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The purpose of this paper is to assess Korean consumers' valuation for domestic rice and imported rice from China and the USA.

In order to identify Korean consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for domestic, Chinese, and US rice, the non-hypothetical experimental auction approach (i.e. the random nth price auction) was utilized. Auction participants were randomly assigned to three treatments: no labelling information, country of origin labelling information, and food miles labelling information to analyze the effects of differing labelling information on consumers' valuation.

The results suggest that Korean consumers have a positive perception of and preference for domestic rice, particularly when country of origin information is provided. However, food miles information alone may not help consumers to distinguish between domestic and Chinese rice.

The marketing of imported rice will increase since Korea will be opening its rice market under tariffication after 2015. Therefore, it is necessary for Korea and other exporting countries to identify the feasibility of marketing both domestic and imported rice, and also to investigate which rice from specific countries Korean consumers prefer. Therefore, the authors conducted the random nth price auction using real rice products and cash in transactions.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the cultural cognition of Chinese Zhong-yong thinking, which is deeply rooted in Chinese Confucius culture, and to examine how entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking is related to new venture performance through guanxi network, and also examine how environmental turbulence affects the influencing mechanism.

This paper follows an empirical design. Data are collected from a survey administered to entrepreneurs in new ventures of China. Regression analysis is used to test the hypothesis.

Results show that entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking is positively related to guanxi and new venture performance, and guanxi mediates the relationship between entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking and new venture performance. In addition, environmental turbulence moderates the relationship between entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking and guanxi such that the relationship is stronger under higher technological turbulence or lower market turbulence.

This research uses cross-sectional data, so causal conclusions cannot be made. In addition, more moderators should be considered.

The present study enriches the understanding of how entrepreneurs’ Zhong-yong thinking affects new ventures, which helps entrepreneur understand how to strategize according to external environment and develop what kind of cognitive style to deal with complex situation of their own venture.

This study is a pioneer in exploring non-Western cognitive style–Zhong-yong thinking in entrepreneurial context. It not only enriches the understanding of how Chinese wisdom affects organizational strategy and organizational performance but also advances the cognition research in the field of entrepreneurship.

To apply the design of experiments (DOE) methodology to the problem of cracking of plastic ball grid array (PBGA) packages during the reflow soldering process.

The DOE methodology was used in order to identify the optimum design. CAE was used for the required stress analysis and for integral calculation during crack analysis.

The optimum design to reduce the stress and fracture probability for the PBGA package was obtained and the DOE technique was shown to be very powerful for establishing the optimum design when there are many design parameters.

In future research, a robust design methodology could be applied including design for six sigma considering the noise parameters.

For better design of a PBGA package, the DOE methodology has been shown to be very useful.

In this paper, application of the DOE approach to a PBGA package design in order to reduce the stresses and probability of fracture was attempted for the first time.

The purpose of this paper is to find an appropriate sliding mode control strategy for neutral systems with time‐delays in the presence of unmatched parameter uncertainties and external disturbance.

Owing to the complexity of uncertain neutral time‐delay systems, some conclusions for system stability and stabilization are complicated non‐linear matrix inequality (NLMI). Through virtual state feedback control, a sliding mode controller is designed to guarantee state trajectories from any initial condition are attracted to the sliding mode plane in a finite time and remain there for all subsequent time, which can avoid the complicated NLMI. Furthermore, a delay‐independent sufficient condition for the design of robust stable sliding mode plane is obtained in term of LMI.

The sliding mode controller for uncertain neutral time‐delay systems is designed and a delay‐independent sufficient condition for the design of robust stable sliding mode plane is obtained.

The main limitations are that external disturbance must meet matched condition.

A useful control strategy for uncertain neutral systems with time‐delays.

The virtual state feedback control is designed so to avoid the complicated NLMI.

This study aims to explore the effects of expertise diversity on project efficiency and creativity in health-care project teams.

This study analyzes hierarchical linear models using multi-source data from 50 project teams in a large health-care organization in the USA. This data set includes self-reported survey responses from 274 team members and human resource information for all 515 members across the 50 teams. Expertise diversity is operationalized by professional diversity and positional diversity reflecting two dimensions, domain and level, of the concept of expertise.

