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The study of business ethics has seldom shed light on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) despite their theoretical and practical significance. Drawing from strain perspective, the purpose of this paper is to address this insufficiency and investigate SME owners’ ethical attitudes toward money-related deviances.

Based on a large sample of 741 Chinese SMEs, an OLS regression analysis was employed to test associated hypotheses. The robustness of results was additionally checked.

The results suggest that for stratification variables, education level is positively related to ethical attitudes, whereas household income level is surprisingly negatively associated with ethical attitudes; for materialism facets, success and happiness exert a negative impact on ethical attitudes as hypothesized, but centrality has no associated impact.

This study has examined both structural and motivational sources of personal strains on the ethical attitude of SME owners, while the characteristics of these strains could be explored in the future studies.

This study advances and complements the dominant behavior approach that emphasizes cognitive and other psychological processes in explaining individual ethical attitudes. It is also seemingly the first study to examine the influence of three materialism facets on entrepreneurial ethical attitudes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine international decision making, information processing, and related performance implications. The authors aim to explore the relationship between international decision making and problem-solving dissensions related to entry mode decisions. In addition, they aim to investigate the effects of dissension on entry mode performance, and the moderating effect of the foreign direct investment (FDI) vs non-FDI decision as it relates to dissension-mode performance. Despite their significance from an information processing perspective, these issues have not been sufficiently explored in international entry mode research.

This research presents data collected from 233 privately owned internationalized Chinese firms. The analysis in this investigation includes hierarchical ordinary least squares regression.

The findings suggest an inverse U-shaped relationship between dissension and entry mode performance, as opposed to a linear one, and a moderating effect of FDI vs non-FDI decisions on this curvilinear dissension-performance association. These findings support and refine the rationale of the information processing perspective.

These findings add realistic elements to the alleged “rational” international decision-making doctrine assumed in previous entry mode literature. The findings show the importance of the heterogeneity of information processing in entry mode strategic decision-making processes (SDMPs), and its effects on specific decision types. The authors believe that this is the first empirical study to use an information processing perspective to examine the effects of SDMPs on entry mode performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how qualitative case research (QCR) has been conducted in the field of international entrepreneurship (IE) in terms of onto-epistemology and methodology. QCR can serve as an umbrella approach for contextualizing and capturing the complexity of IE opportunities, events, conditions and relationships, and to illuminate and enrich the understanding of related IE processes.

A thorough literature review was conducted of IE journal articles published between 1989 and mid-2017. This paper identified and analyzed 292 journal articles in terms of theoretical purpose and research design.

The findings suggest that the “positivistic” QCR is the customary convention of QCR in IE. “Exploratory” and “theory building” are the two most commonly pursued objectives. There have also been atypical practices and increased methodological rigor in recent years. Alternative paradigmatic QCRs that depart from positivistic assumptions are in an early stage of development in IE.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research examining QCR onto-epistemology and methodology approaches in IE, providing a useful state of the art that has been hitherto lacking in the literature. Based on this paper’s findings, the authors suggest that the IE field would benefit from greater methodological transparency in the reporting and writing of QCR. Also, the breadth of knowledge and legitimacy of the IE area would be enhanced through more studies involving unconventional (beyond positivistic) QCR.

The study aims to design the limited number of random working cycle as a warranty term and propose two types of warranties, which can help manufacturers to ensure the product reliability during the warranty period. By extending the proposed warranty to the consumer's post-warranty maintenance model, besides the authors investigate two kinds of random maintenance policies to sustain the post-warranty reliability, i.e. random replacement first and random replacement last. By integrating depreciation expense depending on working time, the cost rate is constructed for each random maintenance policy and some special cases are provided by discussing parameters in cost rates. Finally, sensitivities on both the proposed warranty and random maintenance policies are analyzed in numerical experiments.

The working cycle of products can be monitored by advanced sensors and measuring technologies. By monitoring the working cycle, manufacturers can design warranty policies to ensure product reliability performance and consumers can model the post-warranty maintenance to sustain the post-warranty reliability. In this article, the authors design a limited number of random working cycles as a warranty term and propose two types of warranties, which can help manufacturers to ensure the product reliability performance during the warranty period. By extending a proposed warranty to the consumer's post-warranty maintenance model, the authors investigate two kinds of random replacement policies to sustain the post-warranty reliability, i.e. random replacement first and random replacement last. By integrating a depreciation expense depending on working time, the cost rate is constructed for each random replacement and some special cases are provided by discussing parameters in the cost rate. Finally, sensitivities to both the proposed warranties and random replacements are analyzed in numerical experiments.

It is shown that the manufacturer can control the warranty cost by limiting number of random working cycle. For the consumer, when the number of random working cycle is designed as a greater warranty limit, the cost rate can be reduced while the post-warranty period can't be lengthened.

The contribution of this article can be highlighted in two key aspects: (1) the authors investigate early warranties to ensure reliability performance of the product which executes successively projects at random working cycles; (2) by integrating random working cycles into the post-warranty period, the authors is the first to investigate random maintenance policy to sustain the post-warranty reliability from the consumer's perspective, which seldom appears in the existing literature.

This study aims to investigate the effects of graphite-MoS₂ composite solid lubricant on the tribological properties of copper-based bearing materials under dry conditions.

The mixture of Graphite-MoS₂ was inlaid in ZQSn6-6–3 tin bronze and ZQAl9-4 aluminum bronze matrix. These copper-embedded self-lubricating bearing materials were considered in friction pairs with 2Cr13 stainless steel, and their tribological properties were studied by using an MM200 wear test machine.

The results show that the friction coefficients and wear rates of copper-embedded self-lubricating bearing materials are lower than those of the ordinary copper-based bearing materials. The wear performance of the tin bronze inlaid self-lubricating bearing material is better than that of the aluminum bronze inlaid self-lubricating bearing material. The wear mechanism of the tin bronze bearing material is mainly adhesive wear, and that of the aluminum bronze bearing material is mainly grinding wear, oxidation wear and adhesive wear. The copper-embedded self-lubricating bearing materials had no obvious abrasion, whereas the aluminum bronze inlaid self-lubricating bearing material exhibited deep furrows and obvious abrasion under high loads.

These results are helpful for the application of copper-embedded self-lubricating bearing materials.

In today's electronic package development cycle, activities are managed by multiple participants in the supply chain, which might have different quality and reliability impacts to the end product. As a result, the reliability risk is much higher for companies who do not have insight into and/or control over the products received. The purpose of this paper is to show how design‐for‐reliability (DFR) approaches will come into play to manage the risk.

In this paper, DFR approaches for package development will be discussed from the perspective of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). DFR practices through the package development cycle will be described based on key development modules. A case study for flip chip ball gris array package development using an advanced Cu/Low‐k silicon technology will be presented. Key measures to help control the quality and improve the reliability will be presented.

The proposed methodology significantly improves component and package reliability through the engagement in design, manufacturing, assessment and system evaluation.

The paper discusses the research results and the proposed DFR methodology will be helpful for fabless design houses, electronics manufacturing service (EMS) partners in the supply chain, and OEMs to manage the reliability of the products.