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Leveraging information technology (IT) to improve the treatment and support of patients is a widely studied topic in healthcare. For chronic diseases, such as diabetes, the use of information technology is even more important since its effect extends from a clinic environment to patients’ daily life. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of one widely adopted information technology, the mobile phone, on diabetes treatment, specifically on the complicated process of patients’ health, emotions and compliance.

We leverage a unique longitudinal dataset on diabetes patients’ health status in rural areas of China to study the problem. We also cross-link the dataset with mobile carrier data to further differentiate mobile phone use to phone calls and network use. To address the endogeneity concerns, we apply PSM and a series of instrument variables.

We identify clear evidence that mobile phone use can significantly improve patients’ emotions and compliance, where the effect is generally larger on patients in worse health conditions. While mobile phone calls clearly benefit diabetes patients, we do notice that mobile phone network use has a negative moderating effect with patients’ health condition on improving compliance.

This study not only enriches our theoretical understanding of the role of mobile phones in diabetes management, it also shows the economic benefit of promoting patients’ use of mobile phones, which should be considered by medical care providers and medical policymakers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between supply chain quality management (SCQM) and firm performance (including quality safety performance and sales performance) leveraging social co-regulation as a moderator.

Using survey data collected from 203 food manufacturers in China, a series of hierarchical linear modeling analyses were conducted to test hypotheses on the relationships between SCQM and firm performance.

The findings are threefold. First, all three dimensions of food SCQM practices, i.e., supplier quality management, internal quality management, and customer quality management, have significant positive effects on an enterprise's quality safety performance and sales performance. Second, SCQM practices can also increase sales performance indirectly through quality safety performance as a mediator. Third, while social co-regulation has no significant effect on the relationship between supplier quality management and quality safety performance, it has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between internal quality management and quality safety performance, customer quality management and quality safety performance.

This study not only integrates SCQM with social co-regulation but also explores the regulating effect of social co-regulation through empirical analysis, thereby providing a theoretical base for future research. However, this research is confined to China and so the results are not necessarily generalizable to other countries.

The findings inform managers of the importance in enhancing awareness of food quality and safety as well as in improving their sensitivity to salient quality demands of external stakeholders in order to achieve better SCQM practices. The findings can also inform policymakers of the significance in designing a systematic multi-agent cooperation mechanism for food SCQM as well as to build an effective information sharing mechanism for social co-regulation of food safety.

This study contributes to knowledge by empirically examining the relationships of SCQM practices with firm performance. It also expands the scope of SCQM research by incorporating social co-regulation in the study framework.

Global positioning system (GPS) kinematic positioning suffers from performance degradation in constrained environments such as urban canyons, which then restricts the application of high-precision vehicle positioning and navigation within the city. In December 2012, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) regional service was announced, and the combined BDS/GPS kinematic positioning has been enabled in the Asia-Pacific area. Previous studies have mainly focused on the performance evaluations of combined BDS/GPS static positioning. Not much work has been performed for kinematic vehicle positioning under constrained observation conditions. This study aims to analyze the performance of BDS/GPS kinematic vehicle positioning in various conditions.

In this study, three vehicle experiments under three observation conditions, an open suburban area, a less dense non-central urban area and a dense central urban area, are investigated using both the code-based differential global navigation satellite system (DGNSS) and phase-based real-time kinematic (RTK) modes. The comparison between combined BDS/GPS and GPS-only vehicle positioning solutions is conducted in terms of positioning availability and positioning precision.

Numerical results show that the combined BDS/GPS system significantly outperforms the GPS-only system under poor observation conditions, whereas the improvement was less significant under good observation conditions.

Thus, this paper studies the performance of combined BDS/GPS kinematic relative positioning under various observation conditions.

The purpose of this study is to verify whether digital transformation strategy (DTS) could improve the organizational performance and provide a comprehensive analysis for enterprises on the necessity of implementing digital transformation in the context of China and draw on the perspectives of “Skewed conflict,” “minority dissent theory” and “too-much-of-a-good-thing.” This study investigates the curvilinear moderating role of cognitive conflict between DTS and performance.

