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The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between national societal values and corporate governance in emerging markets.

The sample is comprised of 511 firm-year observations representing firms from 22 emerging markets. The authors regress sample firms’ corporate governance ratings, reported by Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia (CLSA), on national societal value scores (Hofstede, 1980 variables for primary analysis and Schwartz, 1994 variables for sensitivity tests) and firm-level and country-level control variables.

The authors find that national societal values are associated with corporate governance in emerging markets. Corporate governance is strong in firms from individualistic societies, and weak in firms from uncertainty avoiding and masculine cultures.

The authors extend the stream of literature that has established the link between formal institutions and corporate governance. The authors also extend the literature that examines how societal values influence corporate practices in emerging markets.

The results suggest that informal institutions, in addition to formal ones, shape corporate governance in emerging markets. Corporate stakeholders need to be aware of the different societal values of each market and develop specific strategic plans that best suit both formal and informal institutions.

The findings suggest that national societal values need to be considered in cross-country research on corporate governance. The results should also be of interest to policy makers advocating for or against global governance standards.

With the growing awareness about the environment and climate, sustainability has gained increased attention of investors. Many investors now factor in the long-term sustainability of successful and responsible companies when making their investment choices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether or not the sustainability performance of a company affects the informativeness of its earnings by exploring the mediating effect of sustainability performance on the association between stock returns and earnings changes.

Using a sample of firms for the period 2009–2016 with available sustainability data from TruValue Labs' database, the authors investigate how the sustainability performance of a firm mediates the relationship between stock returns and earnings (changes). The authors use ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions to test their hypotheses.

Consistent with the voluntary disclosure and environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance literature, the authors find that higher sustainability performance improves the stock price informativeness of earnings. The authors find evidence in support of increased earnings response coefficient with increased sustainability performance.

This study adds to the literature supporting the notion of sustainability investing indicating that sustainability performance of a firm affects the stock price informativeness and predictability of earnings (changes) of the firm.

This study has value for, both, investors and managers regarding the importance of sustainability performance of the firm. Sustainability performance of the firm sends signals to market participants, increasing the informational content of the reported earnings as well as predictability of future earnings.

Despite the intensive research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm financial performance, little is known about how the linkage between CSR and firm financial performance is heterogeneous across industries and how the performance implications are differentiated among specific categories of CSR activities. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the association between a firm’s engagement in CSR and firm financial performance is heterogeneous across industries and CSR categories.

Using a sample of 17,083 firm-year observations representing 1,877 firms from the largest 3,000 US companies during years 1991 and 2011, the authors compare the association between CSR and firm financial performance across ten industry sectors defined by Global Industry Classification Standard and across the four CSR categories classified by Mandl and Dorr (2007).

The authors find that the association between the overall CSR activities and firm performance is heterogeneous across industries. CSR has significant positive implications for firms from most, but not all, industries. Comparing the performance implication of CSR practices targeting different stakeholder groups, the empirical results indicate that different types of CSR have different influences on financial performance of firms from different industry sectors.

This study provides new angles for managers in maximizing firm performance through CSR activities and suggests an important and interesting direction for researchers who engage in CSR research. Due to its heterogeneous nature, the CSR-performance relationship needs to be examined more specifically – across industries and different CSR categories. Findings from studies incorporating both company industrial sector and CSR categories would provide more meaningful and practical implications for managers.

This study provides important managerial implications. First, to maximize firm performance through CSR activities, managers must interpret the linkage between CSR and firm financial performance from the perspective of a specific industrial sector and acknowledge the importance of CSR practices across different CSR categories. Second, the findings suggest that CSR practices aiming at different stakeholder groups generate different financial returns in different industries. Firms engage in CSR to satisfy different stakeholder groups. When budgets are tight, managers may give higher priority to the CSR practices that have stronger effects on firm financial performance.

This study advances our understanding of the CSR-financial performance relationship by exploring its heterogeneous nature across industry sectors and across specific categories. To obtain the biggest gain from CSR spending, managers must have a good understanding how a specific CSR category can contribute to the financial performance of their particular company in their particular industry.

The authors investigated the impacts of differentiated transformational leadership (TFL), including team-focused TFL and individual-focused TFL, on team creativity through the mediating effect of team conflict, consisting of task conflict and relationship conflict.

