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Mobile phone network third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) modes are the most commonly used modes in many developing countries. This study aims to assess the impact of these network modes and other mobile phone attributes on their retail prices in Pakistan, the fifth most populous and developing country.

This study has been conducted in Punjab province, which shares about 53% of the Pakistan’s population. Hedonic price analysis was carried out on all new mobile phone attributes sold in Punjab’s markets at the retail level. Various econometric tests, that is, Ramsey regression equation specification error, Breusch–Pagan/Cook–Weisberg and variance inflation factor, were calculated to check the robustness of the results.

Results of this study indicated that the mobile phone prices were significantly higher for the sets having 4G network mode than the 3G mode. In addition to this, other mobile phone attributes that significantly influenced their prices were brand, weight, camera, random access memory (RAM), memory size, operating system, battery capacity and display size.

This study has implications for mobile phone sales and marketing strategies of the manufacturers, importers, retailers and others involved in the mobile phone business in developing countries like Pakistan. Mobile phone manufacturers/importers can increase their profits by producing/importing the 4G enabled devices.

Although many studies in the literature estimated the implicit price of mobile phone attributes, none of these had explicitly assessed the impact of network mode generation of mobile phones on their prices.

While the economic benefits of the exhibition industry for the hotel sector have been addressed, the impact of exhibitions on individual hotels is unknown, especially when individual hotels’ star classification and locations are considered. This study aims to provide a better understanding of how room rates of different hotels change during different stages of the Canton Fair in China from a spatial-temporal perspective.

Room rates of 681 star-hotels within the city of Guangzhou before, during and after the Fair were extracted from websites. Through spatial interpolation and autocorrelation analysis and geographical detector (GeoDetector) technique, spatial and temporal patterns of hotel room rates and the interdependence between the convention center and the hotels with different star classification and locations were examined.

An inverse-U shape of room rate change was identified before, during and after the Fair, and the five-star hotels had the sharpest increase. Moreover, the distribution of hotel room rates followed the law of distance decay. The variation of hotel rates became larger when the distance to the convention center was larger. Spatial high-high clusters varied among hotels with different star classification.

This study contributed to the hotel literature by providing empirical evidence regarding how hotels with different star classification and locations were affected by events. This study also advanced the event literature by introducing GeoDetector. The findings of this study offered insights into the hotel location selection, pricing strategies and hotel collaboration with events.

虽然展览业对酒店业的经济效益已经得到解决, 但展览对单个酒店的影响尚不清楚, 尤其是在考虑单个酒店的星级和位置时。本研究旨在从时空角度更好地了解中国广交会不同阶段不同酒店的房价变化情况。

网站提取了广交会前、中、后广州市内681家星级酒店的房价。通过空间插值和自相关分析以及地理探测器（GeoDetector）技术, 研究了酒店房价的时空格局以及会议中心与不同星级和位置的酒店之间的相互依赖关系。

会前、会中、会后房价变化呈倒U型, 其中五星级酒店涨幅最大。此外, 酒店房价的分布遵循距离衰减规律。到会展中心的距离越远, 酒店价格的变化就越大。不同星级酒店的空间高-高集群存在差异。

该研究通过提供关于不同星级和位置的酒店如何受到事件影响的经验证据, 为酒店文献做出了贡献。这项研究还通过引入 GeoDetector 推进了事件文献。研究结果为酒店选址、定价策略和酒店与活动的合作提供了见解。

This paper gives a review of the finite element techniques (FE) applied in the analysis and design of machine elements; bolts and screws, belts and chains, springs and dampers, brakes, gears, bearings, gaskets and seals are handled. The range of applications of finite elements on these subjects is extremely wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore the aim of this paper is to give FE researchers/users only an encyclopaedic view of the different possibilities that exist today in the various fields mentioned above. An Appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on finite element applications in the analysis/design of machine elements for 1977‐1997.

The escalating instances of financial distress (FD) in corporate houses across the globe, call for immediate attention from policymakers, practitioners and academics equally. This study aims to examine how board gender diversity (GD) and information disclosures (ID) interact with each other to drive FD.

The authors apply dynamic panel data analysis on a sample of 255 Indian-listed firms from 2016 to 2023 to arrive at the econometric results.

