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The traveling purchaser problem (TPP) has gained attention in academics to deal with different variants in real business world. This study aims to study a green TPP with quantity discounts and soft time windows (TPPQS), in which a firm needs to purchase products from a set of available markets and deliver the products to a set of customers.

Vehicles are available to visit the markets, which offer products at different prices and with different quantity discount schemes. Soft time windows are present for the markets and the customers, and earliness cost and tardiness may incur if a vehicle cannot arrive a market or a customer within the designated time interval. The environmental impact of transportation activities is considered. The objective of this research is to minimize the total cost, including vehicle-assigning cost, vehicle-traveling cost, purchasing cost, emission cost, earliness cost and tardiness cost, while meeting the total demand of the customers and satisfying all the constraints. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model and a genetic algorithm (GA) approach are proposed to solve the TPPQS.

The results show that both the MIP and the GA can obtain optimal solutions for small-scale cases, and the GA can generate near-optimal solutions for large-scale cases within a short computational time.

The proposed models can help firms increase the performance of customer satisfaction and provide valuable supply chain management references in the service industry.

The proposed models for TPPQS are novel and can facilitate firms to design their green traveling purchasing plans more effectively in today’s environmental conscious and competitive market.

In addition to leading a new tide of global financial technology, blockchain delivers advantages in terms of risk control compared to traditional financial systems. By exploring the relationship between blockchain technology and macroeconomic uncertainty, this study aims to identify the hedge risk attribute of blockchain technology.

From a data set comprising 6,323 Chinese firms with A-shares listed on the Shenzhen and Shanghai Stock Exchanges in 2015–2018, the authors obtain the use of blockchain technology by listed companies on the basis of annual reports, news reports, search engines and prospectuses. These documents are then subjected to text analyses based on computer technology. Cross-sectional and propensity score matching analyses are used to ensure robustness.

The empirical results show that with an increase in macroeconomic uncertainty, blockchain technology can potentially enable companies to reduce their systemic risks and enhance their investment efficiency.

This study expands the literature on the application of blockchain technology, offers references for enterprises to address future risks based on specific macroeconomically uncertain environments and provides guidelines for governments to maintain financial market stability.

The uncertainty of remanufacturing parts is a key factor affecting the quality of remanufactured products. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to measure the uncertainty of remanufactured parts and study the coupling mechanism of reassembly quality.

First, uncertainty of remanufactured parts is analyzed, and the uncertainty measure model for remanufacturing parts based on entropy is constructed. Second, the nonlinear mapping model between the uncertainty and reassembly quality were studied using Gauss-Newton iterative method to reveal the coupling mechanism between uncertainty of remanufacturing parts and reassembly quality. Finally, the model is verified in the reassembly process of remanufacturing cylinder head.

The method can guide reassembly operations to improve the reassembly quality with uncertainty of remanufactured parts.

This study provides practical implications by developing a multivariate nonlinear mapping model for reassembly quality based on entropy to determine the uncertainty factors that affect the reassembly quality significantly and then correct the reassembly operation to better optimize the allocation of remanufacturing production resources. The study also theoretically contributes to reveal the coupling mechanism of reassembly quality with the uncertainty of remanufactured parts.

Knowledge often is the fundament for strategic competitive advantage. Thus, it is highly relevant to understand better how knowledge is transferred from one generation to the next in family businesses. The purpose of this paper is to link the competitive advantage realisation in family businesses to the success of transferring strategically valuable knowledge in different business environments to the next generation.

Building on the contingency model of family business succession (Royer et al., 2008) knowledge transfer in family businesses from different cultures is investigated in this paper. From a resource-oriented and transaction cost inspired perspective two family businesses with a similar industry background from China and Europe are compared regarding knowledge transfer in the context of family firm succession taking into account the respective transaction atmosphere.

Different successions for two long-lived family firms are illustrated in a systematic fashion: based on the theoretical elements suggested both cases are described to get insights into the usefulness of the theoretical reasoning developed. On the basis of these, the cases are compared with each other and conclusions for both cases are drawn. Implications for theory and practice as well as avenues for future research are sketched.

The focus of the current study is to gain more insight into long-lived family businesses by comparing two cases over a period of more than 200 years with regard to strategically relevant resources as well as the underlying transaction atmospheres. Implications for family firms depending on the resource types and transaction atmosphere are discussed.

This chapter attempts to theorize the role of knowledge in the determination of the value of commodities. This draws from the South Korean controversy on the value and price of information commodities such as computer software and digital music. One group of writers has argued that the value of software copies (=commodities) is contributed by the labor time expended to produce the source code (=knowledge) in a piecemeal fashion. For another group, the source code has nothing to do with the production of the value of copies given that the source code is unnecessary for the (re)production of copies, and thus the value of software copies is approximately zero and its price is a high monopoly price. Both approaches are flawed. In the case of the former, no value can actually be transferred from the source code to copies because no changes are made to the source code before or after the production of copies. In case of the latter, knowledge is viewed as having nothing to do with value production. On the basis of this critique, an alternative view is put forward, in which knowledge plays an important role in value production by determining the productivity and/or complexity of labor. Knowledge “virtually intensifies” labor. It is also argued that intellectual property rights should be theorized in a way to refine and reproduce the role of knowledge – the virtual intensification of labor – at more complex and concrete levels of analysis.