The authors designed and conducted a close-to-reality experiment, enrolling 180 students and six professors from a large Chinese university. Student participants worked on a real marketing project and professor participants imitated the behaviors of transformational leaders. Using the computed values of team-focused TFL, individual-focused TFL, team creativity, task conflict and relationship conflict, the authors assessed the relationship among differentiated TFL, team creativity and team conflict.

Team-focused TFL has a significantly positive impact on team creativity through the mediating effect of task conflict, whereas individual-focused TFL has a significantly negative impact on team creativity through the mediating effect of relationship conflict.

From a new perspective of team conflict, the authors revealed the “black box” of the differentiated TFL–team creativity relationship. Moreover, other determinants were well controlled in the experiment, and thus, the authors effectively clarified the intervening mechanism of differentiated TFL on team creativity through the mediating effect of team conflict.

Prior literature has established the theoretical and statistical linkages between monetary compensation and firm performance, yet little is known about how the association between monetary compensation and firm performance is moderated by companies’ engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Further, compared to executive compensation, non-executive compensation remains an underexplored topic. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how workforce-oriented CSR moderates: first, the association between non-executive compensation and firm performance; and second, the association between executive compensation and firm performance.

Using a sample of 181 from the largest 3,000 US companies for the years 1991-2011, the authors investigate how workforce-oriented CSR moderates the association between compensation and firm performance. Compensation is examined at two levels – non-executive versus executive compensation. The workforce-oriented CSR score is constructed as total strengths minus total concerns in Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini’s employee relations dimension.

The authors find an improvement in firm performance with increases in both non-executive and executive compensation. Further, workforce-oriented CSR positively moderates the association between non-executive compensation and firm performance, and negatively moderates the association between executive compensation and firm performance.

This study adds to the literature of the compensation-performance linkage by including both non-executive and executive compensation as important determinants of firm performance and incorporating workforce-oriented CSR as a moderator on the compensation-performance linkage. It also provides new angles for CSR scholars.

This study helps managers understand the importance of fulfilling employees’ social emotional needs and the potential of workforce-oriented CSR in shaping employees’ perceived distributive justice. The findings also help managers make critical decisions regarding the allocation of limited corporate resources and prioritization of investment options. In addition, the findings are also useful to boards of directors and human resources managers who are in charge of hiring executives, building top management teams, and deciding executive compensation.

This study helps advance our understanding of the compensation-performance linkage. The results suggest that the relationship between compensation and financial performance is contingent on other organizational factors. In addition, the findings provide practical implications on how CSR engagement moderates the association between non-executive compensation and firm performance differently than the association between executive compensation and firm performance and how to allocate corporate resources and prioritize strategic options effectively.

This study aims to analyze the tradeoff between two potential marketing strategies for service providers, namely, market segmentation on the basis of reservation lead time and cooperation with third parties.

This paper proposes an optimization model to describe market segmentation strategy after cooperating with third parties by taking hotels for example.

The results show that the profitability of adopting two strategies simultaneously is lower than that with market segmentation alone under some cases, which is relevant with attributes of travel agencies, such as switch rate and market share.

This study indicates that cooperation with third parties has a negative impact on profitability of hotels using market segmentation in some cases. However, randomness of demand, customer loyalty and existence of cancellation should be considered in further research.

In an e-commerce era, hotels with market segmentation based on reservation lead time, are not required to cooperate with third parties under a number of situations (e.g. high switch rates and small market sizes of travel agencies). In addition, hotels should revise the segmentation strategy based on the change rate of potential demand of individual customers. Furthermore, hotels should enhance customer loyalty, strengthen cooperation with travel agencies that possess large market shares or small switch rates.

The study preliminarily formulates the optimal market segmentation strategy on the basis of reservation lead time after cooperating with third parties, which contributes to the revenue management.

This paper aims to present a method to improve the sensitive and low probabilities of false alarm of a manipulator in a human–robot interaction environment, which can improve the performance of the system owing to non-linear uncertainty in the model of the robot controller.

