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In the online microloan market, the ability to evaluate the credit risk of borrowers is key to business success. Based on the general strain theory, this study proposes a contextualized two-stage model with stress factors, negative affects and constraint factors to explain the psychological mechanism of borrowers' default behaviors.

An online survey is conducted to test the hypotheses. We collect and analyze 713 valid responses through a structural equation model.

(1) Economic and social strains experienced by borrowers can cause four types of negative affects: life dissatisfaction, perceived unfairness, inferiority feeling and loneliness; (2) Both strains and negative affects have a considerable effect on borrowers' default intention; (3) Moral norm plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between strains, negative affects and default behavior, whereas perceived deterrence shows a strong main effect.

(1) This study introduces the GST from sociology and criminology, and contextualizes it in the microloan context to explain default behavior; (2) This study provides a comprehensive and staged psychological mechanism to explain deviant behavior; (3) This study bears critical implications for the current practice in credit assessment and default prevention.

Tokenization is a relatively new activity in digital finance. Tokenization, a process that creates a blockchain representation of the underlying instrument, can enhance the standard features and characteristics of assets and securities. Asset and security tokenization produces many benefits. These benefits include reducing issuance and trading costs, lessening dependency on intermediaries, facilitating more liquidity in markets, and providing greater transparency around an asset’s lifecycle for all parties involved. This chapter synthesizes the key characteristics, benefits, processes, tools, and techniques of tokenizing real-world assets. It also provides several examples of current asset-backed token applications to help understand the rapidly growing industry and analyzes future expectations of this new technology.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the “good-to-good” app switching phenomenon that has not been specifically addressed in the prior switching literature. Drawing on the consumer learning theory, this study explores how external social word of mouth (WOM) and internal satisfaction influence app users’ switching intention through social learning route and analogical learning route. This study also examines the moderating effect of app heterogeneity.

An online survey was used to collect data. Two categories of mobile apps with different levels of within-category heterogeneity were targeted in survey questions. A total of 525 valid survey responses were collected.

Social WOM about a competing app increases users’ switching intention through both social norm influence and social information influence, resulting in a direct effect on switching intention and an indirect effect through the perceived attractiveness of a competing app. Users’ satisfaction with an adopted app positively influences the perceived attractiveness of an unadopted competing app, offering evidence for analogical learning in user switching. Meanwhile, users’ satisfaction imposes a direct negative effect on switching intention. A higher level of within-category heterogeneity strengthens (weakens) the positive effect of social WOM (satisfaction) on users’ perceived attractiveness of a competing app.

This study complements the existing switching literature by disentangling the “good-to-good” switching phenomenon in the mobile app market from the consumer learning perspective. This study extends the understanding of cross-category user switching by considering different levels of product heterogeneity.

The information used for supervision by regulatory departments in public-private partnership (PPP) projects is primarily transmitted and processed by the PPP implementation department, which negatively impacts the information quality, leading to information asymmetry and undermining the overall effectiveness of supervision. This study aims to explore how to use blockchain to anchor the information used for supervision in PPP projects to the original information, to strengthen the oversight.

This paper adopts the principles of design science research (DSR) to design a conceptual framework that systematically organizes information along the information dissemination chain, ensuring the reliable anchoring of original information. Two-stage interviews involving experts from academia and industry are conducted, serving as formative and summative evaluations to guide the design.

The framework establishes a weak-centralized information organizing mode, including the design of governance community and on-chain and off-chain governance mechanisms. Feedback from experts is collected via interviews and the designed framework is thought to improve information used for supervision. Constructive suggestions are also collected and analyzed for further development.

This paper provides a novel example exploring the inspirations blockchain can bring to project governance, like exercising caution regarding the disorderly expansion of public sector authority in addressing information disadvantages and how to leverage blockchain to achieve this. Technical details conveyed by the framework deepen understanding of how blockchain benefits and the challenges faced in successful implementation for practitioners and policymakers. The targeted evaluation serves as rigorous validation, guiding experts to provide reliable feedback and richer insights by offering them a more cognitively convenient scenario.

