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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between creative self-efficacy and work engagement using openness to experience as a moderator. The theoretical background is rooted in the resource perspective of the job demands-resources model (JD-R model) of work engagement.

The developed hypotheses were tested in a study of 101 faculty members from a science and technology institute in the USA. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to analyze the data.

The results supported a positive effect of creative self-efficacy on work engagement but did not support a moderating effect of openness to experience on the relationship between creative self-efficacy and work engagement.

This study introduces the context of creativity into the work engagement and JD-R model fields. Specifically, through the resource perspective of the JD-R model, it theoretically and empirically extends the contribution and explanatory ability of personal resources to the improvement of work engagement.

The house money effect is proposed to describe that people appear to consider large or unexpected wealth gains to be distinct from the rest of their wealth, and are thus more willing to gamble with such gains than they ordinarily would be. On the other hand, the availability heuristic describes that people tend to have a cognitive and systematic bias due to their reliance on easily available or associational information. The purpose of this paper is to employ these behavioral perspectives in an empirical model regarding the January anomaly to explore investor behavior in Taiwanese stock market with bonus culture and well-known electronics industry.

This study uses the conventional and standard dummy variable regression model, as employed in prior studies, and further includes some control variables for firm, industry and macro-economic level factors. Moreover, 19 industrial indices for Taiwanese stock market over the period January 1990 to December 2014 are included in this study to examine the hypotheses, except for the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the global financial crisis period of 2007-2009 to avoid the potential effect. On the other hand, the authors also use the entire sample period of 1990-2014 for understanding whether the magnitude of January effect is different.

The empirical results indicate that Chinese bonus payments in January induce a strong January effect in the Taiwanese stock market, especially when most listed firms have positive earnings growth in the preceding year, suggesting a house money effect. Moreover, this study further provides some preliminary evidence that the higher January returns due to bonus culture are apparent only in the electronics industry when both Chinese New Year and bonus payments are in January, implying the role of availability heuristic based on the electronics stocks in investor behavior before the impending stock exchange holidays. Some robust tests show qualitative support.

The major contribution of this study is to extend the existing research by incorporating cultural and industrial factors with behavioral finance, thus enriching the literature on the causes of seasonality for Asian stock markets.

This study also has behavioral implications of investments for investors in the Taiwanese stock market, especially for foreign institutional investors which pay close attention to this market.

This study first applies and examines the culture bonus hypothesis with regard to how employees who receive culture bonuses in January can change their attitudes toward risk and induce the January effect from the concept of mental accounting. Moreover, this study further proposes and examines the extended culture bonus hypothesis related to how the January effect due to culture bonus is different for the electronics and non-electronics industries when taking into account the stock market holidays from the concept of availability heuristic.

Due to the intense rivalry in the smartphone market, manufacturers of mobile phones are becoming increasingly interested in knowing the factors that influence consumers' purchase intention. This paper aims to examine the effect of country-of-origin image, brand image and attitude towards the brand on the purchase intention of smartphone users.

An empirical study was performed based on the information gathered from smartphone users. The structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was applied to examine the hypotheses.

The authors found that brand image and attitude towards the brand significantly influence consumer purchase intention. Additionally, there is an indirect effect even when the nation of origin image does not directly influence the consumer's purchase intention. Indeed, brand image and attitude towards the brand act as a mediator between the country-of-origin image and purchase intention.

This study presents a conceptual model on the impact of country-of-origin image on the propensity of consumers to buy smartphones in a field where little research has been done. The investigation offers a consumer-focused analysis regarding the country-of-origin image. This suggests a significant shift from the current strategy, which is frequently centered on the viewpoint of the companies.

This research aims to explore how consumers' local brand choices differ between air-polluted days and clean days, and why the difference occurs.

Two studies were conducted. Study 1 used the longitudinal consumption data of various yogurt brands and daily air quality indexes in 2014 and 2015. Study 2 conducted three rounds of surveys on a clean day, a general air-polluted day and a seriously air-polluted day.

The findings indicate that consumers show less tendency of attribution and compensatory consumption during air-polluted days, which in turn decrease their willingness to choose local brands.

Implications are provided for future research and marketing practice, especially for local companies that rely heavily on local consumers, and retailers in heavy air-polluted areas.

This paper is the first to illustrate the influence of air pollution on consumers' local brand choices, and it extends current understanding on air pollution and consumer choices by discovering psychological process underneath to explain the effect.

This paper studied whether boredom at home due to social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic may motivate individuals to engage in online leisure crafting, thereby contributing to their thriving at home and career self-management. This paper aims to examine whether individuals’ growth need strength influences the impact of home boredom on online leisure crafting.

This paper performed a two-wave longitudinal study involving a group of employees from the hospitality industry (N = 340) in Mainland China. This paper evaluated home boredom, online leisure crafting and growth need strength at Time 1 and thriving at home and career self-management two months later at Time 2.

The respondents’ experience of home boredom had a time-lagged effect on their thriving at home and career self-management via online leisure crafting. Additionally, their growth need strength amplified the positive impact of home boredom on online leisure crafting.

