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This study explores the impact of brand's psychological contract violation on customers' spurious loyalty, via the mediating effects of customers' brand commitments (affective commitment, calculative commitment and normative commitment) and the moderating effects of justification for violation and nostalgia proneness in the link of psychological contract violation and three commitments.

Based on 427 valid responses collected from paper- and web-based survey questionnaires, a total of 21 hypotheses were tested by adopting a structural equation model, hierarchical regression technique and slope analyses.

The result indicates negative effects of psychological contract violation on customers' attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty via affective commitment and normative commitment, as well as positive effects of psychological contract violation on customers' attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty via calculative commitment. It explains the reason why some loyal customers show spurious loyalty after being psychological contract violated. Meanwhile, it also supports different moderating impacts of justification for violation and nostalgia proneness in these relationships.

This study underscores the importance of calculative commitment in mitigating the adverse effect of psychological contract violation on customers' loyalty. Also, managerial implications are put forward to prevent loyal customers from switching to a worse loyalty stage after being violated.

Extant literature holds contradictory views about the brand love’s moderation effect in the link between brand failure and consumer’s retaliation. This paper aims to first examine how failure severity correlates with negative emotions and how negative emotions lead to retaliation intention. Then, it probes into opposite moderation effects of brand love in these two stages. Further, it explores contingent factors, including perceived fairness, inferred goodwill, aggressive personality and brand trust, which may moderate “love is blind” effect or “love becomes hate” effect.

A questionnaire survey was conducted among the sample of 293 responses from Thailand, and 239 responses from China. A total of eight hypotheses were tested by adopting hierarchical regression technique and slope analyses.

The results show that consumers facing brand failure suffer negative emotions and then generate retaliation intention. Brand love positively moderates the link between failure severity and negative emotions, which is called “love becomes hate” effect. Meanwhile, brand love negatively moderates the link between negative emotions and retaliation intention, which is called “love is blind” effect. In addition, perceived fairness and inferred goodwill alleviate “love becomes hate” effect, and aggressive personality decreases “love is blind” effect.

This study makes contribution to brand failure literature by revealing twofold moderating roles of brand love in arousing retaliation behavior of consumers who encounter product/service failure, as well as contingent factors of these roles. Also, the research findings provide managerial implications to brand managers as to how to manage brand failure and reduce consumers’ retaliation by manipulating brand love and relevant contingent variables.

There is growing interest among marketers in advertising and promoting their brands by adopting an online celebrity endorsement strategy. However, how online celebrities build their own brand equity and how online celebrity brand equity impacts fans’ purchase behavior have not been extensively researched in the extant literature. This paper aims to explore the factors that contribute to online celebrity branding and improving fans’ purchase intentions.

A survey and an experiment were conducted among consumers from the mainland of China. A total of 12 hypotheses were proposed to exam how self-congruity and virtual interactivity impact online celebrity branding and to explore the moderating role of perceived quality and product type.

This paper reveals that customers’ perceived self-congruity with online celebrities’ image and virtual interactivity positively impact the brand equity of online celebrities. Additionally, compared with virtual interactivity, the effect of customer perceived self-congruity on a brand is more significant. The brand equity of online celebrities thereby drives followers’ purchase intentions and the perceived quality of products positively moderates this relationship.

The research conclusions provide managerial implications for marketing practitioners for how to use human brands on social media platforms in the web 2.0 era and ultimately enhance consumer purchase intentions.

This paper aims to investigate how relative contractual and relational governances impact seller’s value appropriation via buyer’s trust, perceived justice and opportunism in the context of industrial buyer–seller relationships.

Survey data from 232 matched buyer-seller dyads of Chinese business-to-business (B2B) firms was used to test the conceptual model and research hypotheses. The confirmatory factor model and structural equation model were tested by using Lisrel 8.80.

The findings show that relative contractual governance and relative relational governance have opposite consequences on B2B relationship and value outcomes. Relative contractual governance generates higher level of buyer’s opportunist behavior because it reduces buyer’s trust and perceived justice, therefore harms seller’s value appropriation. By contrast, relative relational governance enhances buyer’s trust and perceived justice, therefore curbs buyer’s opportunism and improves seller’s value appropriation.

This study makes significant contributions to theory development of value appropriation and inter-firm governance mechanism by extending dyadic view to network view. It proposes the concept of relative governance and explores its role in shaping a business partner’s perception and behavior. It also provides insightful implications for B2B companies on capturing more benefits from the relationship with buyers by leveraging relative governance strategies.

The traditional grey relational models directly describe the behavioural characteristics of the systems based on the sample point connections. Few grey relational models can measure the dynamic periodic fluctuation rules of the objects, and most of these models do not have affinities, which results in instabilities of the relational results because of sequence translation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Fourier transform functions are used to fit the system behaviour curves, redefine the area difference between the curves and construct a grey relational model based on discrete Fourier transform (DFTGRA).

To verify its validity, feasibility and superiority, DFTGRA is applied to research on the correlation between macroeconomic growth and marine economic growth in China coastal areas. It is proved that DFTGRA has the superior properties of affinity, symmetry, uniqueness, etc., and wide applicability.

DFTGRA can not only be applied to equidistant and equal time sequences but also be adopted for non-equidistant and unequal time sequences. DFTGRA can measure both the global relational degree and the dynamic correlation of the variable cyclical fluctuation between sequences.

