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By observing facts of the “reversal of agglomeration” of Chinese enterprises during the period of rapid Internet development and using a new economic geography model combined with the data of the real estate sector, this paper deduces the influence of the “reshaping mechanisms” of the Internet on China's economic geography based on the “gravitation mechanism” of the Internet that affects the enterprises and the “amplification mechanism” of the Internet that amplifies the dispersion force of house prices.

In the empirical aspect, the dynamic spatial panel data model is used to test the micromechanisms of the impact of the Internet on enterprises' choice of location and the instrumental variable method is used to verify the macro effects of the Internet in reshaping economic geography.

It is found that in the era of the network economy, the Internet has become a source of regional competitive advantage and is extremely attractive to enterprises. The rapidly rising house price has greatly increased the congestion cost and has become the force behind the dispersion of enterprises. China's infrastructure miracle has closed the access gap which gives full play to network externalities and promotes the movement of enterprises from areas with high house prices to areas with low house prices.

The Internet is amplifying the dispersion force of congestion costs manifested as house prices and is reshaping China's economic geography. This paper further proposes policy suggestions such as taking the Internet economy as the new momentum of China's economic development and implementing the strategy of regional coordinated development.

This study aims to analyze the factors, evaluation techniques of the durability of existing railway engineering.

China has built a railway network of over 150,000 km. Ensuring the safety of the existing railway engineering is of great significance for maintaining normal railway operation order. However, railway engineering is a strip structure that crosses multiple complex environments. And railway engineering will withstand high-frequency impact loads from trains. The above factors have led to differences in the deterioration characteristics and maintenance strategies of railway engineering compared to conventional concrete structures. Therefore, it is very important to analyze the key factors that affect the durability of railway structures and propose technologies for durability evaluation.

The factors that affect the durability and reliability of railway engineering are mainly divided into three categories: material factors, environmental factors and load factors. Among them, material factors also include influencing factors, such as raw materials, mix proportions and so on. Environmental factors vary depending on the service environment of railway engineering, and the durability and deterioration of concrete have different failure mechanisms. Load factors include static load and train dynamic load. The on-site rapid detection methods for five common diseases in railway engineering are also proposed in this paper. These methods can quickly evaluate the durability of existing railway engineering concrete.

The research can provide some new evaluation techniques and methods for the durability of existing railway engineering.

Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological advancements observed nowadays, entrepreneurs as human beings will always strive to be social. During the COVID-19 pandemic many companies moved activities into the virtual world and as a result offline Social relationships became rarer, but as it turns out, even more valuable, likewise, the inter-organizational cooperation enabling many companies to survive.

This chapter aims to develop knowledge about entrepreneurs’ SR and their links with inter-organizational cooperation. The results of an integrative systematic literature review show that the concept of Social relationships, although often investigated, lacks a clear definition, conceptualization, and operationalization. This chapter revealed a great diversity of definitions for Social relationships, including different scopes of meaning and levels of analysis. The authors identify 10 building blocks and nine sources of entrepreneurs’ Social relationships. The authors offer an original typology of Social relationships using 12 criteria. Interestingly, with regard to building blocks, besides those frequently considered such as trust, reciprocity and commitment, the authors also point to others more rarely and narrowly discussed, such as gratitude, satisfaction and affection. Similarly, the authors discuss the varied scope of sources, including workplace, family/friendship, past relationships, and ethnic or religious bonds. The findings of this study point to a variety of links between Social relationships and inter-organizational cooperation, including their positive and negative influences on one another. These links appear to be extremely dynamic, bi-directional and highly complex.

The purpose of the study is to quickly identify significant heterogeneity of surrounding rock of tunnel face that generally occurs during the construction of large-section rock tunnels of high-speed railways.

Relying on the support vector machine (SVM)-based classification model, the nominal classification of blastholes and nominal zoning and classification terms were used to demonstrate the heterogeneity identification method for the surrounding rock of tunnel face, and the identification calculation was carried out for the five test tunnels. Then, the suggestions for local optimization of the support structures of large-section rock tunnels were put forward.

The results show that compared with the two classification models based on neural networks, the SVM-based classification model has a higher classification accuracy when the sample size is small, and the average accuracy can reach 87.9%. After the samples are replaced, the SVM-based classification model can still reach the same accuracy, whose generalization ability is stronger.

