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This paper aims to investigate whether the establishment of commodity futures can effectively hedge systemic risk in the spot network, given the context of financialization in the commodity futures market.

Utilizing industry association data from the Chinese commodity market, the authors identify systemically important commodities based on their importance in the production process using multiple graph analysis methods. Then the authors analyze the effect of listing futures on the systemic risk in the spot market with the staggered difference-in-differences (DID) method.

The findings suggest that futures contracts help reduce systemic risks in the underlying spot network. Systemic risk for a commodity will decrease by approximately 5.7% with the introduction of each corresponding futures contract, since the hedging function of futures reduces the timing behavior of firms in the spot market. Establishing futures contracts for upstream commodities lowers systemic risks for downstream commodities. Energy commodities, such as crude oil and coal, have higher systemic importance, with the energy sector dominating systemic importance, while some chemical commodities also have considerable systemic importance. Meanwhile, the shortest transmission path for risk propagation is composed of the energy industry, chemical industry, agriculture/metal industry and final products.

The paper provides the following policy insights: (1) The role of futures contracts is still positive, and future contracts should be established upstream and at more systemically important nodes in the spot production chain. (2) More attention should be paid to the chemical industry chain, as some chemical commodities are systemically important but do not have corresponding futures contracts. (3) The risk source of the commodity spot market network is the energy industry, and therefore, energy-related commodities should continue to be closely monitored.

This paper aims to understand how immigrant entrepreneurs use digital opportunities to overcome the liability of newness and foreignness and how an immigrant's ethnicity can be digitally performed as an asset in business.

The study adopts an inductive multiple case study approach using social media content. The data consist of over 3,500 posts, images and screenshots from Facebook, Instagram and the webpages of seven successful Vietnamese restaurants in Sweden. Grounded content analysis was conducted using NVivo.

The findings suggest that digitalising ethnic artifacts can mediate and facilitate three digital performances that together can turn ethnicity from a liability to an asset: (i) preserving performance through digital ethnicising, (ii) embracing performance through digital generativitising and (iii) appropriating performance through digital fusionising. The results support the introduction of a conceptual framework depicting the interwoven duality of horizontal and vertical boundary blurring, in which the former takes place between the offline and online spaces of immigrant businesses, and the latter occurs between the home and host country attachment of the immigrant businesses.

This study responds to calls for understanding how immigrant entrepreneurs can overcome the liability of foreignness. It offers a fresh look at ethnicity, which has been seen in a negative light in the field of immigrant entrepreneurship. This study illuminates that ethnicity can be used as a resource in immigrant entrepreneurship, specifically through the use of digital artifacts and digital platforms.

The purpose of this study is to model the theory of the low-velocity impact (LVI) process on sandwich beams consisting of flexible cores and face sheets reinforced with functionally graded carbon nanotubes (CNTs).

A series of parameters derived from molecular dynamics are used to consider the size scale in the mixture rule for the combination of CNTs and resin. A procedure involving the use of the first-order shear deformation theory of the beam is used to provide the displacement field of the sandwich beam. The energy method and subsequently the generalized Lagrange method are used to derive the motion equations. Due to the use of Hertz’s nonlinear theory to calculate the contact force, the equations of motion are nonlinear. Validation of the problem is carried out by comparing natural frequencies with other papers.

The influence of a series of parameters such as CNTs distributions pattern in the face sheets, the influence of the CNTs volume fraction and the influence of the core thickness to the face sheets thickness ratio in the issue of LVI on sandwich beams with clamped-clamped boundary conditions is investigated. The result shows that the type of CNTs pattern in the face sheet and the CNTs volume fraction have a very important effect on the answer to the problem, which is caused by the change in the value of the Young’s modulus of the beam at the contact surface. Changes in the core thickness to the face sheets thickness ratio has little effect on the impact response.

Considering the important application of sandwich structures in vehicles, aviation and ships, in this research, sandwich beams consisting of flexible core and CNTs-reinforced face sheets are investigated under LVI.

