstrate that corporate philanthropy can be driven from the bottom to the top. In particular, the authors investigate whether employees’ donations influence corporate philanthropy and under what conditions this effect occurs.

The sample consists of Chinese listed firms that disclosed the amount employees donated in response to the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The Heckman two-stage selection model is applied to examine the effect of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy and the conditions under which this effect occurs.

The results show that employees’ donations are positively associated with corporate philanthropy. Furthermore, a higher percentage of females in top management teams can significantly strengthen the effect of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy. When the average age of the top management team members is high, the influence of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy is stronger.

This is an empirical study that helps to predict corporate philanthropy. Another practical implication is that employees should be recognized as an important element of corporate social responsibility.

The results encourage employees to become drivers of corporate social responsibility.

This study contributes to the corporate social responsibility literature by demonstrating that corporate philanthropy can be driven from the bottom to the top. Moreover, this study integrates signaling theory into the study of corporate social responsibility. Finally, this study identifies two important contingent factors that strengthen the effect of employees on top managers’ decisions about corporate social responsibility.

From an institutional perspective, this study empirically examines whether institutional pressures, such as industry pressures and public attention, significantly influence corporate philanthropic disaster responses (CPDRs). Furthermore, this paper aims to examine the moderating role of a company’s prior history of philanthropic donation.

This paper uses secondhand data from 217 Chinese listed companies that responded philanthropically to the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake.

This paper finds that both industry pressure and public attention are positively associated with companies’ donations; their prior history of philanthropic donations significantly moderates these relationships such that these relationships become stronger and for companies that have prior histories of small philanthropic donations.

First, this paper contributes to the philanthropy literature by identifying two kinds of institutional pressures (i.e. industry pressure and public attention) that exert great influences on CPDR contributions. Second, by studying the moderating role of firms’ prior philanthropic history, this study contributes to the understanding of companies’ different reactions to institutional pressures. In addition to the theoretical contribution, this paper encourages companies to proactively establish a sustainable philanthropic giving plan rather than being passively driven by external stakeholders.

Although the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and financial performance has become a hot topic of the Western management community after several decades of arguments, there is still little empirical literature about the relationship between Chinese companies' CSR and financial performance. According to the investigation of Chinese companies, this paper aims to use stakeholder theory to answer this question.

A theoretical framework is proposed based on the stakeholder theory by defining nine kinds of stakeholders and viewing the companies taking CSR as giving responses to the interest requirement of these stakeholders. Some agent variables are also set to depict CFP. Subsequently, this paper uses the data collected in 2007 and 2008 from Chinese firms to explore the relationship between CSR and corporate financial performance (CFP) empirically.

The results show that companies' social responsibility activity can improve their financial performances of the current year, have significant effects on their financial performances of the next year, and vice versa. The variation of CSR and financial performance can also significantly influence each other.

This research integrates the factors of time delay and cause‐effect with the relationship of CSR and CFP, and then provides theory support for companies taking CSR.

This paper aims to define the concept, composition, connotation, functional technology and development path of autonomous transportation systems (ATS) and provide theoretical basis and support for the construction and development of ATS.

The research analyzes the concept and connotation of ATS, studies the composition and structure of ATS, sorts out pillar function technology system including perception, digitization, interoperability, computing and integration in ATS hierarchically, and looks forward to the future development path of ATS from human participation and systems intelligence.

This paper puts forward the concept, composition, connotation and structure of ATS, proposes the pillar functional technology system of ATS and proposes four development stages of ATS.

The research can provide a theoretical and scientific basis for the high-quality, efficient, orderly construction and development of ATS.

This paper examines how sophisticated and better-informed investors, such as short sellers, trade on information along the supply chain. Given the economic linkages between suppliers and customers, one would expect short sellers to trade on such information and to capitalize on investors' inattention to such economic links.

This paper uses both multivariate regression analysis and portfolio analysis where the time series averages of equally weighted monthly portfolio returns are reported to explore the abnormal returns of long-short trading strategies.

Results indicate that short interest predicts unexpected earnings news, consistent with short sellers extracting information from economic relationships. There is a strong negative relationship between short interest in the supplier firm and the one-month future stock return of the customer firm. This negative relation significantly persists for at least 12 months. One plausible channel explaining the information content of supplier (customer) firm's short interest for the customer (supplier) firms is the short sale constraints on the customer (supplier) firms.

The paper addresses a gap in the literature by examining whether short selling in a firm in the months leading up to a customer's (supplier's) negative shock is negatively correlated to the customer's (supplier's) future performance. Overall, the findings suggest that short sellers play an important role in the price discovery of related firms in the supply chain, which is beyond the direct effects documented in prior literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether regulatory restriction on executive compensation in Chinese state-owned enterprises is beneficial to firm performance. The authors also examine the role of monitoring mechanisms in offsetting the effect of compensation restriction.

Multivariate analysis is conducted using archival data from Chinese listed companies over the period of 2007-2014.

The findings show that the restriction on executive compensation is negatively associated with a firm’s accounting performance, and this negative effect is ameliorated in firms with good internal control and a high level of institutional shareholding. Additional analysis reveals that the negative effect of pay restriction on firm performance is more pronounced in central government-controlled listed SOEs than in those controlled by local government.

This study is the first to investigate a government’s say-on-pay policy. Specifically, the findings pinpoint the inefficacy of regulatory intervention in corporate executive compensation. The findings add to compensation literature using China’s unique institutional setting.