Search results

Critical links in traffic networks are those who should be better protected because their removal has a significant impact on the whole network. So, the purpose of this paper is to identify the critical links of traffic networks.

This paper proposes the definition of the critical link for an urban traffic network and establishes mathematical model for determining critical link considering the travellers’ heterogeneous risk-taking behavior. Moreover, in order to improve the computational efficiency, the impact area of a link is quantified, a partial network scan algorithm for identifying the critical link based on the impact area is put forward and the efficient paths-based assignment algorithm is adopted.

The proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the search space for determining the most critical links in traffic network. Numerical results also demonstrate that the structure of efficient paths has significant impact on identifying the critical links.

This paper identifies the critical links by using a bi-level programming approach and proposes a partial network scan algorithm for identifying critical links accounting for travellers’ heterogeneous risk-taking behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the fit between intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management (KM) strategy and its impacts on firm performance.

Based on the fit view, the authors posit that firms can enhance performance by aligning the structure of their IC with KM strategy, as reducing the extent to which their actual IC profile deviate from the “ideal” profile when implementing certain type of KM strategy. Using survey data collected from 328 high technology firms in China, the authors tested the research model.

The more fit a firm’s IC is to its KM strategic type, the better operational and financial performance it can achieve.

The sample of high technology firms in China might limit the generalization of the findings. Nonetheless, this study is based on and extends prior research, which provides a deepened understanding of the role of IC-KM strategy fit in organizational settings.

The paper suggests that firms should adjust their IC according to KM strategy they employ. According to the findings, managers can selectively develop IC to achieve performance goals under certain type of KM strategy.

As one of the first studies to investigate the relationship among IC, KM strategy and firm performance in a holistic way, it indicates that the IC-KM strategy fit can be a novel explanation for performance variances through the alignment of knowledge-based capability and strategy.

Prior research has suggested that abusive supervision has negative impacts on various work outcomes. However, little attention has been paid to the relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ safety behaviour. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to address these limitations by developing and testing a theoretically based conceptual model that explicitly considers the underlying mechanism and boundary condition of the relationship between abusive supervision and safety behaviour of underground coal miners in China.

At Time 1, the authors conducted a survey of 630 employees to assess their supervisors’ abusive leadership behaviours, their own power distance beliefs and their self-reflection. At Time 2, the authros sent questionnaires to the leaders and invited them to evaluate employees’ safety behaviour in the workplace. After cleaning the survey data, the authors tested our model using a multi-level analysis on a sample (n = 458) of underground miners across 96 coal mining sites in China.

The authors propose that abusive supervision decreases employees’ safety compliance/participation by reducing reflection but strengthening rumination. The authors further find that the linkage from abusive supervision to reflection/rumination to safety compliance/participation is affected by power distance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, This is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the mediating effects of a deep cognitive processing variable – namely, self-reflection – and the moderating effects of power distance on the relationship between abusive supervision and safety behaviour.

China has emerged as the world's second-largest economy due to rapid industrial expansion and phenomenal economic growth of China in recent decades. Though, this exponential economic turnaround has been fueled by widespread energy consumption, making China among the largest pollutant emitters in the world. Chinese enterprises have come under greater scrutiny and the Government has mandated Chinese companies to undertake environmental protection investment. This study aims to explore the relationship between environmental protection investment and enterprise innovation by taking evidence from Chinese listed firms.

The data of 2,568 Chinese A-share listed firm-year observations were collected from the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges during 2008–2016. This study employed ordinary least square and panel data fixed effects techniques to ascertain the association between proposed variables.

The authors' findings conjecture the crowding-out effects of environmental investments on enterprise innovation-related expenditures. Furthermore, additional empirical testing reveals that Research and Development (R&D) undertakings of state-owned and politically connected enterprises are not affected by environmental investments. Likewise, corporate innovation activities are not negatively influenced by environmental investments in polluting industries. The study findings offer fresh insights to regulators, corporate managers and stakeholders. The authors' results are robust to alternate econometric specifications and alternate variable specifications.

