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This paper aims to measure Chinese regional thermal industries’ evolution.

This paper uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) and global Malmquist–Luenberger productivity (GMLP) index.

The results reveal that the development of Chinese thermal power industry varies significantly in different regions, and it is highly correlated with the level of local economic development. Although the change of technical efficiency and scale efficiency had different impacts on different regions from year to year, the overall GMLP index change shows a close relationship with the contemporaneous frontier shift.

The results indicate that the Chinese Government should make efforts to promote its policy implementations and regulations in thermal industries so that the contemporaneous frontier will shift toward the global technology frontier with more desirable outputs and less undesirable outputs.

As an application, this study uses DEA and GMLP index to measure the productivity of Chinese thermal industries in 30 Chinese provinces from 2006 to 2013. The results have the meaningful policy implications for decision makers in charge of Chinese thermal industries.

The purpose of this paper is to fabricate and characterize the natural fibre (NF) reinforced epoxy composites containing flame retardants (FRs) and microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) in terms of flammability, thermal properties and dynamic mechanical performances.

The FRs used in this study were ammonium polyphosphate and alumina trihydrate.

The results demonstrated that the addition of MCC particles into the flame retardant composite (control) further enhanced the self-extinguishing properties of composites, in particular, the burn length. Thermogravimetric analysis showed that the mass residue improved with every addition of MCC particles at 700 °C. For instance, the residual weight enhanced from 28.4 Wt.% to 33 Wt.% for the control and the composite with 7 Wt.% MCCs, respectively. As obtained from the dynamic mechanical analysis, the glass transition temperature of composites increased upon increasing inclusion of MCC particles. For example, this parameter was 77.1 °C and 86.8 °C for the control and composite loaded with 7 Wt.% MCC, respectively.

Thus, the combination of MCC and FR had been proved to be a promising flame retardant system for NF reinforced epoxy.

Drawing on research on organisation-based self-esteem (OBSE) and self-consistency theory, this study aims to investigate whether, how and when leader aggressive humour (LAH) impacts hospitality employees’ proactive customer service performance (PCSP).

A total of 294 supervisor–employee dyads from eight hotels in China participated in the survey. The data were analysed by hierarchical multiple regression and PROCESS macro in SPSS.

LAH undermines hospitality employees’ PCSP by threatening their OBSE, and this effect is significant only for highly entitled employees.

Organisations could improve leaders’ awareness of the dark side of aggressive humour, especially for those who supervise highly entitled employees. Organisations could also cultivate positive leader–member relationships to improve employees’ OBSE and provide training for highly entitled employees to cope with leaders’ LAH.

This study contributes to the LAH literature by examining its influence on hospitality employees’ PCSP and identifying the mechanism and boundary conditions underlying this effect.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the progress in grey system research during 2000-2015, so as to present some important new concepts, models, methods and a new framework of grey system theory.

The new thinking, new models and new methods of grey system theory and their applications are presented in this paper. It includes algorithm rules of grey numbers based on the “kernel” and the degree of greyness of grey numbers, the concept of general grey numbers, the synthesis axiom of degree of greyness of grey numbers and their operations; the general form of buffer operators of grey sequence operators; the four basic models of grey model GM(1,1), such as even GM, original difference GM, even difference GM, discrete GM and the suitable sequence type of each basic model, and suitable range of most used grey forecasting models; the similarity degree of grey incidences, the closeness degree of grey incidences and the three-dimensional absolute degree of grey incidence of grey incidence analysis models; the grey cluster model based on center-point and end-point mixed triangular whitenization functions; the multi-attribute intelligent grey target decision model, the two stages decision model with grey synthetic measure of grey decision models; grey game models, grey input-output models of grey combined models; and the problems of robust stability for grey stochastic time-delay systems of neutral type, distributed-delay type and neutral distributed-delay type of grey control, etc. And the new framework of grey system theory is given as well.

The problems which remain for further studying are discussed at the end of each section. The reader could know the general picture of research and developing trend of grey system theory from this paper.

A lot of successful practical applications of the new models to solve various problems have been found in many different areas of natural science, social science and engineering, including spaceflight, civil aviation, information, metallurgy, machinery, petroleum, chemical industry, electrical power, electronics, light industries, energy resources, transportation, medicine, health, agriculture, forestry, geography, hydrology, seismology, meteorology, environment protection, architecture, behavioral science, management science, law, education, military science, etc. These practical applications have brought forward definite and noticeable social and economic benefits. It demonstrates a wide range of applicability of grey system theory, especially in the situation where the available information is incomplete and the collected data are inaccurate.

The reader is given a general picture of grey systems theory as a new model system and a new framework for studying problems where partial information is known; especially for uncertain systems with few data points and poor information. The problems remaining for further studying are identified at the end of each section.

The high-quality development of the real estate industry is crucial to the transformation of China's economy. However, few studies apply the productivity to explore the development path of the real estate industry in China. To fill this gap, this study mainly investigates the total factor productivity (TFP) of the real estate industry of 30 sample provinces in mainland China from 2007 to 2016.

The Malmquist index is applied to estimate the productivity (i.e. TFP) of the real estate industry, based on the data envelopment analysis (DEA). Then, the truncated tobit regression analysis explores the external influencing factors on the TFP of the real estate industry.

