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This research aims to unravel the intricate relationship between luxury brands' social media marketing strategies (i.e. communication and engagement) and their impact on consumers' willingness to pay a premium and brand loyalty.

A large online consumer panel was used to conduct an online survey of 381 consumers. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was adopted for hypothesis testing.

The study's outcomes indicated that (1) perceived interactivity and perceived openness positively influence social media brand communication, (2) social media brand communication and engagement are positive determinants for consumer empowerment and parasocial interactions, (3) consumer empowerment and parasocial interactions positively influence willingness to pay a premium and (4) parasocial interactions (but not consumer empowerment) positively influence brand loyalty.

The study offers significant theoretical implications by unraveling the mechanism of social media marketing for luxury brands, which is under-researched in the current literature. More specifically, the study reveals the process of how social media brand communication and engagement reinforce luxury brand outcomes through parasocial interactions and consumer empowerment. In addition, the study provides empirical evidence to delineate the role of interactivity and openness in enhancing social media brand communication. Moreover, the study extends past research that emphasized initial adoption outcomes such as attitude and purchase intention by probing luxury brand loyalty and willingness to pay a premium.

By effectively strategizing social media marketing, luxury brand marketers can promote brand loyalty and willingness to pay a premium. Luxury brand marketers should concentrate on establishing parasocial interaction with consumers by designing optimal social media brand communication and engagement. To this end, luxury brand marketers should consider integrating the elements of interactivity and openness in their communication with consumers.

The study offers valuable insights for luxury brand marketers aiming to capitalize on the potential of social media marketing to enhance their revenue generation and customer retention. The study advances past luxury branding research by validating the role of consumer empowerment and parasocial interactions in luxury brands' social media marketing.

Long-term interest rates of small open economies (SOE) correlate strongly with the USA long-term rate. Can central banks in those countries decouple from the United States? An estimated Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model for the UK (vis-á-vis the USA) establishes three structural empirical results: (1) Comovement arises due to nominal fluctuations, not through real rates or term premia; (2) the cause of comovement is the central bank of the SOE accommodating foreign inflation trends, rather than systematically curbing them; and (3) SOE may find themselves much more affected by changes in USA inflation trends than the United States itself. All three results are shown to be intuitive and backed by off-model evidence.

The focus of this paper is the economic theory of the plans for the European Monetary Union. Part 1 demonstrates that economists, bankers and policy makers know very little about monetary policy. Part 2 explains the errors of the common practice of defining money by its functions. Because any monetary policy must rest on a definition of money it seems reasonable to conclude that a flawed definition might lead to problems with monetary policy. Part 3 applies this insight to the plans for a common currency in Europe. Because of uncertainties about the timing and details of the implementation, some important considerations are necessarily speculative. They are relegated to appendices. Appendix 1 comments on the timing and authorship and responsibility for the official reports with their unspecified authors. Appendix 2 supplies some grounds for doubting the ultimate durability of the European Monetary Union focusing on reasons that are historical, economic and pragmatic. Because the entire movement is driven by politics, not economics, Appendix 3 considers some of the relevant political issues. The conclusions summarize and speculate on possible reasons for successful outcomes.

This study investigates the spillover effects between exchange rate changes and stock returns in China. The authors find that no significant interconnections exist between stock returns and exchange rates changes.

Although the conventional structural VAR (SVAR) approach fails to examine the contemporaneous effects, the Markov switching SVAR model captures the volatile structure of the Chinese financial market. The regime-switching estimates indicate that volatile structure tends to be significant during two financial crisis periods.

Notwithstanding the fact that exchange rate changes cannot Granger-cause stock returns in the long run, its contemporaneous spillover effects on stock returns are found to be statistically significant.

This study aims to shed light on the spillover effects between exchange rate changes and stock returns in China, as the Chinese currency is becoming flexible and China’s stock market has undertaken important reforms. The spillovers between the two markets are of topical importance due to the increasing connections between China and the global economy.

This chapter outlines the philosophic underpinnings of the self-management paradigm developed over the past three decades by China’s Haier Group, a global leader in white goods. The successful transformation of Haier from a small resource-poor firm to a dominant global giant is often attributed to the self-management culture established in the company by its legendary leader Zhang Ruimin. This management paradigm is a function of the humbleness displayed by Mr. Zhang Ruimin and rooted in his strong belief in the traditional Chinese philosophy of I-Ching and Daoism. We show how the hexagram of Qian (“qian”: humbleness, modesty) from I-Ching is linked to Mr. Zhang’s humble approach and analyze how the six parts of the hexagram of Qian are related to the six development stages of the Haier Group. These insights are used to give some thoughts to the leadership challenge associated with the creation of a dynamic and responsive global organization.