The main findings indicate that while ID exacerbates distress, GD reduces it. In addition, GD also interacts with ID to curtail the adverse effects of disclosures on FD. Therefore, GD acts like a stone that kills two birds simultaneously, first by reducing the distress directly and second by limiting the negative effects of disclosures on distress.

This study extends the understanding of the implications of GD and complements existing research by investigating its direct and indirect impact on FD. It builds on the analysis to propose that GD can foster resilience against adverse FD situations. The findings should apply to other emerging nations after careful consideration of country-specific factors.

This paper aims to study the effect of elevated temperature on the compression behaviour of carbon fibre polyphenylene sulphide (CF/PPS) laminates notched and unnotched specimens made by film stacking method (FSM).

The surface of CF was coated with a silane coupling agent to form an effective transition layer with PPS, so as to enhance the interfacial interaction between CF and PPS. Considering the influence of fabrication pressure, forming temperature and cooling rate on the properties of laminates to obtain a reasonable preparation process. Conducting a compressive experiment of notched and unnotched specimens at different temperatures, which failure modes were examined by scanning electron microscope and stereo microscope.

The experimental observations highlight that with the increase of temperature, the transition failure mode from fibre broken to kink-band appeared in unnotched specimens, which were closely attributed to the matrix state. The notched specimens appeared more complex failure mode, which can be attributed to the joint effect of temperature and opening hole.

A simple way of FSM for composite material laminates has been developed by using woven CF and PPS films.

The outcome of this study will help to understand the compression response mechanism of composite materials made by FSM at different temperature.

This paper investigates the impact of the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) merger in Australia on existing and potential clients of the new merged firm. From prior theory it is expected that some existing clients may have an incentive to switch away from a newly merged firm as the same larger firm now audits close competitors once audited by separate firms. Prior theory also suggests that another group of potential clients should be attracted to the newly merged firm where the merger enhances or creates industry specializations. The expectation is that in both of these instances there will be increased switching activity associated with the newly merged audit firm. Contrary to expectations, a significantly lower level of switching behaviour was observed for the newly merged firm compared with that of the other Big 5 firms, suggesting that an advantage of enhanced specialization may not be the attraction of new clients but the retention of existing clients. When comparing the nature of the switches, some support was found for the view that the switches to the new firm were likely to be in enhanced areas of specialization, but no evidence was found to suggest that close competitors would switch away from this firm. The greater rate of retention of clients compared with other Big 5 firms was not associated with a more competitive audit pricing policy.

In this study, the authors extend upon Brockman et al. (2008), who provide evidence that managers opportunistically accelerate bad news prior to share repurchases, but provide limited evidence that managers withhold good news until after repurchases. The authors examine management forecasts surrounding share repurchases in periods when companies must disclose detailed repurchase information. The authors argue these disclosures increase managers' legal and reputation risks of accelerating bad news, but have a lesser effect on delaying good news.

First, the authors examine whether managers alter the information released to the market before buying back shares by comparing managerial forecasts made within 30 days before the beginning of a repurchasing period with those made outside of this window. Second, the authors examine whether managers are more likely to provide good news forecasts, in terms of both magnitude and frequency, after buying back shares. Lastly, the authors examine the impact of CEO stock ownership on managerial forecasting behavior surrounding share buybacks.

Consistent with the authors’ hypotheses and contrary to Brockman et al. (2008), the authors find limited evidence that the likelihood or magnitude of bad news forecasts is greater in the period before share buybacks. Instead, the authors document that the frequency and magnitude of good news forecasts increase in periods following share buybacks and that these associations are positively moderated by managerial equity incentives. The authors also find that the withholding of good news is associated with lower average repurchase prices and greater repurchase volume. The authors further show that, when litigation risk is greater, managers are less likely to accelerate bad news prior to repurchases and more likely to withhold good news until after. Overall, the study results are consistent with managers balancing the benefits of opportunistic repurchase behavior with the costs.

This study contributes to the management forecast and share repurchase literatures by providing evidence consistent with managers opportunistically releasing earnings forecasts in the period after buying back shares. Most importantly, the authors show that after the rule revision, managers refrain from actively disclosing bad news that carry higher legal costs. Instead, they opt for the omission of good news to repurchase stocks at lower prices. The study results reconcile the conflicting evidence of Brockman et al. (2008) and Ge and Lennox (2011).