Through empirical analysis, it is found that the high-quality development of the real estate industry depends on the technological innovation by the real estate enterprises and the targeted policies by the provincial government. Moreover, the development of the real estate industry has a positive correlation with the growth of China's economy but a negative correlation with the development of other industries.

TFP mainly reveals the development status of the provincial real estate industry and identifies the driving force for exploring the high-quality development mode of the real estate sector. Furthermore, the fluctuation rule of TFP can be applied to predict the development trend of the real estate industry in the future.

As an application, this study measures the TFP of the Chinese real estate industry in different provinces and periods. The results have meaningful policy implications for policymakers regulating the real estate industry.

The effects of the thermo-mechanical treatment on the properties and microstructure of the Al–Cu–Mg–Ag alloy were investigated.

A short-duration preprecipitation process is designed prior to predeformation aging. The novel predeformation aging (solution treatment + holding at 185 °C for 15 min+ rolling deformation + aging at 185 °C, also named T8) was performed on a heat-resistant Al–Cu–Mg–Ag alloy.

The purpose of this study indicate that a short-duration heat treatment before predeformation is beneficial to the precipitation of O during the aging process. The precursors of O during this process might pin the dislocation and cause the grains to orient along some specific direction, which might be advantageous to the precipitation of O while disadvantageous to that of θ′. This novel thermal-mechanical process could result in an increase in the quantity and decrease in the size of the precipitation of O, which leads to a remarkable strength effect. The potential increases while the current density decreases with an increase in the deformation amount, which implies a smaller intergranular corrosion rate. The fine deformed structure leads to an opposite behavior in the exfoliation corrosion test compared with that for intergranular corrosion.

The intergranular corrosion resistance of the Al–Cu–Mg–Ag alloy is enhanced, whereas the exfoliation corrosion resistance is reduced by novel predeformation aging.

This study aims to empirically examine the relationship between Internet use and personal privacy risk perceptions, the mediating effect of trust and the moderating effect of satisfaction on that relationship, which is exactly conducive to the practice of personal information protection.

A moderated mediation model will be employed to test the hypothesized relationships using the 2017 Chinese Society Survey data.

The authors find that Internet use positively relates to citizens' risk perceptions toward privacy security, and trust partially mediates the relationship between Internet use and privacy risk perception. In addition, the analysis of moderating effects showed that satisfaction with social life significantly enhances the negative impact on individuals' privacy risk perceptions of interpersonal trust. The positively moderating effect of satisfaction with local governments' work mainly reveals the relationship between interpersonal trust (or institutional trust) and citizens' privacy risk perception. Moreover, satisfaction with Internet platforms positively moderates the relationship between consumer trust and privacy risk perception.

This article contributes to the social risk amplification framework by applying it to the personal privacy information protection field, which was rarely discussed before. It also enriches privacy research by identifying the internal mechanism of how Internet use influences citizens' risk perceptions towards privacy information leakage.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) is growing steadily and Chinese multinationals (MNCs) are playing an increasingly important role in the global economy. Thus, the number of papers focusing on China’s OFDI and Chinese MNCs has been increasing during the last years. The aim of this chapter is to carry out a review of the empirical papers dealing with Chinese MNCs published between 2002 and 2012 in high-impact international business and management journals.

This chapter reviews 43 empirical papers focusing on Chinese MNCs that were published in nine major scholarly journals between 2002 and 2012.

We report individual and institutional contributions, the theories and methods used, the research topics, and the main findings. We also discuss implications for future research.

Some previous literature reviews have dealt with research on China’s OFDI and Chinese MNCs. Nevertheless, none of the earlier reviews dealt specifically with empirical papers; neither did they provide an analysis of both individual and institutional contributions.

The purpose of this paper is to study the tribology behavior of steel–steel contact under the lubrication of water-based drilling mud with different oleic acid-filled microcapsules as lubricant additives.

A ball-on-disc tribometer was used to evaluate the lubrication properties of the steel–steel contact. The wear tracks of the worn surfaces were observed by a scanning electron microscope.

Results show that the dependence of both friction and wear on the category of additives shares a consistent pattern. In contrast to oleic acid and empty microcapsules, oleic acid-filled microcapsules achieve the best tribological performance which is related to the lubricant effect of oleic acid and the isolation and rolling abilities of microcapsules.

This study provides a helpful method of encapsulated lubricant additives to prolong lubrication performance for steel–steel contact.

This study has applied microcapsules to improve the tribological properties of drilling mud.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-08-2019-0320/

As a kind of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, pipe routing design (PRD) is applied widely in modern industries. In the offshore oil and gas industry, a semi-submersible production platform is an important equipment for oil exploitation and production. PRD is one of the most key parts of the design of semi-submersible platform. This study aims to present an improved ant colony algorithm (IACO) to address PRD for the oil and gas treatment system when designing a semi-submersible production platform.

First, to simplify PRD problem, a novel mathematical model is built according to real constraints and rules. Then, IACO, which combines modified heuristic function, mutation mechanism and dynamical parameter mechanism, is introduced.

Based on a set of specific instances, experiments are carried out, and the experimental results show that the performance of IACO is better than that of two variants of ACO, especially in terms of the convergence speed and swarm diversity. Finally, IACO is used to solve PRD for the oil and gas treatment system of semi-submersible production platform. The simulation results, which include nine pipe paths, demonstrate the practicality and high-efficiency of IACO.

The main contribution of this study is the development of method for solving PRD of a semi-submersible production platform based on the novel mathematical model and the proposed IACO.