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Two time metaphors are often adopted to express the passage of time: the ego-moving metaphor that conceptualizes the ego as moving toward the stationary event (e.g. we are approaching the holiday) or the event-moving metaphor that conceptualizes the event as moving toward the stationary ego (e.g. the holiday is approaching us). This paper aims to investigate the influence of the time metaphor on regulatory focus, as well as its downstream marketing implications.

Five studies were conducted. Studies 1a–1c examined the moderating effect of the valence of events on the relationship between time metaphors and regulatory focus. Studies 2–3 investigated the downstream marketing implications of the above effects.

The findings indicated that compared to the event-moving metaphor, the ego-moving metaphor is more likely to evoke a promotion focus when consumers anticipate a positive event. However, when the event is negative, the ego-moving metaphor is more likely to evoke a prevention focus compared to the event-moving metaphor.

This research extends the previous literature on regulatory focus activation by showing that time metaphors affect regulatory focus, and that event valence plays a critical moderating role in the relationship.

Many companies rely on positive events (e.g. holidays, anniversaries) to market their products. The findings of this research suggest that companies promoting products with promotion-related benefits or products with higher risks should adopt an ego-moving metaphor to describe the coming of the event. In contrast, companies promoting products with prevention-related benefits or products with low risks should adopt an event-moving metaphor to describe the coming of the event.

This research showed that the effects of time metaphors on consumers’ regulatory focus depend on the valence of the events. It also demonstrated the downstream implications of time metaphors by showing that time metaphors influence consumer product choices and financial decisions.

As green marketing is a critical function of green supply chain management, it has generated a great deal of discussion in public discourse and academic research. Interestingly, there is a gap in the research on how a company can effectively invest and manage various green marketing activities. Thus this paper aims to introduce a grey multiple criteria decision-making methodology to investigate the relationships between green marketing activities and performance outcomes (environmental and business performance). This paper seeks to make the following contributions to the green supply chain management literature. First, review the literature to identify implementation activities for green marketing from green supply chain management literature. Second, develop a methodology to evaluate relationships of green marketing activities by integrating grey number and rough set method. Third, obtain various decision rules relating the various green marketing activities to the environmental and/or business performance outcomes through an illustrative application within an incomplete information system. Knowing those rules to help in the implementation, management, and evaluation of these green marketing activities is valuable to both researchers and practitioners. Included in the discussion are insights into how these rules for individual and aggregated performance (environmental, business, and joint performance) may be evaluated. Practical and research implications of this work are detailed in the final section of this paper.

This study aims to present a numerical study on the flow and heat transfer performance of a water-cooled tube with protrusions in different geometrical parameters.

A new type of enhanced heat exchanger tube is designed. Protrusions are formed on the inner surface of the tube by mechanical expansion, compression and other processing methods. A three-dimensional numerical symmetry model is established by ANSYS for studying the influence of protrusion distance, protrusion radius and protrusion arrangement on flow and heat transfer characteristics in turbulent flow.

The results show that the protrusions increase the heat transfer area and improve the heat transfer effect but also increase the flow resistance. Performance evaluation criteria (PEC) is applied to evaluate the flow and heat transfer characteristics of convex tubes. When adopting the aligned protrusions arrangement, the radius of 2 mm and distance of twice the protrusion radius is most heat transfer effect. The PEC of protrusion tubes with a staggered arrangement are higher than those in aligned arrangement, and the maximum value is 2.36 when Reynolds number is 12,000.

At present, most of the protrusion technology applications are based on the cold plate heat dissipation of electronic devices, and the flow path is rectangular. Convex tube heat exchanger is a high-efficiency heat exchanger, which uses convex tubes instead of smooth tubes in tubular heat exchangers to enhance heat transfer and widely used in petroleum, chemical, textile, oil refining and other industries.

To improve the accuracy of parameter prediction for small-sample data, considering the existence of error in samples, the error circle is introduced to analyze original samples.

The influence of surface roughness on fatigue life is discussed. The error circle can treat the original samples and extend the single sample, which reduces the influence of the sample error.

The S-N curve obtained by the error circle method is more reliable; the S-N curve of the Bootstrap method is more reliable than that of the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) method.

