Search results

The study discusses organic agricultural product persuasion using an empirical survey. This study argued that strong argument persuasive advertising message would trigger individuals' self-reference to the harm of pesticide residue in non-organic agricultural product, which would raise their purchase intention of organic agricultural product.

The present study conducted an empirical investigation in Taiwan by recruiting 527 Taiwanese participants using the convenience sampling procedure. The current research performed structural equation modeling analysis and used LISREL software to report the analytical results.

Individuals with health consciousness may perceive a high-level risk of non-organic agricultural product, which would raise individuals' fear perception to the harm of pesticide residue. Fear perception will increase individual's purchase intention of organic agricultural product. Results can help industry practitioners benefit from the results by enabling them to develop their advertising strategy for organic food.

Results can help industry practitioners benefit from the results by enabling them to develop their advertising strategy for organic food.

In the process of building the “Belt and Road” and “Bright Road” community of interests between China and Kazakhstan, this paper proposes the construction of an inland nuclear power plant in Kazakhstan. Considering the uncertainty of investment in nuclear power generation, the authors propose the MGT (Monte-Carlo and Gaussian Radial Basis with Tensor factorization) utility evaluation model to evaluate the risk of investment in nuclear power in Kazakhstan and provide a relevant reference for decision making on inland nuclear investment in Kazakhstan.

Based on real options portfolio combined with a weighted utility function, this study takes into account the uncertainties associated with nuclear power investments through a minimum variance Monte Carlo approach, proposes a noise-enhancing process combined with geometric Brownian motion in solving complex conditions, and incorporates a measure of investment flexibility and strategic value in the investment, and then uses a deep noise reduction encoder to learn the initial values for potential features of cost and investment effectiveness. A Gaussian radial basis function used to construct a weighted utility function for each uncertainty, generate a minimization of the objective function for the tensor decomposition, and then optimize the objective loss function for the tensor decomposition, find the corresponding weights, and perform noise reduction to generalize the nonlinear problem to evaluate the effectiveness of nuclear power investment. Finally, the two dimensions of cost and risk (estimation of investment value and measurement of investment risk) are applied and simulated through actual data in Kazakhstan.

The authors assess the core indicators of Kazakhstan's nuclear power plants throughout their construction and operating cycles, based on data relating to a cluster of nuclear power plants of 10 different technologies. The authors compared it with several popular methods for evaluating the benefits of nuclear power generation and conducted subsequent sensitivity analyses of key indicators. Experimental results on the dataset show that the MGT method outperforms the other four methods and that changes in nuclear investment returns are more sensitive to changes in costs while operating cash flows from nuclear power are certainly an effective way to drive investment reform in inland nuclear power generation in Kazakhstan at current levels of investment costs.

Future research could consider exploring other excellent methods to improve the accuracy of the investment prediction further using sparseness and noise interference. Also consider collecting some expert advice and providing more appropriate specific suggestions, which will facilitate the application in practice.

The Novel Coronavirus epidemic has plunged the global economy into a deep recession, the tension between China and the US has made the energy cooperation road unusually tortuous, Kazakhstan in Central Asia has natural geographical and resource advantages, so China–Kazakhstan energy cooperation as a new era of opportunity, providing a strong guarantee for China's political and economic stability. The basic idea of building large-scale nuclear power plants in Balkhash and Aktau is put forward, considering the development strategy of building Kazakhstan into a regional international energy base. This work will be a good inspiration for the investment of nuclear generation.

This study solves the problem of increasing noise by combining Monte Carlo simulation with geometric Brownian motion under complex conditions, adds the measure of investment flexibility and strategic value, constructs the utility function of noise reduction weight based on Gaussian radial basis function and extends the nonlinear problem to the evaluation of nuclear power investment benefit.

Employability is a key concept in higher education. Graduate employment rate is often used to assess the quality of university provision, despite that employability and employment are two different concepts. This paper will increase the understandings of graduate employability through interpreting its meaning and whose responsibility for graduate employability from the perspectives of four key stakeholders: higher education institutions, students, government and employers.

There are two stages to this literature review which was undertaken across bibliographic databases. The first stage builds a conceptual understanding of employability, relating to definition and how employability can be achieved and enhanced from the perspective of stakeholders. A structured search employing Boolean searches was conducted using a range of terms associated with key stakeholders. The second round of review drew on documentary analysis of official statements, declarations, documents, reports and position papers issued by key stakeholders in the UK, available online.

It reveals that responsibility for employability has been transferred by the UK government to higher education institutions, despite clear evidence that it needs to be shared by all the key stakeholders to be effective. In addition, there is a gap between employers' expectation for employability and the government's employability agenda.

