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Omnichannel has become increasingly important with the development of e-commerce. In omnichannel, merchants expect customers to get the products and services at anytime, anywhere and in any way, and the same is true for customers. This drives multihoming in online platforms for both merchants and customers. Thus, once both customers and merchants are multihomed, what price and subsidy decisions should be made between platforms to compete to obtain optimal profits? The main purpose of this paper is to solve these problems and provide decision-making for two-sided platforms in omnichannel.

This study builds a dual Hotelling model to capture the utility and network effects of customers and merchants on two-sided platforms. This study introduces the exposure effect and convenience effect of multihomed customers and merchants in the model and analyzes the impact of these effects in the market with multihoming on one side. Then, this study extends the model to the market with multihoming on both sides and makes the pricing decision for two-sided platform when considering the exposure effect and convenience effect through an equilibrium solution. Finally, this study also uses numerical analysis to simulate the decision and profit of the platform.

This paper finds that the convenience effect will only increase social welfare when customers are single-homed and merchants are multihomed. In addition, when both users are multihomed, the platform will subsidize to attract merchants and customers if the convenience effect and exposure effect are relatively high. This study also finds that network effects come not only from the same platform but also from another platform in the case with multihoming on both sides. And network effects in the heterogeneous platform will be reduced by the convenience effect and exposure effect.

According to the behavioral characteristics of merchants and customers in omnichannel, this paper first adopts the dual Hotelling model to study the pricing of two-sided platforms with multihoming on both sides. This paper shows that network effects originate not only from the same platform but also from another platform and that the exposure effect and the convenience effect can exist as cross-platform network effects, which provides a new explanation for network effects in markets with multihoming on both sides. This research extends the theory of network effects and plays an important role in the development of two-sided platforms in omnichannel.

Omnichannel sales have provided new impetus for the development of catering merchants. The authors thus focus on how catering merchants should manage capacities at the ordering, production and delivery stages to meet customers’ needs in different channels under third-party platform delivery and merchant self-delivery. This is of great significance for the development of the omnichannel catering industry.

This paper formulates the capacity decisions of omnichannel catering merchants under the third-party platform delivery and merchant self-delivery mode. The authors mainly use queuing theory to analyze the queuing behavior of online and offline customers, and the impact of waiting time on customer shopping behavior. In addition, the authors also characterize the merchant’s capacity by the rate in queuing model.

The authors find that capacities at ordering stage and food production stage are composed of base capacities and safety capacities, but the delivery capacities only have the latter. And in the self-delivery mode, merchants can develop higher safety capacities by charging delivery fees. The authors prove that regardless of the delivery mode, omnichannel sales can bring higher profits to merchants by integrating demand.

The authors focus on analyzing the capacity management of omnichannel catering merchants at the ordering, production and delivery stages. And the authors also add the delivery process into the omnichannel for analysis, so as to solve the problem of capacity decision-making under different delivery modes. The management of delivery capacity and its impact on other stages’ capacities are not covered in other literature studies, which is one of the main innovations of this paper.

This paper aims to investigate the optimal price and service rate decisions in a customer-intensive service, where customers’ perceived service quality decreases in the service speed. Customers are assumed to be forward-looking in purchase decision-making and heterogeneous in their reservation utilities. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of customers’ forward-looking behavior and the heterogeneity on the operational decisions in a customer-intensive context.

The service is delivered through an M/M/1 queue system with unobservable queues. Customers are forward-looking in queue joining decisions, where the purchase decisions are made when the expected utility is greater than the reservation utility. The optimal price and service rate decisions are analyzed with both homogeneous and heterogeneous customers, where homogenous customers have the same reservation utility in purchase decision-making, while heterogeneous customers have different reservation utilities, which are captured by a random variable.

The optimal price and service rate decisions with forward-looking customers depend on the customer intensity, potential market size and customers’ reservation utility distribution. The results suggest that customers’ heterogeneity in terms of their reservation utilities affects the optimal decisions, market coverage and the expected revenue. Service providers need to take customers’ heterogeneity and the forward-looking behavior into operational decision-making.

This paper extends previous studies in customer-intensive service and contribute to the service operations management area by explicitly incorporating customers’ forward-looking behavior and heterogeneity in purchase decision-making. Assuming customers are forward-looking and heterogeneous is more realistic and practical. The results highlight that knowing customers’ behavioral characteristics can better improve decision-making in service operations, which is critical for enhancing customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, thus critical to a firm’s success in the market with intensive competition.