The parameter distribution and characteristics are statistically obtained based on the surface roughness, surface roughness factor and intercept constant. The original sample is studied by an error circle and discussed using the Bootstrap and MLE methods to obtain corresponding S-N curves. It provides a more trustworthy basis for predicting the useful life of products.

Although China has claimed since 2005 that it will move towards a more market-oriented system of managing its foreign exchange, it has remained, in part, a managed economic system. This chapter examines the relative importance of fundamentalist, chartist and currency arrangements in determining the RMB exchange regime using both traditional linear and non-linear artificial intelligence models. We find that the emphasis on the US dollar as a reference currency has declined. Fundamentalist forces are becoming strong determinants of the currency exchange. The genetic programming approach is among the best performing in minimizing forecasting error.

With the analysis of the causes of corruption, this study aims to investigate specific anti-corruption measures that can be implemented to reform the political system and the social climate of China.

This study examines 97 severe corruption cases of high-ranking officials in China, which occurred between 2012 and 2015. As this insinuates that both institutional and social corruption are major problems in China, the analysis delves into multiple facts of corruption, including different types, four primary underlying causes, and suggestions regarding the implementation of three significant governmental shifts that focus on investigation, prevention tactics and legal regulations.

China’s corruption is not only individual-based but also it has developed into institutional corruption and social corruption. Besides human nature and instinct, the causes of corruption can be organised into four categories, namely, social customs, social transitions, institutional designs and institutional operations. For the removed high-ranking officials, the formation of interest chains was an important underlying cause behind their corruption.

This study makes a significant contribution to the literature because this study provides a well-rounded approach to a complex issue by highlighting the significance of democracy and the rule of law as ways to regulate human behaviour to combat future corruption.

This study aims to explore the gap between information needs and services for autism in China.

The gap is revealed by investigating the status quo of autism information needs and services. The authors extracted categories and subcategories of information needs through content analysis of academic documents and then supplemented the subcategories through text mining of an online forum. Meanwhile, categories and subcategories of information services were extracted through content analysis of autism websites. Finally, the authors matched the two to explore the gap and designed a quantitative index to measure it.

A total of eight and ten categories of information needs and services are extracted, respectively. In total, six categories of information needs can be partly matched, but nearly half of the subcategories failed. Huge gaps in economic support, sociality and policy mechanisms categories are observed through the quantitative index and medium gaps in social resource services and employment categories while almost no gaps in psychological/emotional counseling, rehabilitation skills training and professional knowledge/information categories.

This study takes a deep insight into the gap between autism information needs and services in China, providing evidences and suggestions for information providers to improve their services. Academic documents and online forum data are adopted to avoid the impact of stigmatization, which provides a multi-source data analysis approach for the information needs of special groups.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Generation Y consumers’ symbolic consumption on brand attitude and purchase intention toward global brands.

A conceptual model has been developed to illustrate the proposed relationships among the related variables. Data from a total of 300 usable surveys were collected from Thai Generation Y consumers. The proposed hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling analyses.

The study found that Generation Y consumers’ symbolic consumption has a significant and positive effect on brand attitude and purchase intention.

Time and resources limitation did not allow to study the larger sample. Future research should include more product categories and more global brands. Sample can be extended to consumers in ASEAN countries to provide more comprehensive insights into consumer perceptions and brand behaviors toward global brands.

The findings suggest that symbolic consumption is a key motivation to increase purchase intention when developing marketing strategies for the Generation Y consumer.

This study has contributions to symbolic consumption and Generation Y literature combining several important dimensions into a structural model, and examines the relationships among these dimensions.

Whistleblowers have been credited for uncovering financial scandals in companies globally, including Enron, Olympus Corporation, and WorldCom. Despite increasing support and incentives for whistleblowing, there generally remains reluctance to blow the whistle. Thus, the purpose of this study is to review: (1) the determinants of internal and external whistleblowing on accounting-related misconduct, (2) U.S. whistleblowing legislation on accounting-related misconduct and related research, and (3) the effects of whistleblowing on firms and whistleblowers. Within each area, suggestions for future research are offered.