This study makes the following contributions toward the extant literature. First, the study investigates if there is a crowding-out effect of spending on environmental protection in the current period and the innovation expenditure in the upcoming period. Empirical results confirm that there exists a trade-off between both types of spending, implying that the spending on environmental protection will negatively influence the spending on innovation. Second, the study deepens the analysis in considering other influences in this relationship. For instance, the authors' separately consider the aforementioned trade-off in state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises. The study also examines the mediating influence of corporate political connections and industry attributes, whether or not these influence the relationship between the actual spending on environmental protection and the upcoming spending on innovation.

Financial price forecast issues are always a concern of investors. However, the financial applications based on machine learning methods mainly focus on stock market predictions. Few studies have explored credit risk predictions. Understanding credit risk trends can help investors avoid market risks. The purpose of this study is to investigate the prediction model that can effectively predict credit default swaps (CDS).

A novel generative adversarial network (GAN) for CDS prediction is proposed. The authors take three features into account that are highly relevant to the future trends of CDS: historical CDS price, news and financial leverage. The main goal of this model is to improve the existing GAN-based regression model by adding finance and news feature extraction approaches. The proposed model adopts an attentional long short-term memory network and convolution network to process historical CDS data and news information, respectively. In addition to enhancing the effectiveness of the GAN model, the authors also design a data sampling strategy to alleviate the overfitting issue.

The authors conduct an experiment with a real dataset and evaluate the performance of the proposed model. The components and selected features of the model are evaluated for their ability to improve the prediction performance. The experimental results show that the proposed model performs better than other machine learning algorithms and traditional regression GAN.

There are very few studies on prediction models for CDS. With the proposed novel approach, the authors can improve the performance of CDS predictions. The proposed work can thereby increase the commercial value of CDS predictions to support trading decisions.

This paper aims to investigate the inverse U-shape relationship between DM and accessing loans from the banks and explore the moderating effect of donation mode diversity.

Based on a survey dataset of 1,036 private firms in China, we use a Heckman two-stage estimation model to test hypothesizes.

The results show an invert U-shape relationship between donation magnitude and access to bank loan. The authors also find that donation mode diversity will positively moderate donation magnitude–bank loan relationship: the positive effect of donation magnitude will be stronger for the private firms using multiple channels of philanthropic donation.

This paper extends the literatures by examining how philanthropic donation behaviors in form of donation magnitude (how much to give) and donation mode diversity (how to give) influence private firms’ loan borrowed from the bank, an important but largely ignored stakeholder. Therefore, it suggests that both the amount and the channels of philanthropic donation could have significant roles in the efficiency of achieving strategic outcomes of corporate philanthropy.

As social networking sites (SNSs) gain popularity, they are being widely used by entrepreneurs to obtain social capital to carry out business ventures. However not all SNS usage behaviors promote entrepreneurship. Only when individuals actively participate in SNSs relationship maintenance behaviors they can obtain resources that are conducive to promoting social entrepreneurship. The aim of this study is to explore the role of WeChat relationship maintenance behavior (WRMB) on social entrepreneurial intention (SEI) with dual narcissism as an essential antecedent that affects SNS use.

Based on dual narcissism theory and the theoretical framework that networking is a critical skill and activity for the success of social entrepreneurship, this study proposes a serial mediation model that explores the formation of SEI. This study collected data from a sample of 275 MBA students in China and applied multiple regression and confirmatory factor analysis techniques to test the research model.

The results reveal narcissistic admiration (NA) is positively associated with WRMB, while narcissistic rivalry (NR) is negatively associated with such behavior. And the positive impact of NA on SEI can be explained by WRMB and social capital paths, while the negative impact of NR cannot.

This research is the first application of dual narcissism in the field of SEI, which provides a new way to explain the antecedents of SEI under the social network. The findings provide an effective reference path for social entrepreneurship education in universities and educational institutions and enlighten the correct distinction between dual narcissism in entrepreneurial psychological consultation.