This chapter aims to define comparative and international higher education (CIHE), describe its orientation and application, and reflect on research trends of the past five years. Research trends were identified through the review of panel sessions of the Higher Education Special Interest Group at the Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society between 2014 and 2018. These trends include a greater focus on equity, access, and affordability; competition, rankings, and status; partnerships (e.g., international and public–private); regional integration and mobility; and a continued interest in quality and accountability as well as understanding the internationalization at the institutional and system levels. This chapter suggests explanations for these trends, which relate closely to impacts of growing competition for funding in higher education and growing inequities in the world system of higher education. Lastly, it offers recommendations for how CIHE researchers can engage with practitioners to further address these inequities.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the emerging phenomenon of medical tourism in the context of Iran from a customer experience management perspective and benchmark of their judgment including positive or negative, of the experience they have achieved of the Iranian health (medical) experience (CE) and suggest scenarios for the improvement of the Iranian customer experience management (CEM).

The research methodologies and research methods that are used in this descriptive-analytical research are based on an inspection of the remarkable literature related to medical tourism and customer experience management. The data gathering instrument is a researcher-made questionnaire based on the variables in the conceptual model extracted from the research literature. The study was conducted from May to August 2019. The population cohort of this study was the foreign patients calling selected Iranian hospitals and the sampling method was a purposive and snowball sample of prospective medical tourists. As the study was conducted throughout Iran, some important hospitals in Iran were selected by stratified sampling Yang et al. (2020b). The sample size and data saturation were 500 participants Lv and Song (2019). The collected data using the questionnaire were analyzed by SPSS software and statistical tests.

According to the results, the customer experience management statistical significance in the task aspect is (p = 0.0523), in the mechanical aspect is (p = 0.0563), in the human aspect is (p = 0.0544). The study showed positive customer experience among the patients who had been treated in the Iranian hospitals.

There is a lack of study that focuses on medical tourism and customer experience management in Iran. Therefore, based on the results of this study, the experience of medical tourists in Iran proved to be positive and satisfying. As little research has been conducted in the area of customer experience management (CEM) in Iranian medical tourism, future researchers can use these valuable results precisely and in more detail to benchmark more accurately the customer experience in all areas of medical and health tourism and other research areas in different aspects of CEM in Iran.

Outlines the attitudes of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to usury, discusses the application of religious principles to economic transactions and argues that Islamic practices with regard to charging interest are not actually inconsistent with Christian Scholastic thinking in the late medieval period. Considers ideas about money and interest from Aristotle onward and uses Scholastic arguments against interest to illuminate the Islamic moral position. Recognizes that in subsistence economies interest causes injustice, but believes that in wealth‐producing economies religious texts should be applied differently to serve “the common good”.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the main ways in which large amounts of information have been integrated to provide new measures of food consumption and agricultural production, and new methods for gathering and analyzing internet-based data.

This study reviews some of the recent developments and applications of big data, which is becoming increasingly popular in agricultural economics research. In particular, this study focuses on applications of new types of data such as text and graphics in consumers' online reviews emerging from e-commerce transactions and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data as well as other producer data that are gaining popularity in precision agriculture. This study then reviews data gathering techniques such as web scraping and data analytics tools such as textual analysis and machine learning.

This study provides a comprehensive review of applications of big data in agricultural economics and discusses some potential future uses of big data.

This study documents some new types of data that are being utilized in agricultural economics, sources and methods to gather and store such data, existing applications of these new types of data and techniques to analyze these new data.

The purpose of this study is to examine the lump solutions of the (3 + 1)-dimensional nonlinear evolution equations by considering a (3 + 1)-dimensional generalized Kadomtsev–Petviashvili (gKP) equation and a (3 + 1)-dimensional variable-coefficient generalized B-type Kadomtsev–Petviashvili (vcgBKP) equation as examples.

Based on Hirota’s bilinear theory, a direct method is used to examine the lump solutions of these two equations.

The complete non-elastic interaction solutions between a lump and a stripe are also discussed for the equations, which show that the lump solitons are swallowed by the stripe solitons.

The dynamics of these solutions are analyzed to enrich the diversity of the dynamics of high-dimensional KP-type nonlinear wave equations.

Details a new type of screwing mechanical hand which has been developed. There are three distinguishing features on the structures and functions of the mechanical hand: it can perform both screwing and unscrewing automatically; it has no special driver for its finger grasp and release but adopts some specific mechanisms and structures for this process; and the preset screwing torque is used to control the release of the fingers. Describes the main parts and operating process of the hand; the structure and movements of the wrist and hand; and the principle behind the grasp and release mechanism.