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Purpose: Many Internet users search for health information but they struggle with assessing the quality of the information they find. By drawing on a multi-modal approach to data collection, this study aims to understand further the nuanced cognitive processes that people utilize as they acquire and evaluate online health information.

Design: We used a mixed-methods approach that includes surveys, interviews, and observations of 76 diverse adults of all ages in the Chicago area completing various health information-seeking tasks.

Findings: Most participants begin their information-seeking process on search engines. We identified the most popular credibility-assessment strategies used on the search engine results’ pages (SERP) as well as on websites. We also explored how the process of executing such strategies reveals greater and lesser savvy among users.

Research Limitations: While the sample size and methods limit its generalizability, this study included a larger and more diverse group of participants than most observational work, which results in data about a wider range of behaviors than is typical of such research.

Social Implications: Our findings showed that most of our participants could use additional education regarding credibility assessment of online health information. Additionally, since a great deal of credibility assessment occurs on SERP, search companies bear a particular responsibility for ensuring the quality of the information their results highlight.

For decades, the fast population growth worldwide was interrelated with the adopted rapid lifestyle behavior that relies on the extensive use of fossil fuels. This primary energy source has caused various urban and environmental impacts, such as global warming, air pollution, and so forth. Consequently, the identified circumstance issues have caused many health, social, and economic hindering effects for global citizens. It poses an existential threat to humanity and the global earth's ecosystem. The alarming levels of urban pollution emissions are putting enormous challenges to the related stakeholders (governments, businesses, investors, automakers, and citizens) to admit the need to decarbonize the global economy and reach sustainable development goals (SDGs) for cleaner and smarter cities across borders. As such, a vital part of a smart city is the transport sector. The road transport sector, precisely, is one of the primary consumers of fossil fuels that contribute to high carbon dioxide emissions. Accordingly, it is essential to adopt novel and sustainable urban transport solutions and promote the achievement of the SDG's eleventh goal for sustainable cities and communities. This chapter provides insight into the present global energy situation with particular attention to the road transport sector. Indeed, it highlights different emerging technologies for a sustainable and smart urban mobility future that will mitigate the environmental situation thanks to the development of drive and internet telecommunication technologies. Furthermore, we aim in this chapter to study the international progress of the transition project using the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal (PESTEL) analysis methodology. This study is to pinpoint opportunities for project development and the challenges that set back its evolution.

The field of Human Resource Management (HRM) has long recognized the importance of interpersonal influence for employee and organizational effectiveness. HRM research and practice have focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics and behaviors as a means to understand “who” is influential in organizations, with substantially less attention paid to social networks. To reinvigorate a focus on network structures to explain interpersonal influence, the authors present a comprehensive account of how network structures enable and constrain influence within organizations. The authors begin by describing how power and status, two key determinants of individual influence in organizations, operate through different mechanisms, and delineate a range of network positions that yield power, reflect status, and/or capture realized influence. Then, the authors extend initial structural views of influence beyond the positions of individuals to consider how network structures within and between groups – capturing group social capital and/or shared leadership – enable and constrain groups’ ability to influence group members, other groups, and the broader organizational system. The authors also discuss how HRM may leverage these insights to facilitate interpersonal influence in ways that support individual, group, and organizational effectiveness.

This study explores the interrelationship between regulatory risks and strategic controls within the financial supervision architecture of an emergent global financial centre of China that embraces innovation as part of its strategic objectives.

This paper employs a longitudinal case study approach to examine the institutional dynamics of the key financial regulators in connection with the regulated financial institutions in Hong Kong before and after the financial tsunami of 2008.

First, this study reveals an organic development of a specialised financial regulatory architecture that resists transforming itself structurally despite the significant impact of externalities. Second, in this post-financial crisis analysis, regulated financial institutions swiftly respond by strengthening their risk controls through compliance with the guidelines imposed by the regulator. Institutional dynamics in influencing the implementation of risk controls through a top-down interactive mechanism are observed. Such dynamic and pertinent rapid responses induce the pursuit of optimal risk management within a regulatory framework.

This paper provides a longitudinal case study to reveal regulatory risks and strategic controls of the global financial centre of China. It unveils mitigating risk control measures in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The study demonstrates how regulatory institutions strive to take precautionary, coercive measures such that the regulated institutions mimic and implement prudent mechanisms.

Internationalisation leads to a radical process of change through which an organisation modifies the focus of its operations, value system and cognitive framework so as to achieve a more internationally responsive structure (Whitehead, 1992). Earlier studies have investigated the internationalisation process considering the internal and external factors of the company and its market (Cavusgil et al., 2002; McGoldrick, 1998, 2002; McGoldrick & Davies, 1995; Treadgold & Davies, 1988). The internationalisation literature based on Uppsala studies about the internationalisation process of Swedish firms, (Johanson & Wiedersheim-Paul, 1975; Johanson & Vahlne, 1977) identified four different internationalisation stages called the “establishment chain”, which also applied to the retail context (Davies & Fergusson, 1995, p. 99). The results show that different stages demand different resource commitment from the company (Johanson & Vahlne, 1977). It is assumed that a company initially lacks knowledge of the local market. The level of local market knowledge affects the company's commitment decisions and its activities. The network approach (Johanson & Mattsson, 1988) could be applied to the study of vertical international relationships. It is, therefore, useful for the international sourcing activities of retailers (Dawson, 1994, p. 270) and provides a competitive advantage as well as flexibility, in which each of the organisations in the network is working towards a common objective (McGoldrick, 2002, p. 571). In the past 20 years, many researchers have paid more attention to network relationships, which have become the main marketing strategy. They agree that the study of network relationships between companies, suppliers and customers is more important than the marketing mix (Ghauri, 1999).

This study investigates the linkage between the Hong Kong stock market and Singapore stock market and the U.S. stock market during the pre- and post-East Asia Financial Crisis in 1997 and 1998. It uses multivariate regression models to study the impact of Hong Kong’s fixed exchange rate system and Singapore’s free-floating exchange rate system on their respective stock markets. The results indicate that the exchange rate is not a significant determinant of linkage between the U.S. and the two Asian stock markets, but the evidence suggests that stronger post-crisis relationships between the U.S. and the two Asian stock markets. The evidence also supports a stronger short-run relationship between the U.S. and Hong Kong stock markets relative to that between the U.S. and Singapore stock markets.

This study systematically maps the research trends in the domain of “shadow education” over the last 40 years using metadata extracted from the SCOPUS database. The results reveal that the outputs of shadow education research have grown exponentially within the last decade. Bray and his colleagues from the University of Hong Kong, East China Normal University, and the Education University of Hong Kong have been the most prolific and influential research team. They are followed by Park and Byun from the USA, who have mostly worked on East Asian contexts. The USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, have been the main sources of contributions and the University of Hong Kong has been the leading university in this field. Educational studies, economics, psychology, linguistics, and sociology have been the main disciplines researched within shadow education. Shadow education studies have revealed how shadow education can be a major instrument for maintaining and exacerbating social inequalities. They have also largely focused on the tangible (quantifiable) benefits related to improving students’ examination results. This study’s results stress the importance of regulating the private tutoring market, suggesting areas for ongoing research.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.