This study aims to investigate the predictive role of team personality composition in facilitating shared leadership through team member exchange (TMX), while also to examine the moderating effect of organizational culture.

The authors conducted a two-stage online survey and selected the customer service teams, claims teams and financial teams of 26 Chinese insurance companies as the research samples. The authors finally obtained validated questionnaires from 107 teams with 457 members. The hypothesized relationships were tested using SPSS 25.0 and Mplus.

The results indicate that both team relationship-oriented and task-oriented personality composition have significant positive effects on shared leadership with team-member exchange serving as a full mediator for both paths. As a boundary condition, organizational culture (i.e. including internal integration values and external adaptation values) has a moderating effect on the influence of TMX on shared leadership.

The study investigates the predictive role of team personality composition on shared leadership, which complements the empirical studies of shared leadership antecedents in the literature. Drawing on social exchange perspective, the authors find out that TMX serves as a mediator between team personality composition and shared leadership. The authors also identify the moderating effect of organizational culture on the emergence of shared leadership. The research emphasizes the contextual boundary condition in this process.

This study aims to examine how participation in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects province-level regional economic resilience. In the context of dual circulation – the new development paradigm proposed by the Chinese Government – participating in the BRI is an important means of connecting both international and domestic circulations and achieving high economic resilience. The complex causal relationship between participation in the BRI and province-level regional economic resilience is investigated.

Based on the complex system view, this study uses fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the impact on regional economic resilience when provinces participate in the BRI through unimpeded trade, infrastructure connectivity, financial integration and people-to-people bonds under the two conditions of attention allocation and buffering capacity. Qualitative textual analysis is applied to analyse provincial work reports, and relevant statistical data are used to measure the economic resilience from 2013 to 2020.

The authors identified three condition configurations that lead to a high regional economic resilience at province-level and one condition configuration that lead to no high-level regional economic resilience.

In-depth analyses of qualitative materials should be conducted to explain the systematic relationships among the conditions.

This research is of practical significance to the development of the theoretical framework and practices of the BRI in the context of dual circulation.

This study aims to extract knowledge of ancient Chinese scientific and technological documents bibliographic summaries (STDBS) and provide the knowledge graph (KG) comprehensively and systematically. By presenting the relationship among content, discipline, and author, this study focuses on providing services for knowledge discovery of ancient Chinese scientific and technological documents.

This study compiles ancient Chinese STDBS and designs a knowledge mining and graph visualization framework. The authors define the summaries' entities, attributes, and relationships for knowledge representation, use deep learning techniques such as BERT-BiLSTM-CRF models and rules for knowledge extraction, unify the representation of entities for knowledge fusion, and use Neo4j and other visualization techniques for KG construction and application. This study presents the generation, distribution, and evolution of ancient Chinese agricultural scientific and technological knowledge in visualization graphs.

The knowledge mining and graph visualization framework is feasible and effective. The BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model has domain adaptability and accuracy. The knowledge generation of ancient Chinese agricultural scientific and technological documents has distinctive time features. The knowledge distribution is uneven and concentrated, mainly concentrated on C1-Planting and cultivation, C2-Silkworm, and C3-Mulberry and water conservancy. The knowledge evolution is apparent, and differentiation and integration coexist.

This study is the first to visually present the knowledge connotation and association of ancient Chinese STDBS. It solves the problems of the lack of in-depth knowledge mining and connotation visualization of ancient Chinese STDBS.

This study aimed to explore the spatial accessibility dynamics of urban parks and their driving forces from 1901 to 2010 in terms of the dynamic relationships between spatial morphology and road networks, taking Nanjing City as an example.

This study mapped and examined the spatiotemporal distribution of urban parks and road networks in four time points at Nanjing: the 1910s, 1930s, 1960s and 2010s, using the analysis methodology of spatial design network analysis, kernel density estimation and buffer analysis. Two approaches of spatial overlaying and data analysis were adopted to investigate the accessibility dynamics. The spatial overlaying compared the parks' layout and the road networks' core, subcore and noncore accessible areas; the data analysis clarified the average data on the city-wide and local scales of the road networks within the park buffer zone.

