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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between tax avoidance and earnings persistence in the light of a developing economy, with the main focus on China.

In the analysis, the author conducts a survey on the tax avoidance situation of Chinese listed companies from 2012 to 2020. Then, a multivariate regression analysis is performed in order to analyse the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and earnings persistence.

The findings of the present study show that tax avoidance has a significant positive effect on earnings persistence. However, when the degree of tax avoidance is high, the “risk effect” of tax avoidance exceeds the “value effect”, and tax avoidance will reduce the persistence of earnings. This conclusion is even more prominent when the company is non-state-owned. Further research shows the increase of institutional investors’ shareholding ratio can improve “value effect” of tax avoidance, lessen “risk effect” of tax avoidance, and positively affect the relationship between tax avoidance and earnings persistence.

This study provides evidence for investors to understand the dual effect of tax avoidance on earnings persistence. The results may have implications for regulatory bodies. They can provide a better understanding of the corporate governance role of institutional investors in curbing opportunistic tax avoidance.

This study enriches the research on tax avoidance effects by analysing the impact of tax avoidance on earnings persistence. This study also compensates for the shortcomings of analysing earnings persistence mainly from the perspective of tax differences in the past, and promotes the study of the corporate governance effects of institutional investors under different levels of tax avoidance.

This paper aims to explore the impact of flexible human resource management system (FHRMS) on employee innovation performance in Chinese context. The boundary conditions of employability and organizational identity are also discussed.

This study is based on 322 questionnaire survey from employees in China. The questionnaires were collected at two time points. This study used the method of multi-level linear model analysis for empirical test.

This study has three conclusions. First, FHRMS have a significant positive impact on employee innovation performance, with employability playing a mediating role. Second, organizational identity plays a moderating role between employability and employee innovation performance. Third, organizational identity moderates the mediating effect of a human source management systems on employee innovation performance through employability.

The results are helpful to open the “black box” of the influence of FHRMS on employees’ individual innovation performance. This study provides a reference for enterprises to establish flexible human source management system to improve employee innovation performance.

The purpose of this paper is to study the corrosion behavior of Q235 steel in saturated acidic red and yellow soils.

The corrosion behavior of Q235 steel in saturated red and yellow soils was compared by weight-loss, SEM/EDS, 3D ultra-depth microscopy and electrochemical measurements.

R_p of the steel gradually increases and i_corr gradually decreases in both the red and yellow soils with time. The R_p of the steel in the red soil is lower, but its i_corr is higher than that in the yellow soil. The uniform corrosion rate, diameter and density of the corrosion pit on the steel surface in the red soil are greater than those in the yellow soil. Lower pH, higher contents of corrosive anions and high-valence Fe oxides in the red soil are responsible for its higher corrosion rates and local corrosion susceptibility.

This paper investigates the difference in corrosion behavior of carbon steel in saturated acidic red and yellow soils, which can help to understand the mechanism of soil corrosion.

The rapidly growing e-commerce industry with its special characteristics brings new challenges to the optimization of the supply chain and inventory management. This study aims to investigate the inventory-related optimization of an e-marketplace official store that works on a business-to-customer system when cashback promotion is used to attract more customers. Also, it proposes a new inventory model to maximize the e-commerce profit by optimizing the cashback amount and delivery period.

The proposed model assumes that customer demand is a function of price and delivery time and that price is affected by the cashback amount. The e-commerce operator has a profit-sharing contract with an e-payment company that facilitates the payment. E-commerce also builds collaboration under a cost-sharing contract with a supplier to ensure product delivery. A mathematical model is developed and the related theories are investigated. A numerical example illustrates the validity of the model and a sensitivity analysis is carried out to give useful insights.

A new inventory model for an e-market system has been introduced which shows the impact of a cashback promotion on the e-commerce business. This study shows that managers can optimize the cashback amount and its delivery time to get the maximum profit. In certain cases, the manager may set a high cashback amount (e.g. 100%) to attract customers to place more orders.

This study presents a new inventory model for today’s fast-growing e-commerce business; therefore, the results contribute to the understanding of promotion program practices and inventory management and provide insights to develop efficient e-commerce managerial decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.

This study examines how informal business networks achieve marketing goals in socially uncertain contexts. Drawing from multiple historical sources, Shangbangs, a type of business network that thrived in pre-1949 China, are analyzed.

The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) undergirds a study of Shangbangs’ historicity (i.e. their socio-historically embedded multiplicity, including organizational forms, activities and connotations.

As informal regional, professional, project-based, special-product-based or mixed marketing networks, Shangbangs relied on “flexible specialization” and coupled multiple business needs to market goods and services, business organizations, specific social values and, when necessary, to debrand business rivals.

This analysis extends theories about marketing networks by probing their subtypes, diverse marketing activities, multipronged channels and relationship building with social entities (including underground societies, business associations and guilds) in response to pre-1949 China’s market uncertainties. Substantiating an alternative approach to “flexible specialization” and marketing innovations within the pre-1949 Chinese economy shows how a parallel theoretical framework can complement western-based marketing theories.