This paper aims to investigate the cooperative governance mechanisms for personal information security, which can help enrich digital governance research and provide a reference for the formulation of protection policies for personal information security.

This paper constructs an evolutionary game model consisting of regulators, digital enterprises and consumers, which is combined with the simulation method to examine the influence of different factors on personal information protection and governance.

The results reveal seven stable equilibrium strategies for personal information security within the cooperative governance game system. The non-compliant processing of personal information by digital enterprises can damage the rights and interests of consumers. However, the combination of regulatory measures implemented by supervisory authorities and the rights protection measures enacted by consumers can effectively promote the self-regulation of digital enterprises. The reputation mechanism exerts a restricting effect on the opportunistic behaviour of the participants.

The authors focus on the regulation of digital enterprises and do not consider the involvement of malicious actors such as hackers, and the authors will continue to focus on the game when assessing the governance of malicious actors in subsequent research.

This study's results enhance digital governance research and offer a reference for developing policies that protect personal information security.

This paper builds an analytical framework for cooperative governance for personal information security, which helps to understand the decision-making behaviour and motivation of different subjects and to better address issues in the governance for personal information security.

This study aims to explore the extent to which Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs) rely on supranational institution – the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – versus host country institutional quality to navigate their foreign location choice.

This study uses a conditional logit regression model using a sample of 1,302 greenfield investments by Chinese MNEs in 54 BRI participating countries during the period 2011–2018.

The results indicate that as a supranational institution, the BRI serves as a substitution mechanism to address the deficiencies in institutional quality in BRI participating countries, thereby attracting Chinese MNEs to invest in those countries. In addition, the BRI’s substitution effect on host country institutional quality is more pronounced for large MNEs, MNEs in the manufacturing industry and MNEs in inland regions.

This study expands the understanding of the BRI as a supranational institution for MNEs from emerging markets and reveals its substitution effect on the host country institutional quality. Furthermore, it highlights that MNEs with diverse characteristics gain varying degrees of benefits from the BRI.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a binocular visual odometry algorithm based on the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) in visual navigation systems.

The authors propose a novel binocular visual odometry algorithm based on features from accelerated segment test (FAST) extractor and an improved matching method based on the RANSAC. Firstly, features are detected by utilizing the FAST extractor. Secondly, the detected features are roughly matched by utilizing the distance ration of the nearest neighbor and the second nearest neighbor. Finally, wrong matched feature pairs are removed by using the RANSAC method to reduce the interference of error matchings.

The performance of this new algorithm has been examined by an actual experiment data. The results shown that not only the robustness of feature detection and matching can be enhanced but also the positioning error can be significantly reduced by utilizing this novel binocular visual odometry algorithm. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed matching method and the improved binocular visual odometry algorithm were also verified in this paper.

This paper presents an improved binocular visual odometry algorithm which has been tested by real data. This algorithm can be used for outdoor vehicle navigation.

A binocular visual odometer algorithm based on FAST extractor and RANSAC methods is proposed to improve the positioning accuracy and robustness. Experiment results have verified the effectiveness of the present visual odometer algorithm.

Natural disasters profoundly influence agricultural trade sustainability. This study investigates the effects of natural disasters on agricultural production imports in China within 2002 and 2018. This exploration estimates the mediating role of transportation infrastructure and agriculture value-added and the moderating role of government effectiveness and diplomatic relations.

This investigation uses Probit, Logit, Cloglog and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models.

The results confirm the mediating role of transportation infrastructure and agriculture value-added and the moderating role of government effectiveness and diplomatic relations in China. According to the findings, natural disasters in trading partners heighten the risk to the agricultural imports. This risk raises, if disasters damage overall agricultural yield or transportation infrastructure. Moreover, governments’ effective response or diplomatic ties with China mitigate the risk. Finally, the effect of disasters varies by the developmental status of the country involved, with events in developed nations posing a greater risk to China’s imports than those in developing nations.

China should devise an early warning system to protect its agricultural imports by using advanced technologies such as data analytics, remote sensing and artificial intelligence. In addition, it can leverage this system by improving its collaboration with trading partners, involvement in international forums and agreement for mutual support in crisis.

The aim of this study is to focus on consumers’ responses towards visual fashion ideal in hybrid magazine advertisements from a cross-cultural and generational perspective.

This exploratory qualitative focus group study showed a set of validated advertisements to 64 female participants. Half of the sample was from the USA, the other half was from China. To examine generational differences, the interviewees were split by age in each group: half of the participants were between 18 and 34, and half were between the age of 45 and 65 years.

Both Chinese and American target audiences viewed the trendy advertisements with an aspirational eye in which the advertisement was interpreted as representing an ideal self to which they aspired, one that they wanted to achieve but, for some reason(s), were not capable of achieving at the time. However, the degree of aspiration varied for Chinese and American audiences.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, future research may use survey and experimental research approaches.

International marketers may need to design advertisements with more “realistic” imagery, while keeping the idealized Western style in Chinese advertising. Advertisers should also be cognizant of intergenerational influences in the Chinese market; many young Chinese women still rely on their mothers regarding fashion purchase decisions.

This paper fills a need to understand both the similarities and the differences in marketing communications across cultures.