Based on the idea of part standardisation and product differentiation in lean management, this paper answers the question when integrate firms should choose market foreclosure to maximise profits by studying a two-tier supply chain, which contains three types of firms: suppliers, manufacturers and integrated firms. Moreover, the effect of the substitutability between final products and the competition among firms in the supply chain would be investigated from the perspective of dynamic analysis.

Considering the decision order of integrated firms and manufacturers in the downstream of the supply chain, the authors build three competition models. In each model, integrated firms compete with manufacturers in Bertrand–Nash fashion. And, suppliers compete with each other in Cournot fashion, so do integrated firms and manufacturers. The authors further discuss how the competitive relationship between firms affect the equilibrium result.

Numerical analysis reveals that under other conditions unchanged, the increased competition between downstream firms leads to the rise in the willingness of selling parts for integrated firms, while the increase in the number of suppliers has the opposite effect. In addition, due to the market change before and after the vertical merger, it may lead to the transition from profitable to unprofitable for the vertical merger.

This paper provides a theoretical analysis and managerial implication for integrated firms' market foreclosure decision. From the perspective of dynamic analysis, this paper demonstrates the result of vertical mergers and provides an explanation for the failure of vertical mergers.

Consumers are inclined to join longer queues due to social interactions in service consumptions. This purchase behavior brings in operational challenges in terms of capacity planning, which affects consumers’ demand, leading to an unstable and fluctuated arrival process. This paper aims to investigate the dynamic characteristics of the arrival process of a service system with boundedly rational consumers whose purchase decisions are influenced by the queue length under social interactions.

Consumers’ bounded rationality is modeled based on the random utility theory. Due to social interactions, the equilibrium queue length and its interaction with the expected waiting time affect consumers’ value perception. The authors first analyze the optimal service capacity decision with or without considering the influence of social interactions in a static setting. They then focus on the dynamic characteristics of the arrival process by a one-dimensional dynamical model in terms of the arrival rate.

This paper finds that the service system can behave chaotic in terms of arrival rate dynamics under social interactions. The results highlight the dynamical complexity of a simple service system due to consumers’ behavioral factors and the influence of social interactions, which may be the critical drivers leading to fluctuated and uneven demand.

The findings demonstrate that due to consumers’ limited cognitive ability and the influence of social interactions, the demand to a service system can be stable, periodic or even chaotic in terms of the arrival process. This study provides an alternative explanation to the observed demand fluctuations in various service processes under the influence of social interactions, which is important for service providers to effectively manage service capacity to achieve a stable service process and improve operational efficiency.

Customer-intensive services refer to the service that a provider needs to invest in customers with high patience and experience. Within a certain rate range, the slower service rate and the longer service time, the higher customer’s utility; however, this may cause queue congestion. And the advertising of service provider will affect the revenue. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of advertising on the optimal price, service rate and the optimal revenue of such service provider at different development stages.

This paper investigates the service strategies of service provider based on advertising effects. The authors first divide service provider into insufficient customers or sufficient customers according to the development stage, then analyze the impact of advertising at different stages. The authors focus on the formulation of the optimal price, service rate and the optimal revenue of service provider at different stages.

This paper finds that in the insufficient customers stage, the service provider’s strategy of “small profits but quick turnover” is conducive to quickly accumulating customers. With the development of service provider, the advertising indirectly increases the revenue of service provider by maintaining popularity. The result also shows that with the development of service provider, the initiative of such service market has gradually been mastered by service provider, from “buyer market” to “seller market.”

The finding provides an alternative explanation for the impact of advertising on service provider’s optimal strategies; it also solves the settings of service price and rate of customer-intensive service provider at different development stages. This study is essential to create the optimal revenue and solve supply–demand conflicts (such as doctor–patient conflict) between service provider and customers.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the self-determination theory (SDT) to propose a research model that incorporates the SDT framework and contextual variables as determinants and self-identity and social identity as mediating constructs to predict individuals’ intentions toward donation crowdfunding in China.

Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the data collected from China.

The results indicate that the self-identity and social identity collectively or separately mediate the effect exerted by the sense of self-worth, face concern, moral obligation, perceived donor effectiveness, social interaction and referent network size on donation intentions. However, there is no evidence supporting the hypothesis connecting moral obligation with self-identity.