An empirical investigation was used to collect a large sample data of Chinese enterprises’ digital transformation. A multiple linear regression analysis with SPSS was used to test the proposed hypotheses such as the inverted U-shaped moderating effect of the cognitive conflict.

In the Chinese context, DTS has a positive relationship on the short- and long-term financial performance. Moreover, this relationship was moderated by cognitive conflict such that the relationship between DTS and short-term financial performance could be further enhanced under the moderate cognitive conflict; however, the relationship between DTS and long-term financial performance was considerably influenced for higher cognitive conflict.

Based on the co-evolution of the information technology/information system (IT/IS) and business strategy, this study clarified the relationships among DTS, digital strategy and business and information technology strategies. By focusing on corporate strategy, this study further examined the effect of digital transformation on both short- and long-term financial performance. To further reveal the micro-psychological mechanisms underlying the effect of DTS on organizational performance, this study confirmed the inverted U-shaped moderating effect of the top management team’s cognitive conflict. Therefore, this research provides a new theoretical perspective for future research in the field of IT/IS, DTS and digital strategy.

China has recently introduced a new audit law that aims to increase the scope of audit supervision and raise the standards for preventing risks in auditing national public projects. This paper presents a systematic research study on the causes of audit risks in national public projects and discusses the process by which these causes contribute to the emergence of such risks. Furthermore, the paper investigates the core risk sources in various types of national construction project audit. This paper aims to provide theoretical support for auditors of national construction projects in risk avoidance when conducting audits.

In this study, the authors carefully selected five national public audit projects from China and performed a comprehensive analysis of 85 relevant audit documentation. The textual analysis was conducted using Nvivo12 software, and the grounded theory approach was adopted for generalization purposes.

Based on the research results, the findings suggest that there are five key causes contributing to the audit risk of national construction projects: professional competence, risk awareness, management capacity, level of attention and deliberate fraud. The most critical factor identified is management capability, with 59.93% of the data supporting this view. This conclusion was based on an analysis of state-owned enterprises, administrative organs and public institutions. Building upon this, a framework titled “the mechanism of audit risk factors with management capability as the core” was constructed.

This paper employs qualitative analysis methods to examine national construction projects in China, contributing new literature to the theoretical study of audit risk management. The article also provides practical recommendations for auditors on how to mitigate audit risks and improve the quality of audit services in national project governance.

This paper aims to use nano-silver paste to design a new bonding method for super-large-area direct-bonded-aluminum (DBA) plates. It compared several frequently used bonding methods and proved the feasibility of an optimized low-pressure-assisted double-layer-printed silver sintering technology for large-area bonding to increase the thermal conductivity of power electronic modules with high junction temperature, higher power density and higher reliability.

The bonding profile was optimized by using transparent glasses as substrates. Thus, the bonding qualities could be directly characterized by optical observation. After sintering, the bonded DBA samples were characterized by nondestructive X-ray computed tomography system, scanning electron microscopy equipped with an energy dispersive spectrometer. Finally, bonding stress evolution was characterized by shear tests.

Low-pressure-assisted large-area double-layer-printed bonding process consisting of six-step was successfully developed to bond DBA substrates with the size of 50.8 × 25.4 mm. The thickness of the sintered-silver bond-line was between 33  and 74 µm with the average porosity of 12.5 per cent. The distribution of shear strength along the length of DBA/DBA bonded sample was from 9.7  to 18.8 MPa, with average shear strength of 15.5 MPa. The typical fracture primarily propagated in the sintered-silver layer and partially along the Ni layer.

The bonding stress needs to be further improved. Meanwhile, the thermal and electrical properties are encouraged to test further.

If nano-silver paste can be used as thermal interfacial material for super-large-area bonding, the thermal performance will be improved.

The paper accelerated the use of nano-silver paste for super-large-area DBA bonding.

The proposed bonding method greatly decreased the bonding pressure.

In the past several decades, considerable research has been dedicated to the development of mobile systems that can traverse vertical surfaces. For the control of the climbing robot, high-precision sensing of the climbing robot’s heading angle during movement is very important. This paper aims to propose a vision-based scheme for the 2D direction angle detection of wall-climbing robots.