This article highlights that solely using employment rate statistics as a key indicator for employability will encourage the practice of putting employers' needs above knowledge creation and the development of academic disciplines, with the consequence that higher education will become increasingly vocation driven.

This study aims to address the following research questions: Do the two types of service firms (individual or aggregator) have similar competitiveness on online search ads? How should the two types of service firms select optimal branded keywords to improve search performance? In addition, how do consumers’ search queries influence the service search performance of the two types of service firms?

In this study, the authors conduct an empirical analysis by building a two-stage choice modeling on the process of search engine ranking and consumer click-through decisions. The authors estimate the parameter coefficients and test the hypotheses using maximum likelihood estimation in the logistic regression model.

The empirical findings suggest that consumer response rates are highly dependent upon three aspects (service types, branded keyword strategy and consumer search query). First, the authors found that service aggregators receive greater consumer responses than individual service providers. Second, depending upon the various branded keyword strategies (e.g. generic vs branded, “within-type” vs “cross-type”) implemented by service aggregators or individual firms, the expected consumer responses could be quite different. Finally, customer’s search query, being either generic or branded, also has direct effect and interactive effect with service type on how consumers would response to the sponsored ads in the service search process.

The limitation of the research is twofold. First, conversion rate is not considered in the model estimation due to the nature of the data set. Second, the discussion about the keywords selection strategies is focusing on the hospitality industry. Future research shall further validate the generalizability into other industries.

First, given this competitive advantage, service aggregators should take an aggressive approach to adopting paid search strategy in acquiring new users and enhance its brand salience in the service ecosystem. Second, when considering other competitor’s brand names to include, if a firm is a service provider (e.g. hotel), a strategy that can help it receive higher consumer response would be to use “within-type” rather than “cross-type” branded keyword strategy. If a firm is a service aggregator, a better branded keyword strategy would be to use “across-type” instead of “within-type” approach. In addition, given that consumer’s brand awareness can influence the effectiveness of branded keyword strategy, online service search should target consumers in earlier stages of a decision journey.

The authors believe their theoretical framework can provide actionable solutions to service firms to ease customer’s search process, increase customer’s stickiness using search engines and add value to the customer relationships with all services entities within the digital ecosystem.

This study is the first to expand online search marketing into granule examinations (main and interactive effects of three key factors) in the service search domain. First, the authors differentiate service firms into two categories – online travel aggregators and individual hotels in the model. Second, the authors introduce two sets of new classifications of branded keywords for online service search research (i.e. own versus other brand and “cross-type” versus “within-type” branded keywords). Third, this study integrates service consumers’ search word specificity into the conceptual framework which is often missing in previous online search research.

Guanxi is an influential factor of doing business in China. This research focuses on a specific guanxi type, political connection and studies the impact of political connection on corporate value. Moreover, in the technology innovation studies, few studies have examined the impact of politics on technology innovation of firm. This paper aims to examine the relations among political connection, technology innovation and corporate value by an empirical study.

A sample of listed technology-intensive firms in China is used. This research examines the impact of political connection and technology innovation on corporate value with two dimensions, namely, the owner type of firm and the political connection level of firm.

Based on an empirical study, this research has four main findings. First, technology innovation has positive impact on corporate value. Second, compared to non-connected firms, politically connected firms value more. Third, political connection to a government of higher administrative level contributes more to corporate value. Finally, the relations among political connection, technology innovation and corporate value differ by the owner type of firm.

This research contributes to the study of guanxi by considering the specific guanxi type, political connection, as well as to the study of technology innovation by considering the impact of politics.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the complementary design rules, give a quantitative comparison and analyze the force production mechanism of two kinds of primary wound field flux-switching linear (PWFFSL) motors.

PWFFSL motors have the merits of no use of rare-earth magnet, low cost and a wide operation range in which the armature windings and the field windings are all located at the short primary mover and the secondary is very robust. Hence, the PWFFSL motor is ideal for rail transportation systems which need a long stator and a wide speed range. To overcome the disadvantages of the existing PWFFSL motors, new complementary design rules will be proposed. Also, to offer a better PWFFSL motor for the rail transportation systems, it is necessary to investigate different structures of PWFFSL motors and give a comprehensive comparison. To predict the force performance of two kinds of PWFFSL motors with different secondary types, their flux density analysis and force production mechanism will be presented and compared.

The comparison result shows that the PWFFSL motor with toothed secondary can offer larger thrust force, higher force density and higher efficiency, whereas the PWFFSL motor with segmented secondary has the merits of lower force ripple, less use of stator iron, higher power factor and less critical saturation.