By applying the identification method described in this paper, the significant heterogeneity characteristics of the surrounding rock in the process of two times of blasting were identified, and the identification results are basically consistent with the actual situation of the tunnel face at the end of blasting, and can provide a basis for local optimization of support parameters.

In this paper the authors aim to argue that the existence of a strong corporate governance mechanism (a formal credibility-enhancing mechanism) and the presence of a more trustworthy-looking CEO (an informal credibility-enhancing mechanism) are substitutes.

By using machine-learning-based facial-feature-point detection technique, the authors construct a proprietary facial-trustworthiness database for a large-scale of CEOs in the US listed companies. First, the authors manually search for qualifying CEO image from websites and annual reports. Second, by following the neuroscience and psychology literature, the authors use the machine-learning-based face detector to identify the facial features in the CEO photos to calculate a rich and reliable set of facial-trustworthiness measures. The authors then construct a composite facial-trustworthiness index for each CEO. After obtaining accounting data, the authors’ final sample comprises 16,201 firm-year observations for 3,186 CEOs in the sample period of 2000-2018.

The results of the authors’ regression analyses show a negative association between board monitoring intensity and CEOs' facial trustworthiness, indicating that board directors may factor CEOs' facial trustworthiness into their monitoring decisions. Moreover, the authors find that these results are mainly driven by CEOs whose tenure is below the third quartile (i.e. eight years). The authors further find stronger results for externally hired CEOs than internally promoted CEOs. Finally, the authors’ results remain robust when using change models or subsample of CEO photos in recent years.

First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that adopts a large sample to provide systematic evidence on the directors' use of facial trustworthiness. This study extends the literature by documenting the impacts of CEOs' individual characteristics on the board monitoring intensity. Second, the results of this study emphasized the important role of perceptions based on executives' facial appearance in firm valuation, executive compensation and audit fee, and by presenting empirical evidence that CEOs' facial trustworthiness affects board monitoring intensity. Third, this study responds to the call for research on personalized trust by Hsieh et al. (2020).

This paper analyzes previously unmeasured effects of a response to a service incident called “benevolent” within the customer –firm relationship.

A questionnaire was administered to telecommunication customers in a Western European country, and the model was estimated using partial least squares (PLS).

This study shows that the customer–firm relationship is surprisingly affected by the response to expected incidents that the customer interprets as acts of benevolence or opportunism. This research also shows that the firm's incident response interpreted as benevolence or opportunism has an effect that merely positive or negative events do not. Acts of benevolence response towards an incident positively affect customer–firm relationship quality, and expectations of such acts may lead to an upward spiral in customer commitment.

While benevolence trust has been proposed and studied before, the response to incidents interpreted as benevolent or opportunistic and their consequences have been under-studied, hence exhibiting a research gap.

在公司與顧客之間的關係的範疇內, 公司對服務事故所作的被稱為仁慈的反應的影響不曾被測量; 本研究擬就該反應的影響進行分析和探討。

研究以問卷方式進行¸ 對象為一個西歐國家裏的電訊服務客戶。研究人員使用偏最小平方法作估算, 設計有關的模型。

研究結果顯示、若顧客對公司就預期的事故所作的反應看作是仁慈的話, 又或相反地視為是投機主義所驅使的, 則公司與顧客之間的關係會出人意表地受到影響。研究結果亦顯示、顧客的仁慈、抑或是投機主義的闡釋和理解所帶來的影響, 與單純積極正面事件或消極負面事件所帶來的影響是不一樣的。公司對事件仁厚的回應會給予顧客之間的關係的質量帶來正面的影響; 而且, 對這種回應的預期、或會給客戶承諾帶來螺旋上升。

對仁厚之信賴曾被提出並作探討。唯對被視為仁慈的或機會主義作祟的反應所作的研究則不足, 這方面實存研究缺口。

Pursuing sustainable development has become a necessity for all types of businesses, owing to the increasing sensitivity of stakeholders towards pollution and environmental degradation related to economic activities. To sustain this approach, investments supporting green innovations (GIs) are required. The paper investigates how stakeholders affect the choices of companies to pursue sustainable development objectives through the use of GIs.

A sample of 222 innovative Italian SMEs was collected and analysed using the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique and the importance performance map analysis.

The authors found that the stakeholders with not-contractual ties with SMEs affect GIs. Among stakeholders with not-contractual ties only workforce represents a strong stimulus to eco-innovate. Anyway, contrary to expectations, public administrations exert a negative influence; that is, they appear to hinder SMEs approach towards GIs.