First, the authors proposed a method based on image geometric transformation to transform a camera image into a front view image of the wall, as the position and direction angle of the robot can be detected from the transformed image to eliminate the need for calibration of the camera’s internal and external parameters. Second, the AngleNet model is proposed to detect the 2D direction angle of the wall-climbing robot. Third, a training sample expansion strategy is proposed, which greatly decreased the workload of annotating training samples for AngleNet.

The single image processing time of AngleNet on the GPU is only 1.7 ms, which satisfies the demands of real-time processing. The mean and maximum error of predicted direction angle on the 556 samples of the test set are 1.1° and 3.8°, respectively.

This research offers an effective method for measuring the climbing robot’s direction angle in a complex outdoor environment. Combined with position detection, it can provide high-precision position and direction angle measurement information for the motion control of the climbing robot.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of consumer ethnocentrism, country image, functional food image, subjective knowledge and health consciousness in predicting purchase intention of imported functional foods using the theory of planned behavior.

A total of 361 Chinese consumers from 20 to 60 year old who have purchased Korean functional foods participated in this study using an online survey. Structural equation modeling was performed to examine the hypotheses.

Consumer ethnocentrism had a negative effect on the intention to purchase Korean functional food, but the image of Korean functional foods, subjective knowledge and health consciousness positively affected intention to purchase Korean functional foods. Country image had a positive effect on the image of Korean functional foods. Attitude and perceived behavioral control had a positive effect on the intention to purchase Korean functional foods.

This study combined social and personal factors to explain Chinese consumer intention to purchase imported Korean functional foods.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the significant lower completion rate of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) by firms from emerging economies (EEs) (China in particular) compared with firms from advanced economies, and identify the country- and industry-level factors that affect the completion of cross-border M&As by Chinese firms.

This study explores the effects of economic, cultural and institutional distances and target firms in technology- and knowledge-intensive industries on the completion of cross-border M&As by Chinese firms. It also examines the interplay between distance factors and technology- and knowledge-intensive industries on cross-border M&A completion. This study adopts a quantitative approach and is based on a sample of 768 announced cross-border M&A deals by firms in China between 2000 and 2015.

The results indicate that economic distance increases the likelihood of the completion of cross-border M&As when the target is in a more developed economy than China, but decreases when the target is in a less developed economy. Cultural and institutional distances have a significant, negative impact on the completion of cross-border M&As. In addition, target technology-intensive industries have a significant direct negative effect on cross-border M&A completion and moderate the relationship between the distance factors and the likelihood of cross-border M&A completion.

The results reveal factors that affect the completion of cross-border M&As by emerging market firms (EMFs). Further research, however, is needed to discover how distance factors affect how EMFs find, evaluate and negotiate international bids. To broaden the scope of the research, data for firms from other EEs would also be required.

The study expands the literature that considers the effects of major distances on cross-border M&A completion. In addition, the importance of defining and measuring distances in the context of cross-border M&As is highlighted. Finally, the study expands knowledge on how cross-border M&As affect the internationalization strategies of EMFs by conceptualizing and testing how target industries affect cross-border M&A completion.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the causal link between foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports in China based on the knowledge capital model (KK model, Markusen, 2002).

The bootstrap Granger full-sample and sub-sample rolling window causality test is used to determine whether FDI can promote exports.

The full-sample causality test indicates no causal relationship from FDI to exports. However, considering structural changes of exports and FDI, the authors’ find that the full-sample test is not reliable. Instead, the authors use the rolling window causality test to revisit the dynamic causal relationship, and the results present significant effects from FDI on exports, mostly around periods in which the proportion of FDI from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan is increasing. Specifically, positive impacts of FDI on exports are stronger than the negative impacts in China.

The findings in this study suggest a significant time-varying nature of the correlation between FDI and exports. The promotion effect of FDI to exports is proved by the rolling window approach; it thus supports the KK model that divides FDI into lateral FDI and vertical FDI and proves that the constitution of FDI is critical to the relationship between FDI and exports.

China has been facing adjustment of its economic structure in recent years, and in this situation, increasing the proportion of FDI that can bring advanced production function is critical for the industrial structural adjustment.

This paper uses the bootstrap rolling window causality test to investigate the time-varying nature of the causality between FDI and exports, considering structural changes for the first time. The authors further deepen the previous research and draw a more realistic conclusion.