The study provides suggestions for service providers on how to improve and perfect the functions, and it also provides insights for donation crowdfunding fundraisers on how to increase the success rate.

The conclusions of this study provide academics with a more thorough understanding of the driving forces of individual behavior intention toward donation crowdfunding in China. This study further expands the SDT and identity theory in the context of donation crowdfunding, which improves their robustness in explaining behavioral intention. These theories may be an important part of future information system research.

To eliminate the angle deviation of magnetic encoder, this paper aims to propose a compensation method based on permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) sensorless control. The paper also describes the experiments performed to verify the validity of this proposed method.

The proposed method uses PMSM sensorless control method to get high precision virtual angle value, and then get the deviation value between virtual position and magnetic angle which is used as compensation table. Oversampling linear interpolation tabulation method has been proposed to eliminate the noise signals. Finally, a magnetic encoder with precision (repeatability) 0.09° and unidirectional motion precision 0.03 is realized. The control system with an encoder running at 14,000 and 0.01 r/min showing high motion resolution is also realized.

Higher value of current in PMSM leads to a magnetic encoder with higher precision. When using oversampling linear interpolation to tabulate the compensation table, it is understood that more oversampling does not lead to a better result. Finally, validated by experiments, using eight intervals to calculate the mean value of angle deviation leads to the best result.

The angle deviation compensation method proposed in this paper has a great practical implication and a good commercial application. The method proposed in this paper could be effectively used to self-correct the magnetic encoder using arctangent method and also correct any rotary encoder sensor.

This paper originally proposes an adaptive correction method for a rotary encoder based on PMSM sensorless control. To eliminate the noise signals in an angle compensation table, over-sampling linear interpolation tabulation method has been proposed which also guarantees the precision of the compensation table.

This paper aims to study the impact of land options on the land transfer behaviour of Chinese city governments.

Based on the institutional environment of Hangzhou, China, the option pricing model is used to measure the option value of the trading plots. The effect of the option value on the land transfer price and the timing of transfers are estimated respectively, using the hedonic price model and the survival analysis models.

The results show that the option value has a significant explanation on land price and timing of land transfers. Under the effect of option value, the positive impact of fiscal pressure on the possibility of land transfer weakens. From the perspective of the annual option premium rate, the option premium is closely related to the real estate cycle. Option premiums are higher during booms but lower during recessions and in new urban areas.

By revealing the distinction of land option premiums in different places and times, this paper provides a reference for city governments seeking a balance between real estate regulation and obtaining more land revenue.

By introducing policy variables that reflect the degree of tightness of real estate regulation and indicators of local government financial pressure, the paper discusses the impact of options on the transfer behaviour of local governments in different situations.

In recent years, with the rapid development of the Internet and e-commerce, the online retail business has grown rapidly. E-commerce platforms can track different click data to understand consumer behavior and demand preferences, so as to make better demand forecasts, and strategically share this information with upstream suppliers. When the platform charges a certain fee for the shared data, the suppliers face the question of whether to purchase demand information. This article aims to analyze the influence of price competition and advertising competition on the suppliers' decisions to purchase information and the online platform for data pricing.

By using static game with incomplete information, this paper explores information-sharing strategies of an online platform with two competitive brand suppliers. The authors use Nash game to analyze the suppliers' purchasing information decision and then obtain the optimal information price of the online platform with information-sharing contract.

This paper shows that demand information sharing benefits both the platform and the suppliers. Without information contracts, the online platform is willing to share demand information with at least one supplier. Especially, when the consumer's sensitivity to advertising is larger and the commission fee charged by the online platform is small, the online platforms will share information with only one supplier. Based on the game outcomes between the suppliers, two pricing strategies for information are proposed under which at least one supplier purchases information. If the consumers are less (more) sensitive to advertising competition, pricing strategy of the online platform induces both suppliers (only one supplier) to purchase information.

At present, most of the information-sharing articles are based on the traditional purchase and sale mode. Based on the background of e-commerce, this paper examines the online platform's information-sharing strategies, which has certain innovation. In addition, the results show that the information-sharing strategy of the online platform is affected by both the price and advertising competitiveness, which provides a new expansion and supplement for the information-sharing literature.