The analysis of the changing relationships between urban parks and the spatial morphology of road networks showed that the accessibility of urban parks has generally improved. This was influenced by six main factors: planning implementation, political policies, natural resources, historical heritage and cultural and economic levels.

The results provide a reference for achieving spatial equity, improving urban park accessibility and supporting sustainable urban park planning.

An increasing number of studies have explored the spatial accessibility of urban parks through the relationships between their spatial distribution and road networks. However, few studies have investigated the dynamic changes in accessibility over time. Discussing parks' accessibility over relatively long-time scales has practical, innovative and theoretical values; because it can reveal correlational laws and internal influences not apparent in short term and provide reference and implications for parks' spatial equity.

Waiting time, as an important predictor of queue abandonment and patient satisfaction, is important for resource utilization and patient experience management. Medical institutions have given top priority to reforming the appointment system for many years; however, whether the increased information transparency brought about by the appointment scheduling mechanism could improve patient waiting time is not well understood. In this study, the authors examine the effects of information transparency in reducing patient waiting time from an uncertainty perspective.

Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment in a tertiary academic hospital, the authors analyze over one million observational patient visit records and design the propensity score matching plus the difference in difference (PSM-DID) model and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to address this issue.

The authors confirm that, on average, improved information transparency significantly reduces the waiting time for patients by approximately 6.43 min, a 4.90% reduction. The authors identify three types of uncertainties (resource, process and outcome uncertainty) in the patient visit process that affect patients' waiting time. Moreover, information transparency moderates the relationship between three sources of uncertainties and waiting time.

The authors’ work not only provides important theoretical explanations for the patient-level factors of in-clinic waiting time and the reasons for information technology (IT)-enabled appointment scheduling by time slot (ITASS) to shorten patient waiting time and improve patient experience but also provides potential solutions for further exploration of measures to reduce patient waiting time.

This paper aims to examine the influence of social media communications, particularly firm-generated content (FGC) and consumer-generated content (CGC) on predicting consumer purchase decisions (CPD) through the lens of perceived brand authenticity (PBA). This paper also investigates the moderating influence of brand prestige (BP) and brand familiarity in the luxury hotel sector.

This study collected data from 390 consumers who were regularly using social media platforms, traveled frequently and stayed in luxury hotels. Following stringent data filtering, 371 responses were analyzed via structural equation modeling.

The findings indicate that FGC and CGC significantly strengthened PBA. However, CGC was the effective driver that directly influenced CPD. Likewise, PBA directly and indirectly substantially impacted CPD. Finally, BP’s direct and moderating effects significantly influenced CPD in the luxury hotel sector.

This novel study contributes to signaling theory, social media communications and branding literature in the luxury hotel sector.

A successful process of design concept evaluation has positive influence on subsequent processes. This study aims to consider the evaluation information at multiple stages and the interaction among evaluators and improve the credibility of evaluation results.

This paper proposes a multi-stage approach for design concept evaluation based on complex network and bounded confidence. First, a network is constructed according to the evaluation data. Depending on the consensus degree of evaluation opinions, the number of evaluation rounds is determined. Then, bounded confidence rules are applied for the modification of preference information. Last, a planning function is constructed to calculate the weight of each stage and aggregate information at multiple evaluation stages.

The results indicate that the opinions of the evaluators tend to be consistent after multiple stages of interactive adjustment, and the ordering of design concept alternatives tends to be stable with the progress of the evaluation.

Updating preferences according to the bounded confidence rules, only the opinions within the trust threshold are considered. The attribute information of the node itself is inadequately considered.

This method addresses the need for considering the evaluation information at each stage and minimizes the impact of disagreements within the evaluation group on the evaluation results.