This paper reports the first part of a recent interview with Dr Bor-Shiuan Cheng on his values, beliefs or thoughts on how to lead a fulfilling life as a person and a researcher.

This paper is based on a recent interview with Dr Bor-Shiuan Cheng.

Life is a journey of discovering our purpose and fulfilling our own destiny. Once Dr Cheng decided his career direction after trying out different alternatives, he sticks to it and makes the best out of it. His choice of majoring in psychology became a basis for the contributions to Chinese management research.

Dr Cheng’s life and career paths showcased a successful scholar who keeps doing one thing in his life, being himself, being focused and persistent. His experience may inspire and encourage junior scholars for career development.

The interview presents the life and career paths of Dr Cheng, who has chosen to take a road less traveled and enjoyed different views along the road.

This research aims to focus on the environmentally specific transformational leadership (ETFL) of a chief executive officer (CEO) and aims to examine the effect of CEOs' ETFL on firm's proactive environmental strategies (PESs), by indicating the top management team's (TMT) green commitment as a mediator and regulative pressure as a moderator to understand the relation.

This study used multisource data from 170 small-to medium-sized manufacturing firms in China.

The results indicated that CEOs' ETFL was positively related to the TMT's green commitment, which, in turn, enhanced the firm's PESs. Moreover, regulative pressure strengthened the direct effect of CEOs' ETFL on their TMTs' green commitment and the indirect effect of CEOs' ETFL on the firm's PESs via TMTs' green commitment.

The tested importance of regulative pressure as an external condition that strengthens the effectiveness of CEOs' ETFL offers new theoretical insights to advance the literature on PESs.

Travel websites allow tourists to share their thoughts, beliefs and experiences regarding various travel destinations. In this paper, the researchers demonstrated an approach for destination marketing organisations to explore online tourist-generated content and understand tourists' perceptions of the destination image (DI). Specifically, the researchers initiated an investigation examining how the destination image of Macau changed during the period of 2014–2018 based on user-generated content on travel websites.

Web crawlers developed by Python were employed to collect tourists' reviews from both Ctrip and TripAdvisor regarding the theme of “Macau attraction”. A total of 51,191 reviews (41,352 from Ctrip and 9,839 from TripAdvisor) were collected and analysed using the text-mining technique.

The results reveal that the frequency of casino-related words decreased in reviews by both international and mainland Chinese tourists. Additionally, international and mainland Chinese tourists perceive the DI of Macau differently. Mainland Chinese tourists are more sensitive to new attractions, while international tourists are not. The study also shows that there are differences between the government-projected DI and the tourist-perceived DI. Only the “City of Culture” and “A World Centre of Tourism and Leisure” have built recognition with tourists.

Given the easy accessibility of online information from various sources, it is important for destination marketing organisations to analyse and monitor different DI perspectives and adjust their branding strategies for greater effectiveness. This study uncovered the online DI of Macau by using text mining and content analysis of two of the largest travel websites. By analysing and comparing the differences and relationships among the frequently used words of tourist-generated content on these websites, the researchers revealed some interesting findings with important marketing implications.

Although environmental pressures have been covered in great detail in prior literature as the drivers of eco-innovation, there remains inconsistency in the empirical results concerning the effects of these pressures on eco-innovation behaviour. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the impact of environmental pressures, namely, regulatory pressure, green demand and competitive pressure, on eco-innovation among manufacturing SMEs. Moreover, it examined the mediating role of environmental capabilities on the environmental pressure–eco-innovation relationship.

Quantitative data were collected using an online self-reported questionnaire survey to test the hypothesised model. A total of 183 valid questionnaires were collected from managers and owners of manufacturing SMEs in Egypt.

The results of the data analysis using the Smart-PLS software package revealed that among environmental pressures, only green demand had a direct effect on eco-innovation. In addition, environmental capabilities only mediated the effect of competitive pressure on eco-innovation.

This study has been one of the few addressing the issue of how the drivers of eco-innovation interact. It has also provided the managers and owners of SMEs and policymakers with practical implications.

This is an attempt to introduce proactive changes when creating and providing intellectual access in order to convince catalogers to become more social catalogers then they have ever been in the past.

Through a brief review and analysis of relevant literature a definition of social cataloging and social cataloger is given.

User contributed content to library catalogs affords informational professionals the opportunity to see directly the users’ perceptions of the usefulness and about-ness of information resources. This is a form of social cataloging especially from the perspective of the information professional seeking to organize information to support knowledge discovery and access.

The user and the cataloger exercise their voice as to what the information resources are about, which in essence is interpreting the intentions of the creator of the resources, how the resource is related to other resources, and perhaps even how the resources can be, or have been, used. Depending on the type of library and information environment, the weight of the work may or may not fall equally on both user and cataloger.

New definitions of social cataloging and social cataloguing are offered and are linked back to Jesse Shera’s idea of social epistemology.