This paper presents a VHDL‐AMS based genetic optimisation methodology for fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs) used in complex automotive systems and modelled in mixed physical domains. A case study applying this novel method to an active suspension system has been investigated to obtain a new type of fuzzy logic membership function with irregular shapes optimised for best performance.

The geometrical shapes of the fuzzy logic membership functions are irregular and optimised using a genetic algorithm (GA). In this optimisation technique, VHDL‐AMS is used not only for the modelling and simulation of the FLC and its underlying active suspension system but also for the implementation of a parallel GA directly in the system testbench.

Simulation results show that the proposed FLC has superior performance in all test cases to that of existing FLCs that use regular‐shape, triangular or trapezoidal membership functions.

The test of the FLC has only been done in the simulation stage, no physical prototype has been made.

This paper proposes a novel way of improving the FLC's performance and a new application area for VHDL‐AMS.

This paper is concerned with new formulations of local meshfree and finite element numerical methods, for the solution of two-dimensional problems in linear elasticity.

In the local domain, assigned to each node of a discretization, the work theorem establishes an energy relationship between a statically admissible stress field and an independent kinematically admissible strain field. This relationship, derived as a weighted residual weak form, is expressed as an integral local form. Based on the independence of the stress and strain fields, this local form of the work theorem is kinematically formulated with a simple rigid-body displacement to be applied by local meshfree and finite element numerical methods. The main feature of this paper is the use of a linearly integrated local form that implements a quite simple algorithm with no further integration required.

The reduced integration, performed by this linearly integrated formulation, plays a key role in the behavior of local numerical methods, since it implies a reduction of the nodal stiffness which, in turn, leads to an increase of the solution accuracy and, which is most important, presents no instabilities, unlike nodal integration methods without stabilization. As a consequence of using such a convenient linearly integrated local form, the derived meshfree and finite element numerical methods become fast and accurate, which is a feature of paramount importance, as far as computational efficiency of numerical methods is concerned. Three benchmark problems were analyzed with these techniques, in order to assess the accuracy and efficiency of the new integrated local formulations of meshfree and finite element numerical methods. The results obtained in this work are in perfect agreement with those of the available analytical solutions and, furthermore, outperform the computational efficiency of other methods. Thus, the accuracy and efficiency of the local numerical methods presented in this paper make this a very reliable and robust formulation.

Presentation of a new local mesh-free numerical method. The method, linearly integrated along the boundary of the local domain, implements an algorithm with no further integration required. The method is absolutely reliable, with remarkably-accurate results. The method is quite robust, with extremely-fast computations.

With the rapid development of integrated circuits, verification of SOC chips has become a great challenge due to its integration and complexity. Traditional software‐based simulation methodology cannot meet verification needs. Therefore, FPGA‐based hardware acceleration technologies are requested in SOC verification. The classic methodology of hardware acceleration downloads the DUT (Device under Test) to the FPGA, while part of RTL codes and test bench is still run on the simulator in the workstation. Research found that the speed bottleneck of this methodology is mostly caused by the ping‐pong mode of data transmission between workstation software and the FPGA emulator, thus resulting in that channel transmission time takes too much proportion of total time. The purpose of this paper is to present a vector mode based hardware/software co‐emulation methodology, which leverages a pipeline structure to transmit, receive and buffer data. This methodology reduces the communication overhead by carrying out a parallel mechanism in that while user's design is under test in the emulator, signal data are transmitting in the channel simultaneously, thus increasing the speed of hardware acceleration and emulation.

The methodology of hardware acceleration proposed by this paper intercepts data for once from the emulation process of a traditional platform as test bench and utilizes direct memory access (DMA) channel to speed up data transfer, as well as increasing reasonable data caching mechanism, which reduces the ratio of channel transmission time in the entire emulation time, achieving accelerating emulation.

The proposed methodology and traditional hardware acceleration approach were tested on a quasi‐cyclic low‐density parity‐check (LDPC) decoder. Experiment results indicate that the proposed method can increase communication throughput 140 times compared with the traditional approach.

A vector mode based hardware/software co‐emulation methodology is presented in the paper. Higher communication throughput can be achieved by carrying out a parallel mechanism, as well as leveraging a pipeline structure to transmit, receive and buffer data.