This paper contributes to filling the knowledge gaps about the factors stimulating innovative SMEs' investments in GIs. Specifically, by analysing the stakeholders' influences, many policy indications emerge, such as extending facilities and regulations, encouraging partnerships and networking and attracting private and institutional investors.

Until now, the prominent interest of researchers and policymakers has been focused almost exclusively on large manufacturing corporations because of their higher ecological footprints and the belief that SMEs are supposed to be mainly followers rather than first adopters of innovations. But in many international areas, the role of SMEs is widely predominant, and these SMEs chiefly operate in the service sectors.

This paper aims to develop an original framework of innovation and to explore the complexity of association between individual and collective (team-based) entrepreneurship, and their simultaneous impacts on innovation in context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

An integral theoretical framework is developed to encourage innovation and the hypothetical relations are tested with the help of structural equation modeling (SEM) through AMOS. Data were gathered through survey technique and the questioners were distributed through email among 700 entrepreneurs from SMEs operating in five major industrial cities of Punjab province Pakistan.

The results of SEM analyses confirm that both the individual entrepreneur and the collective efforts of all the business members contribute to innovation in SMEs. Entrepreneur’s personality traits have a direct positive impact on innovation while the centralized decision-making by entrepreneur is not associated with innovation. Centralized decision-making is found to be negatively associated with communication and have insignificant positive association with collaboration. Factors associated with the team-based entrepreneurship like communication and collaboration among members of the SME’s contribute to the entrepreneurial orientation and collective entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial orientation and collective entrepreneurship have direct positive impact on innovation in SMEs.

It is imperative for SMEs to encourage decentralized organizational culture and participative leadership to bring innovation into their products and processes and further to improve their competitive advantage.

To the best of author knowledge, present study is a first attempt that explores the complex association between individual and team-based entrepreneurship and further, empirically investigate the simultaneous impacts of these variables on innovation in context of SMEs.

Evaluating the economic effects of climate change is a pivotal step for planning adaptation in developing countries. For Bangladesh, global warming has put it among the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, with increasing temperatures and sea-level rise. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine how climate change impacts the economy in Bangladesh in the case of climate scenarios.

Using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and three climate change scenarios, this paper assesses the economy-wide implications of climate change on Bangladesh’s economy and agriculture. It is clear from the examination of the CGE model that the impacts of climate change on agricultural sectors were felt more sharply, reducing output by −3.25% and −3.70%, respectively, and increasing imports by 1.22% and 1.53% in 2030 and 2050, compared to the baseline.

The findings reveal that, relative to baseline, agricultural output will decline by a range of −3.1% to −3.6% under the high climate scenario (higher temperatures and lower yields). A decrease in agricultural output results in declines in agricultural labor and household income. Household income falls in all categories, although it drops the most in urban less educated households with a range of −3.1% to −3.4%. On the other hand, consumption of commodities will fall by −0.11% to −0.13%, according to the findings. Although climate change impacts had a relatively small effect on gross domestic product, reducing it by −0.059% and −0.098% in 2030 and 2050, respectively.

As agricultural output, household consumption and income decline, it will impact the majority of the population’s health in Bangladesh by increasing malnutrition, hidden hunger, poverty, changing food environment, changing physical and mental health status and a changing health-care environment. Therefore, population health and food security will be a top socioeconomic and political concern for Bangladesh Government.

The examination of the dynamic CGE model is its originality. In conclusion, the evidence generated here can provide important information to policymakers and guide government policies that contribute to national development and the achievement of food security targets. It is also necessary to put more emphasis on climate change issues and address potential risks in the following years.

Aiming at the lack of explanatory power of traditional industrial organization theory in cross-border competition, by introducing the idea of ecological niche, the authors aim to explore the competitive situation of platform-based enterprises when they operate in multiple fields.

With the help of ecological niche theory, construct the niche width and niche overlap index of typical enterprises in the platform economy, and find out the advantages and the intensity of competition through comparative analysis.

In an environment of cross-border competition, large enterprises have significant competitive advantages, and the fierce competition is concentrated among medium-sized enterprises.

The conclusions of this paper not only provide new insights for explaining the phenomenon of cross-border competition in the platform economy, but also provide theoretical reference for the anti-trust enforcement practice in the platform economy.