Based on the social interaction theory and trust theory, this study investigates the switching of users on social question and answer (Q&A) platforms from knowledge seekers to knowledge contributors.

We used Python to gather data from Zhihu, performed hypothesis testing on the models using Poisson regression and finally conducted a mediation effect analysis.

The findings reveal that knowledge seeking impacts users' motivation for information interaction, emotional interaction and trust. Notably, information interaction and trust exhibit a chained mediation effect that subsequently influences knowledge contribution.

Current studies on user knowledge behavior typically examine individual actions, rarely connecting knowledge seeking and knowledge contribution. However, the balance of knowledge inflow and outflow is crucial for social Q&A platforms. To cover this gap, this paper empirically investigates the switching between knowledge seeking and knowledge contribution based on the social interaction theory and trust theory.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a simple chaotic circuit. The circuit can be fabricated by less discrete electronic components, within which complex dynamical behaviors can be generated.

A second-order non-autonomous inductor-free chaotic circuit is presented, which is obtained by introducing a sinusoidal voltage stimulus into the classical Wien-bridge oscillator. The proposed circuit only has two dynamic elements, and its nonlinearity is realized by the saturation characteristic of the operational amplifier in the classical Wien-bridge oscillator. After that, its dynamical behaviors are revealed by means of bifurcation diagram, Lyapunov exponent and phase portrait and further confirmed using the 0-1 test method. Moreover, an analog circuit using less discrete electronic components is implemented, and its experimental results are measured to verify the numerical simulations.

The equilibrium point located in a line segment varies with time evolution, which leads to the occurrence of periodic, quasi-periodic and chaotic behaviors in the proposed circuit.

Unlike the previously published works, the significant values of the proposed circuit with simple topology are inductor-free realization and without extra nonlinearity, which make the circuit can be used as a paradigm for academic teaching and experimental illustraction for chaos.

Geotechnologies have a long tradition in several areas of society and research. The recent development of the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies opened several doors to the contribution of tourism. Emergent technologies contributions to tourism and planning such as web mapping, augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are relatively recent, and there is a lack of research around their potential for Creative Tourism enhancement. For example, combining web mapping with AR or storytelling can be an excellent contribution to operators, planners and tourists. For research purposes, new opportunities are open, particularly by integrating community-shared data. It is well known for the popularity of social networks, the exponential growth of photo sharing, but few studies have been implemented to understand their contribution to research. This chapter focuses on emerging geotechnologies concerning cultural mapping, Creative Tourism and sustainability. Since it is a new growing niche, more research is needed to develop and understand the potential of new approaches. Besides traditional techniques such as quantitative (e.g. surveys) and qualitative ones (e.g. interviews, focus groups and world café), it revises the role of geotechnologies on Creative Tourism development and growing activities. Results from case studies from Europe are analysed.

The intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) is a major outcome of the Paris Agreement on international cooperation to reduce emissions, and is likely to be the future scenario for carbon emissions. This paper aims to obtain the fine spatial pattern of carbon emissions in 2030, identify hot spots and analyze changes of carbon emissions with a spatial grid method.

Based on the integrated quantified INDCs of each economy in 2030, the authors predict the population density pattern in 2030 by using the statistics of current population density, natural growth rates and differences in population growth resulting from urbanization within countries. Then the authors regard population density as a comprehensive socioeconomic indicator for the top-bottom allocation of the INDC data to a 0.1° × 0.1° grid. Then, the grid spatial pattern of carbon emissions in 2030 is compared with that in 2016.

Under the unconditional and conditional scenarios, the global carbon emission grid values in 2030 will be within [0, 59,200.911] ktCO₂ and [0, 51,800.942] ktCO_2, respectively; eastern China, northern India, Western Europe and North America will continue to be the major emitters; grid carbon emissions will increase in most parts of the world compared to 2016, especially in densely populated areas.

While many studies have explored the overall global carbon emissions or warming under the INDC scenario, attention to spatial details is also required to help us make better emissions attributions and policy decisions from the perspective of the grid unit rather than the administrative unit.