This first comprehensive analysis of Shangbangs, an innovative historical Chinese marketing network outside the conventional market-corporate dichotomy, can inform theory building for marketing strategy-making and management conditioned by social contexts.

To promote the success of peer-to-peer accommodation, this study examines the effects of online host–guest interaction as well as the interaction's boundary conditions of listing price and reputation on listing popularity.

Using 330,686 data collected from Airbnb in the United States of America, the authors provide empirical evidence to answer whether social-oriented self-presentation and response rate influence listing popularity from the perspective of social exchange theory (SET). In addition, the authors investigate how these two kinds of online host–guest interactions work with listing price and reputation to influence listing popularity.

The results reveal the positive association between online host–guest interaction and listing popularity. Notably, the authors find that listing price strengthens but listing reputation weakens the positive effects of online host–guest interactions on listing popularity in peer-to-peer accommodation.

This study is the first attempt to adopt SET to explain the importance of online host–guest interactions in influencing listing popularity as well as examine the moderating role of listing price and reputation on the above relationship.

The aim of this study is to examine the influence of consumer preferences for overseas green products and the implementation of blockchain technology on the performance of a supply chain, which comprises an overseas manufacturer and a domestic e-commerce platform. This research endeavors to identify the optimal pricing decisions and strategies for both the manufacturer and the platform in the context of the expanding e-commerce and globalization of the economy.

The authors propose and analyze four distinct models based on the selection of selling contracts by the manufacturer and the adoption strategy of blockchain by the platform, using game theory to obtain the optimal solutions for these models.

The authors show that consumer migration promotes the manufacturer's green inputs, while the expansion of green consumer proportion is not conducive to it. They also show that blockchain technology has the potential to effectively limit manufacturer cannibalization. Interestingly, the study reveals a cascading effect of advantage where the manufacturer's profit variation trend changes only with the integration of pricing power advantage and blockchain technology inputs. This effect suggests that the equilibrium strategy is achievable under the agency contract with blockchain adoption, while Pareto improvement can be obtained with blockchain technology under both selling contracts.

This research could be extended in several possible directions. First, future work could explore outsourcing strategies for overseas manufacturers. Second, more types of consumer heterogeneity and different risk preferences could be considered. Third, this study can be extended by further exploring the design of mechanisms under asymmetric demand information to make the model more realistic.

The authors examine the impact of market segmentation and consumer preferences on green supply chain decisions, and analyze supply chain members' strategic choices for selling contracts and blockchain adoptions. The research also sheds light on the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of green supply chain development and blockchain applications.

Cute products have found market success. The literature has identified various factors of cuteness, but the effect of size is under-addressed. This study aims to investigate whether and how size perception influences consumers’ cuteness perception.

In three experiments, size was manipulated in terms of visual cue, product description and product name to determine its impact on cuteness perception.

The results of the three experiments demonstrate that a size cue of smallness can heighten consumers’ perception of product cuteness. The first two studies provided converging evidence for the main hypothesis that smaller objects are evaluated as cuter. Study 3 not only replicated the findings of the first two studies but also revealed that vulnerability acts as the underlying process for the smallness-cuteness relationship. Study 3 also showed that the purchase likelihood for an extended product warranty is higher in the small condition compared to the control condition.

While the findings were robust across product types and size manipulations, possible boundary conditions related to product types or individual characteristics were not tested.

The findings suggest how brand managers can use size perceptions to influence consumers’ perceptions of the cuteness of their products and brands.

The findings inform brand managers about the nuances of size cues that may affect how customers perceive their products and identify a more generally applicable cuteness factor that may have downstream implications for marketing practitioners.

There is widespread debate about the nationalistic top-down approach of citizenship education. By using the notion of cultural citizenship as a useful theoretical lens, citizenship education research tends to focus on the process of subjectivity construction among students’ citizenship learning process. The Communist Party of China plays a dominant role in cultivating citizens in the form of ideological and political education (IaPE) in Chinese universities. The research problem thus focuses on the dynamics and complexity of how Chinese university students construct their subjectivities regarding citizenship learning through IaPE. The main purpose of the study is to provide some research directions for understanding students’ citizenship learning today.

With the case study of one university in China and interview data from 25 students, this paper examines the ways in which students understand and respond to dominant discourses.

The findings revealed there is a deficit of citizenship learning in IaPE, and students felt ideologically pressurized. This study suggests students’ complex subjectivities of active participants but confused minds as a phenomenon in Chinese higher education, in which they must involve in IaPE for personal academic and career development, while they adopted covert strategies for self-conscious citizenship learning expectations. These strategies took the form ranging from obediently completing basic curriculum requirements and distancing away by studying abroad, to actively searching for learning opportunities from other courses and media society.

This paper contributes to citizenship education research by recognizing the complexities of how subjectivities are formed in formal university settings.