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This paper aims to design an algorithm which is used to deal with non-linear discrete systems with constraints under the lower computation burden. As a result, we solve the non-holonomic vehicle tracking problem with the lower computational load and the convergence performance.

A fusion event-triggered model predictive control version is developed in this paper. The authors designed a shrinking prediction strategy.

The fusion event-triggered model predictive control scheme combines the strong points of event triggered and self-triggered methods. As the practical state approaches the terminal set, the computational complexity of optimal control problem (OCP) decreases.

The proposed strategy has proven to stabilize the system and also guarantee a reproducible solution for the OCP. Also, it is proved to be effected by the performance of the simulation results.

This paper aims to investigate whether and how air pollution affects auditor behavior and audit quality. Specifically, the authors draw from studies of behavioral economics and psychology to develop a new prediction that air pollution-induced negative mood causes pessimistic bias in auditors’ risk assessments of client firms, which motivates them to put more effort into achieving higher audit quality.

This study uses a sample of Chinese public firms for the period 2013 to 2018 and an ordinary least squares model to examine the effects of air pollution on audit quality.

The results suggest that auditors exposed to higher levels of air pollution are more likely to put more effort into their audits, resulting in higher audit quality. Furthermore, the impacts of air pollution on audit quality are more pronounced when an auditor has a higher level of education, a major in accounting or a related subject and a position as a partner. A series of identification tests and sensitivity tests further support the main findings.

This study provides deeper insight into how air pollution affects auditors’ decision-making through its effect on mood.

The findings have broad potential implications for auditing and other high-skill professions. Because air pollution-induced negative mood is a common occurrence and numerous psychological experiments have demonstrated the potentially adaptive and beneficial role of negative mood in decision-making for professions like auditing that need a more conservative, alert and detail-oriented cognitive style, negative mood may to some extent facilitate decision-making. Professionals may benefit from paying closer attention to the adaptive benefits of different moods.

Few studies empirically discuss the effects of auditors’ psychology on audit outcomes. This study responds to this research gap with analyzes of how air pollution-induced negative mood can affect auditors’ professional judgment and audit outcomes. Further, this study adds to the growing literature that examines how air pollution affects various aspects of the economy and enriches the literature on behavioral economics, providing empirical evidence from a large sample of the effects of an environmental stressor on individual auditors’ professional judgment.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the audit of outgoing leading officials' natural resource accountability and environmental governance, as well as the internal mechanism of audit of outgoing leading officials' natural resource accountability that plays a role in national environmental governance.

Based on city-level panel data from 2012 to 2015, this paper adopts a difference-in-difference model to examine the role of government audit in national governance from an environmental perspective. Furthermore, using a mediating effect model, the study sheds light on the internal mechanism of audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability that plays a role in national environmental governance.

This paper finds that: the implementation of the audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability has significantly improved the water quality of the pilot area, but its effects on waste gas and smoke are not obvious; environmental supervision partly plays a mediating role in the improvement of regional environmental governance by the audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability; the audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability can complement the incentive mechanism of promotion. The older the local officials are, the more obvious the effect of the audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability on the environmental quality of the pilot areas is.

This paper reveals the role of government audit from the perspective of environmental governance. It provides empirical evidence for policy regarding the audit of outgoing leading officials' natural resource accountability.

Sina Microblog is the most popular microblog in China. The purpose of this research is to explore the factors that influence Sina microbloggers' intention to continue using this platform.

This research proposes the effects of user satisfaction based on perceived usefulness, experiential value and knowledge sharing motivation and community norm on continual usage intention.

The results suggest that continual usage intention is directly affected by perceived usefulness, experiential value, egoism, satisfaction and community norm. Theoretical and practical implications are considered.

This paper is one of the earliest empirical studies in China to explore why Chinese consumers intend to rather than actually use Sina Microblog.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the self‐assembled monolayers (SAMs) of phytic acid on cupronickel B30 surface of anticorrosion and inhibiting mechanisms.