This study reveals that professional diversity is negatively related to project efficiency and project creativity, whereas positional diversity is positively related to project efficiency.

Successfully managing a project team of experts within a limited time frame is a challenge for organizations. This study advances the understanding of the double-edged sword effect of expertise diversity on project teams, focusing on professional and positional diversity. It provides important insights for human resource development in terms of the composition of project teams regarding members’ expertise.

Gives a bibliographical review of the finite element methods (FEMs) applied for the linear and nonlinear, static and dynamic analyses of basic structural elements from the theoretical as well as practical points of view. The range of applications of FEMs in this area is wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore aims to give the reader an encyclopaedic view on the subject. The bibliography at the end of the paper contains 2,025 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with the analysis of beams, columns, rods, bars, cables, discs, blades, shafts, membranes, plates and shells that were published in 1992‐1995.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate cultural and individual differences in newsvendor decision making.

The online experiment, programmed in the PHP scripting language, had 107 participants: local managers of four large, well-known and supply chain–intensive firms in China (Lenovo, Shenhua, CMST and GM).

The authors find that, as compared with American subjects, Chinese subjects engage in more demand chasing, order quantities that are closer to the mean demand, have a lower expected profit and exhibit greater variance in order quantities. However, these observations may not hold when the cross-cultural comparison is conducted for each pair of ethnic subgroups whose members have the same cognitive reflection test score, a measure of individual differences. Moreover, cultural differences also affect how individual differences manifest in newsvendor decisions.

The authors findings have important implications for employee selection, training and management in any cross-cultural business environment.

Little attention has been paid, in the behavioural operations literature, to individual differences and how they interact with culture. This paper is the first to examine the interaction effects of cultural and individual differences in newsvendor decisions, and it highlights an important research area that is currently understudied in operations management.

This study aims to assess the effect of job insecurity, customer incivility and work–life imbalance on Lebanese bank employee workplace well-being (EWW), while investigating the moderating role that positive and negative affect might have.

Quantitative data was collected from 202 respondents and analyzed using structural equation modeling system through IBM SPSS and AMOS.

Results revealed that each of the independent variables has a negative, statistically significant effect on Lebanese bank EWW. The positive affect and the negative one are shown to have a moderating effect that lessens and boosts, respectively, these negative effects.

The study adds to the literature on EWW while highlighting the high-power distance and collectivist society that the research took place in.

Limitations include the sample size that was hoped to be larger, in addition to the self-reporting issue and what it entails in the data collection process.

The study has many practical implications, including the validation of a questionnaire in a developing Arab country, hence providing a reliable tool for researchers. HR specialists should lean toward applicants with positive affect, ensuring that their workplace is occupied by members with enhanced resilience. Furthermore, employers should support their employees’ professional growth, thus, boosting their employability during turmoil and consequently making them less vulnerable in times of economic recession.

The study’s unique context, depicted in the harsh economic and financial crisis, makes the findings on EWW of a high value.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the automation of selective disassembly sequence planning (SDSP) and generate the optimal or near-optimal disassembly sequences.

The disassembly constraints is automatically extracted from the computer-aided design (CAD) model of products and represented as disassembly constraint matrices for DSP. A new disassembly planning model is built for computing the optimal disassembly sequences. The immune algorithm (IA) is improved for finding the optimal or near-optimal disassembly sequences.

The workload for recognizing disassembly constraints is avoided for DSP. The disassembly constraints are useful for generating feasible and optimal solutions. The improved IA has the better performance than the genetic algorithm, IA and particle swarm optimization for DSP.

All parts must have rigid bodies, flexible and soft parts are not considered. After the global coordinate system is given, every part is disassembled along one of the six disassembly directions –X, +X, –Y, +Y, –Z and +Z. All connections between the parts can be removed, and all parts can be disassembled.

The disassembly constraints are extracted from CAD model of products, which improves the automation of DSP. The disassembly model is useful for reducing the computation of generating the feasible and optimal disassembly sequences. The improved IA converges to the optimal disassembly sequence quickly.