The purpose of this paper is to study a production lot sizing problem with consideration of imperfect manufacturing and emergency maintenance policy, providing managerial implication for practitioners.

In this study, the authors introduce two models, where in Model I, shortages are not allowed and repair times are negligible. In Model II, shortages are allowed and are partially backlogged, and repair times are assumed to be exponentially distributed, algorithm is developed to solve the models, numerical examples were demonstrated the applications.

Results show that in the Model I, demand rate is the most significant parameter affecting the average expected cost, whereas the time needed to breakdown after machine shift is the most significant factor affecting the production lot size. Therefore, reduction in the time needed to breakdown after machine shift would be helpful for determining an appropriate production lot size in Model I. In Model II, repair time parameter is the most significant factor affecting the average expected cost. Reducing the value of machine shift parameter would be helpful for determining an adequate production lot size and reducing decision risk.

This paper can provide important reference value for practitioners with managerial implication of how to effectively maintain equipment, i.e. how to make product lot size considering the influence of the maintenance policy.

From the aspect of academia, this paper provides a solution to the optimal production lot sizing decision for an imperfect manufacturing system with consideration of machine breakdown and emergency maintenance, which is a supplement to imperfect EMQ model.

In this paper, microbial transglutaminase (MTG) was applied to process silk fabric for improving its crease resistance under the prerequisite of maintaining other performances. Not only was the effect of MTG on silk fabric investigated through the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FR), but analysis was also undertaken in the microcosmic structure of fibroin through the scanning electron microscope (SEM). Solo MTG treatment as well as compound treatments of MTG followed by hydrogen peroxide, protease and ultrasonic, all showed that MTG can improve the crease resistance of silk fabric. It also enhanced its tensile breaking strength or amended damage in the tensile breaking strength caused by pretreatments.

Simultaneously, comparison with other treatments showed that compound treatment of MTG followed by ultrasonic exerted a better coordinated effect and conferred better performances, which made the wrinkle recovery angle (WRA) increase by 17.4% and tensile breaking strength improve by 11.2% respectively. At the same time, other performances were still maintained well.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review the functionalities, safety regulations and product applications of herb Stevia rebaudiana extract. This plant material is embedded with multiple functionalities such as antioxidant, antidiabetics, anti-inflammation and antimicrobial. The regulations released from global authorities are covered to ensure the safety premise of stevia. Besides, the product applications of the extract of aerial parts of the herb S. rebaudiana helps us to recognize its value from commercial side.

Relevant literatures are selected and obtained from main scientific databases such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, PubMed and trade magazines published between 2000 and 2023. The keywords and their possible combinations such as sweetening, antioxidant, antidiabetics, anti-inflammation, safety and product development were used to ensure the preciseness and completeness of literature searching. Major data such as sweetness, total phenolic content and dose together with latter critical conclusions from searched publications were appropriately used and discussed. In this review, approximately 150 scientific literatures were meticulously ordered and analyzed. In applications, it is the first time that sentiment analysis was used to obtain a market assessment of the stevia-containing products.

This review paper helps rearrange the scientific affairs of those stevia extract’s functions like sweetening, antioxidant, antidiabetics and inflammation. Sweetness indexes of steviol glycosides were summarized together for comparison while various in vitro and in vivo approaches were reviewed to quantify those functions’ capacities and to depict the related mechanism. The regulation of steviol glycoside compounds such as rebaudioside A was established by global authorities such as US Food and Drug Administration and Joint FAO/World Health Organization Expert Committee to ensure the safety endorsement before commercialization. Then, this study discussed about the market performance of stevia ingredients or products with the self-developed data analytics. This study also investigated the product development progress of stevia-containing food products in the categories of beverage, bakery, dairy and confectionery. Those stevia-containing food consumer goods can be acceptable by certain consumers.

This review paper precisely presents the evidential information about the stevia’s multiple functionalities with mechanisms and global regulation milestones. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is then the first time to probe the stevia-containing products’ market performance through data analytics.