Many PWFFSL motors with different primary/secondary pole pitches based on the proposed design principle have not been considered in this paper.

This paper has presented the air-gap flux analysis, proposed the complementary design rules for two kinds of PWFFSL motors with different secondary types and compared the electromagnetic performance of the two motors.

A non‐equilibrium multi‐valley transport model for carriers in compound semiconductor devices has been developed. This macroscopic transport model provides an efficient scheme for device modeling, and can overcome the difficulty in evaluating the relaxation times in multi‐valley conservation equations without a priori assumption of the displaced‐Maxwellian distribution. This model has been successfully applied to electron transport in GaAs subjected to rapidly time‐varying fields. The results have suggested that the macroscopic effective mass of electrons might be strongly dependent on average velocity.

The purpose of this study is to propose a hybrid model integrating the expectation-confirmation model with the views of cognitive absorption (CA) theory and updated DeLone and McLean information system success model to examine whether quality factors as antecedents to medical professionals’ beliefs can affect their continuance intention of the cloud-based e-learning system.

This study’s sampling frame was taken from among medical professionals working in hospitals with over 300 beds in Taiwan which had implemented the cloud-based learning management system (LMS) with a blend of asynchronous and synchronous technologies. Sample data for this study were collected from medical professionals at six hospitals in Taiwan. The data for this study were gathered by means of a paper-and-pencil survey, and each sample hospital that participated in this study was asked to identify a contact person who could distribute the survey questionnaires to medical professionals who had experience in using the cloud-based LMS in their learning. A total of 600 questionnaires were distributed, and 378 (63.0%) usable questionnaires were analyzed using structural equation modeling in this study.

This study proved that medical professionals’ perceived learner–content interaction quality, learner–system interaction quality, service quality, cloud storage service quality and learner–human interaction quality all positively caused their perceived usefulness, confirmation and CA elicited by the cloud-based e-learning system, which jointly explained their satisfaction with the system, and resulted in their continuance intention of the system.

Several limitations and suggestions may open avenues for future research. First, the limitation of self-reported measures should be considered; future research may combine with qualitative data (e.g. semi-structured, narrative, in-depth interviews, focus group interviews and open-ended questions) to get more complete interpretations of medical professionals’ cloud-based e-learning continuance intention. Next, this study’s data were collected from hospitals in Taiwan only; given this study’s limited scope, future research may generalize this study’s sample to the respondents of other national cultural backgrounds and make cross-country comparisons to enhance the completeness of this study. Finally, this study’ results were based on cross-sectional data; future research may use a longitudinal analysis by taking into account the evolution of medical professionals’ cloud-based e-learning continuance intention over time.

This study fully evaluates interaction-related and cloud-related quality determinants through an understanding of medical professionals’ state of CA in explaining their cloud-based e-learning system continuance intention that is difficult to expound with only their utilitarian perception of the system. Hence, the results contribute to deep insights into an all-round quality evaluation in the field of medical professionals’ cloud-based e-learning continuance intention, and extrinsic and intrinsic motivators are both taken into consideration in this study’s theoretical development of medical professionals’ cloud-based e-learning continuance intention to acquire a more comprehensive and robust analysis.

The purpose of this study is to propose the research model integrating the expectation-confirmation model with the views of learning engagement (LE) and extending DeLone and McLean information systems (IS) success model to examine whether quality determinants as antecedents to students' beliefs can influence students' continuance intention of massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Sample data for this study were collected from students enrolled in a comprehensive university in Taiwan. A total of 600 questionnaires were distributed, and 363 (60.5%) useable questionnaires were analyzed using structural equation modeling in this study.

This study proved that students' perceived knowledge quality, system quality, interface design quality, learner–instructor interaction quality, and collaboration quality all positively caused students' perceived usefulness, confirmation and LE in MOOCs, which jointly explained students' satisfaction with MOOCs and subsequently resulted in students' continuance intention of MOOCs.

This study fully evaluates IS-related and interaction-related quality determinants via an understanding of students' state of LE in explaining students' continuance intention of MOOCs that is difficult to expound with only their utilitarian perception of MOOCs. Hence, this study contributes to deep insights into an all-round quality evaluation in the field of MOOCs continuance intention and takes extrinsic and intrinsic motivators into account in the theoretical development of MOOCs continuance intention to acquire a more comprehensive and robust analysis.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/19348830810915532. When citing the article, please cite: Lei-Yu Wu, Chun-Ju Wang, Chun-Yao Tseng, Ming-Cheng Wu, (2008), “Founding team and start-up competitive advantage”, International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Vol. 16 Iss: 1/2, pp. 138 - 151.