Electrochemical and photocurrent response methods were performed to determine the effect of phytic acid SAMs on cupronickel B30.

The results indicated that phytic acid was liable to interact with B30 as a result of formation of complexes on B30 surface for anti‐rust and anti‐corrosion. The SAMs changed the structure of the electrochemical double layer and made the value of double layer capacitance decrease significantly. The B30 electrode showed p‐type photoresponse, which came from Cu₂O layer on its surface. The photoresponse decreased greatly due to the SAMs of phytic acid as the corrosion resisting property was enhanced. This finding was in good agreement with the results obtained from EIS and polarization curves. Adsorption of phytic acid was found to follow the Langmuir adsorption isotherm and the adsorption mechanism was typical of chemisorption.

The SAMs of phytic acid on cupronickel B30 was gained for the first time. The photo‐electrochemical method was an in situ method, which was effective for characterizing optical and electronic properties of passive films.

This study aims to deem the new policy – talk for environmental protection – promoted in the second half of 2014 to be the exogenous event and adopts PSM and DID to verify whether and how the central government’s mechanism of supervision of environmental enforcement improves firm environmental performance and reveals the micro effect and working mechanism of the supervision of environmental enforcement.

The researchers first select reasonable control groups for target districts by means of PSM, then apply DID to compare corporations in the treatment group with those in the control group for the change of environmental performance before and after the talk for environmental protection, so as to evaluate the micro-level effect of such talks on corporate environmental performance; after that, the research examines the working mechanism of such talks on corporate environmental performance; then, it goes a step further to find out the environmental impact of such talks on corporations of different natures of property right.

It is found from the research that the talk for environmental protection will effectively improve the environmental performance of corporations in the target districts, and the improvement of environmental performance in state-owned corporations in the target districts will be more evident. However, such improvements, to a certain extent, are achieved by reducing the output value, and corporations do not increase environmental investments from a long-term perspective.

First, the targets of the talk for environmental protection are mainly principals of municipal governments, but the research expands the scope to the whole province due to the small sample at the municipal level. Despite evidences showing that such a pressure of supervision impacts the whole province, the results obtained based on the data at the municipal level will be accurate. Second, the research selects a relatively short research period. Third, due to the limited data on corporate environmental performance in China, the research selects only listed companies from key monitored and controlled firms by state.

First, for the central government, environmental policy making is not the end of its job; it shall also supervise local governments’ work at environmental governance and properly handle its relationship with local governments. Second, for the local governments, in the course of implementing environmental policies, they should not only strengthen law enforcement but keep the continuity of law enforcement to avoid moving law enforcement. Third, in the long run, corporations must start from the source of production to enhance environmental governance and make cleaner production, so as to keep boosting corporate competitiveness and their ability of fighting risks.

First, the research innovatively provides empirical evidence about the effect of China’s supervision of environmental enforcement. Previous studies on this topic are mostly theoretical discussions only, while this research makes the talk for environmental protection the exogenous event about the supervision of law enforcement and achieves breakthroughs in empirical studies of administrative enforcement supervision. Second, the research pushes the studies on the implementation effect of environmental policies from a medium level to a micro level. Third, the research achieves some breakthroughs in the data for measuring corporate environmental performance.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of three critical dimensions of supply chain resilience, supply chain preparedness, supply chain alertness and supply chain agility, all aimed at increasing a firm’s financial outcomes. In a turbulent environment, firms require resilience in their supply chains to prepare for potential changes, detect changes and respond to actual changes, thus providing superior value.

Using survey data from 77 firms, this study develops scales for preparedness, alertness and agility. It then tests their hypothesized relationships with a firm’s financial performance.

The results reveal that the three dimensions of supply chain resilience (i.e. preparedness, alertness and agility) significantly impact a firm’s financial performance. It is also found that supply chain preparedness, as a proactive resilience capability, has a greater influence on a firm’s financial performance than the reactive capabilities including alertness and agility, suggesting that firms should pay more attention to proactive approaches for building supply chain resilience.