Hospitality managers can motivate employees to engage in crafting online leisure activities at home when they experience home boredom during the outbreak of COVID-19, which may further allow them to experience thriving at home and engage in career self-management. Additionally, managers can develop managerial interventions to improve the growth need strength of employees with low growth needs, which may, in turn, render these employees less likely to tolerate home boredom, thereby increasing the positive impact of home boredom on their online leisure crafting.

This paper offer insights for the boredom literature regarding how individuals’ home boredom caused by social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic might lead to their thriving at home through online leisure crafting. This paper also provides insights for the leisure crafting literature regarding the role of online leisure crafting in individuals’ thriving at home. This paper reveals the role of growth need strength in the impact of home boredom on thriving at home through online leisure crafting.

This study postulates that the nostalgic emotion of cultural tourists affects their perceived experiential value and helps to evoke their destination image, which contributes to the formation of place attachment. The study deploys a survey research in which questionnaires are distributed in Mystical Yan Cheng, a theme park in China that is built on the historical remains of the Spring and Autumn Annals. The study collects 347 valid responses. The results reveal the multifaceted nature of a destination image. Furthermore, nostalgic emotion positively contributes to the place attachment of cultural tourists. However, the study also illustrates an inadequate understanding of the nature of nostalgic emotion and further study is recommended. The results of the study also indicate that a high level of satisfaction does not necessarily contribute to destination image and place attachment.

The main purpose of this study is to explore the influence of the country‐of‐origin image, product knowledge and product involvement on consumer purchase decision.

Taiwan, China and the USA were the three countries selected for research into the country‐of‐origin, insurance and catering services. Structured questionnaires and convenience sampling were used. Samples were collected from consumers in the Taipei area. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed with convenience sampling method, and 369 effective samples were collected, the effective rate being 92.25 percent. Stepwise regression analysis was adapted to test hypothesis.

The main findings were listed as follows: the country‐of‐origin image, product knowledge and product involvement all have a significantly positive effect on consumer purchase decision; the country‐of‐origin image has a significantly positive effect on consumer purchase decisions under different product involvement; and product knowledge has significantly positive effect on consumer purchase decisions under different product involvement.

Limitations of the study are: it is unable to infer to national consumers and to other service areas and the explanatory power of some empirical models is relative low. Implications of the study are that: a more thorough structure about consumer purchase decisions should be provided and the relationship between product knowledge and information search quantity should be verified.

Practical implications pf the study are that the company must face competitive strategies from many countries and also the effect of consumer product knowledge on business competitive strategy.

The added value of this paper is to link between theory and practice, and explore the different country‐of‐origin image, product knowledge and product involvement on consumer purchase decisions.

The paper aims to achieve translational shaking tests on a 6-DOF hydraulic parallel manipulator. Shaking tests are commonly performed on shaking tables, which are generally used for small motion ranges and are usually financially costly. The research is required to generate shaking motions in three translational directions for a specimen for shaking tests, but it also needs to produce 6-degree of freedom (DOF) motions with large motion ranges.

A hydraulic 6-DOF (degree of freedom) parallel manipulator is applied to achieve this goal. The link-space control is adopted for the manipulator, and PID controller and feed-forward controller are used for each loop of the system. A hybrid reference signal generator is proposed by using a shaking controller, which is developed to convert the shaking motion into position signal. The converted result is directly added to the pose signal. The whole real-time control system is realized by using MATLAB xPC Target.

The developed method is verified on the hydraulic 6-DOF parallel manipulator with specimen. Experiments show very promising results that the proposed technology is really applicable to perform translational shaking tests on the hydraulic parallel manipulator.

A simple yet efficient solution is proposed that allows shaking tests in three translational directions performed on the hydraulic 6-DOF parallel manipulator with wide motion ranges. The paper presents a state-of-the-art related to the applications of parallel robots in several fields of technology.

The increasing popularity of ERP solutions has provided dietary supplement manufacturing companies with modules to manage pricing and inventory. However, the decisions made by these modules are often independent and rely on deterministic forecasts. This paper studies a multi-product dietary supplement manufacturing system under stochastic demands. The purpose is to maximize the long-run expected profit by jointly considering pricing and inventory strategies.

The authors investigate both the general cases and three special cases including stable demand, negligible backlog and instantaneous replenishment. A two-stage algorithm named PAS is proposed. In the strategy construction stage, the constructed objective bounds are combined to provide estimates which then help to derive the optimal product prices. In the system operation stage, replenishment decisions are further made based on the prices generated from the previous stage.

It is proved that base-stock policy is optimal for the studied system, and the optimal based-stock level is provided. The global optimal strategies are obtained for three important special cases. For the general case, theoretical objective bounds are established. These bounds provide quick and reliable performance estimates for practical applications.

Very few studies have jointly considered pricing and inventory strategies with uncertainty demands in the dietary supplement industry. The PAS algorithm developed integrates these decisions and consistently generates high-quality solutions even under highly varying demands. Such algorithm could be a valuable add-on to the pricing and inventory management modules in ERP systems.