A novel collision detection method based on adaptive residual estimation is proposed, promoting the detection accuracy of the collision of the manipulator during operation. First, a general momentum residual estimator is designed to incorporate the non-linear factors of the manipulator (e.g. joint friction, speed and acceleration) into the residual-related uncertainty of the model. Second, model parameters are estimated through gradient correction. The residual filter is used to determine the dynamic threshold, resulting in higher detection accuracy. Finally, the performance of the residual estimation scheme is evaluated by comparing the dynamic threshold with residual in real-time experiments where a single Universal Robot 5 robot end–effector collides with the obstacle.

Experimental results demonstrate that the collision detection system can improve sensitivity and lead to low probabilities of false alarm of non-linear uncertainty in the model.

The method proposed in this article can be applied to industry and human–robot interaction area.

An adaptive collision detection method is proposed in this paper to address non-linear uncertainties of the model in industrial application.

With the advent of the era of Big Data, the scale of knowledge graph (KG) in various domains is growing rapidly, which holds huge amount of knowledge surely benefiting the question answering (QA) research. However, the KG, which is always constituted of entities and relations, is structurally inconsistent with the natural language query. Thus, the QA system based on KG is still faced with difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to answer the domain-specific questions based on KG, providing conveniences for the information query over domain KG.

The authors propose a method FactQA to answer the factual questions about specific domain. A series of logical rules are designed to transform the factual questions into the triples, in order to solve the structural inconsistency between the user’s question and the domain knowledge. Then, the query expansion strategies and filtering strategies are proposed from two levels (i.e. words and triples in the question). For matching the question with domain knowledge, not only the similarity values between the words in the question and the resources in the domain knowledge but also the tag information of these words is considered. And the tag information is obtained by parsing the question using Stanford CoreNLP. In this paper, the KG in metallic materials domain is used to illustrate the FactQA method.

The designed logical rules have time stability for transforming the factual questions into the triples. Additionally, after filtering the synonym expansion results of the words in the question, the expansion quality of the triple representation of the question is improved. The tag information of the words in the question is considered in the process of data matching, which could help to filter out the wrong matches.

Although the FactQA is proposed for domain-specific QA, it can also be applied to any other domain besides metallic materials domain. For a question that cannot be answered, FactQA would generate a new related question to answer, providing as much as possible the user with the information they probably need. The FactQA could facilitate the user’s information query based on the emerging KG.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different soldering temperatures on the performance of chip-on-board (COB) light sources during vacuum reflow soldering.

First, the influence of the void ratio of the COB light source on the steady-state voltage, luminous flux, luminous efficiency and junction temperature has been explored at soldering temperatures of 250°C, 260°C, 270°C, 280°C and 290°C. The COB chip has also been tested for practical application and aging.

The results show that when the soldering temperature is 270°C, the void ratio of the soldering layer is only 5.1%, the junction temperature of the chip is only 76.52°C, and the luminous flux and luminous efficiency are the highest, and it has been observed that the luminous efficiency and average junction temperature of the chip are 107 lm/W and 72.3°C, respectively, which meets the requirements of street lights. After aging for 1,080 h, the light attenuation is 84.64% of the initial value, which indicates that it has higher reliability and longer life.

It can provide reference data for readers and people in this field and can be directly applied to practical engineering.

With China’s economic growth slowing down and the growth rate of fiscal revenue decreasing, the pressure on local government debts is further increasing. Under this background, it is of great significance to clarify the relation between local government debts and China’s economic growth in order to give full play to the positive role of local debts in stabling growth. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Therefore, this paper explores the impact of Chinese local government debt on economic growth from theoretical and empirical aspects, respectively, and compares the regional differences between different debts and economic growth dynamics.

In the theoretical model part, this paper constructs a three-sector dynamic game model, under the two circumstances of whether local government is subject to debt constraints, and examines the relation between local government debt and economic growth and other variables through numerical simulation. Research shows that when the government is not constrained by debt, there is an inverted “U” relation between government debt and economic growth. When the government is constrained by debt, the economic growth rate gradually decreases as the government debt increases.

In the theoretical analysis part, this paper tries to estimate the amount of local debts under different calibers and examines the impact of different types of local government debts on China’s economic growth and their regional differences. The results show that excessive accumulation of government hidden debts in the eastern region is not conducive to economic growth, while explicit debts in the central and western regions significantly contribute to local economic growth. The results of empirical analysis are basically consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model.