First, this study develops a comparatively comprehensive definition for supply chain resilience and explores its dimensionality. Second, this study provides empirically validated instruments for the dimensions of supply chain resilience. Third, this study is one of the first to provide empirical evidence for direct impact of supply chain resilience dimensions on a firm’s financial performance.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the causal mechanisms that explain the relationship between the long-term buyer–supplier relationship and buyer performance. Building on the growing body of research on social capital in supply chain management (SCM), the authors examine how a buyer achieves superior performance in forming the enduring partnership with a supplier through two different forms of supplier embeddedness: buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness.

The bootstrapping method is utilized in data analysis to examine the mediating effects of the two different forms of supplier embeddedness simultaneously on the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer performance outcomes.

The authors find that the two forms of supplier embeddedness serve as distinct conduits for the buyer to translate the long-term buyer–supplier relationship into performance effectiveness. Notably, dyadic embeddedness only mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer economic performance, while supplier external embeddedness solely mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer innovation performance.

This study empirically demonstrates that different forms of supplier embeddedness may benefit a buyer differentially when directed at distinct performance goals. If a buyer can leverage both buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness, the buyer will overcome value creation limitations of social capital from a single source, obtaining more comprehensive performance benefits sought by developing long-term buyer–supplier relationships.

The problem of parameter identification for biaxial piezoelectric stages is still a challenging task because of the existing hysteresis, dynamics and cross-axis coupling. This study aims to find an accurate and systematic approach to tackle this problem.

First, a dual-input and dual-output (DIDO) model with Duhem-type hysteresis is proposed to depict the dynamic behavior of the biaxial piezoelectric stage. Then, a systematic identification approach based on a modified differential evolution (DE) algorithm is proposed to identify the unknown parameters of the Duhem-type DIDO model for a biaxial piezostage. The randomness and parallelism of the modified DE algorithm guarantee its high efficiency.

The experimental results show that the characteristics of the biaxial piezoelectric stage can be identified with adequate accuracy based on the input–output data, and the peak-valley errors account for 2.8% of the full range in the X direction and 1.5% in the Y direction. The attained results validated the correctness and effectiveness of the presented identification method.

The classical DE algorithm has many adjustment parameters, which increases the inconvenience and difficulty of using in practice. The parameter identification of Duhem-type DIDO piezoelectric model is rarely studied in detail and its successful application based on DE algorithm on a biaxial piezostage is hitherto unexplored. To close this gap, this work proposed a modified DE-based systematic identification approach. It not only can identify this complicated model with more parameters, but also has little tuning parameters and thus is easy to use.

The aim of this paper is to study the inhibition effect of environmentally friendly inhibitors; polyaspartic acid (PASP), Na₂WO₄ and the complex of PASP and Na₂WO₄ for brass and Cu30Ni alloy (B30) corrosion in simulated cooled water solutions.

The inhibiting effect was investigated in simulated cooled water solutions by potentiodynamic polarization (DC) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy.

The results indicated that PASP and Na₂WO₄ both had an inhibition effect. A desirable inhibition effect was shown for brass and B30 corrosion at a PASP concentration of 15 mg/L. The best inhibition effects for Na₂WO₄ appeared at 10 mg/L for B30 corrosion and at 20 mg/L for brass, respectively. The combination of PASP and Na₂WO₄ showed a synergistic effect. The optimum ratio of PASP to Na₂WO₄ was 6:1 at the total inhibitor concentration of 20 mg/L.

This paper has for the first time showed that the two environmentally friendly inhibitors PASP and Na₂WO₄ had an inhibition effect for brass and B30 corrosion and the complex of PASP and Na₂WO₄ had good synergistic effect for brass and B30 corrosion in simulated cooled water solutions.