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The purpose of this paper is to observe consumers’ attitudes toward and intentions to purchase green products on social media and to explore the relationships among social media marketing, perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE), product knowledge, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, price consciousness and attitudes toward and intentions to purchase green products. In addition, this research attempts to further understand these relationships in different consumer groups.

A questionnaire survey method was used to collect data from consumers in China. The Amos 22.0 software package was used to conduct the data analysis.

The empirical results suggest that attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control positively affect purchase intentions, while price consciousness negatively affects purchase intentions. Product knowledge positively affects consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions, and PCE positively affects consumers’ attitudes. As expected, social media marketing positively affects subjective norms, product knowledge and PCE and negatively affects price consciousness. However, there is no significant relationship between PCE and purchase intentions. According to the results of multigroup structural equation modeling analysis, the effects differ significantly among different consumer groups.

This study enriches the research about the factors that influence consumers’ purchases of green products in emerging countries in the social media marketing context.

This paper aims to explore the mediating role of organizational entrepreneurial capability in the link between entrepreneurs’ effectuation and new venture performance, and whether entrepreneurs’ passion positively moderates this relationship in the Chinese emerging economy.

This study collected survey data from 140 Chinese new ventures. Following an empirical design, hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping analysis were applied to examine six hypotheses.

Results reveal that organizational entrepreneurial capability plays a positively mediating role in the association between entrepreneurs’ effectuation and new venture performance. Moreover, the whole mediation model is positively moderated by entrepreneurs’ passion, not only the association but also between entrepreneurs’ effectuation and organizational entrepreneurial capability.

The study is limited to the static relationships between key variables using the data obtained at one point in an emerging economy, which cannot investigate the dynamic evolution between variables. More longitudinal designs or cases to track the dynamic association should be considered.

The findings provide useful suggestions for entrepreneurs to enhance their effectual logic and entrepreneurs’ passion to better perceive and exploit opportunities and further improve new venture performance. The results also provide guidance for other groups, such as angel investors and policymakers, regarding how to use effectuation logic as an evaluation criterion to judge whether a new venture or program has investment potential.

These findings enrich the effectuation theory by providing the empirical evidence of the effect of entrepreneurs’ effectuation on new venture performance in an emerging economy. They also provide deeper insights into opportunity research by uncovering the mediating role of organizational entrepreneurial capability in the relationship between entrepreneurs’ effectuation and new venture performance.

Wage reform is an important aspect of Chinese economic reform. The success of wage reform is likely to depend upon the following understanding: Neither use of the efficiency‐oriented market wage system nor use of the equity‐oriented planned wage system can solve the dual problem of economic growth and income distribution. A synergy of the two systems will therefore be needed. Such a synergetic wage system, which simultaneously solves the dual problem of production and distribution, can expedite the rise of social productivity – the fundamental mission in the preliminary stage of Chinese socialism. In other words, wages should be differentiated, and the differences should be related to workers′ effort and society′s demand for them. These differences, however, need not be very large.

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to explore Chinese consumers’ motivations for purchasing luxury products, and to unravel the interrelationships among individual differences, motives, and luxury consumption.

Methodology – Data were collected from general consumers living in a large cosmopolitan city of China. A total of 473 questionnaires provided usable data and were analyzed using SPSS.

Findings – Eight motives were identified: self-actualization, product quality, social comparison, others’ influence, investment for future, gifting, special occasions, and emotional purchasing. Results showed that personal income, age, the motives of gifting, others’ influence, and product quality were significant predictors of luxury spending. Younger consumers, who did not typically make plans before buying, were more likely to buy luxury products out of emotion and less likely to do so for self-actualization or future investment.

Research limitations – The conceptualization and operationalization of some concepts used in this study (e.g., luxury brands, luxury consumption, and motives) may not be robust. Social desirability bias could comprise the validity of some research findings.

Originality – Despite a large body of research on luxury consumption, to date, most studies have been conducted in Western developed countries. Past research has showed that the symbolic and social values related to luxury consumption are deeply embedded in culture. As such, it is meaningful to investigate luxury consumption in China, whose culture is vastly different from the West.

There are many farmers in rural Ethiopia, who do not join cooperative societies, despite the different technical and financial supports from the government. This study thus aims to investigate the main factors that inspire rural people to join into the cooperatives.

The study collected relevant primary data from 400 sample households using a special household survey designed for this study. The study also reviewed different secondary materials. The collected data were analyzed using the two-sample t-test principle and cooperative participation probit model.

The finding of the binary choice model illustrates that information access, special skill, membership in rural association, frequency of attending a public meeting/workshop, household head education, credit access, training access, number of family members in school, distance to main market, availability of infrastructures, farmland ownership and farmland sizes are the major explanatory variables that have statistically significant (p-value <0.05) influence on the rural people joining in the cooperative societies in the study areas.

This study was based on a cross-sectional survey. As a result, the finding may be subjected to some limitations though the study made all possible efforts to minimize the limitations.

Many studies found that cooperatives are a basis for food security. Accordingly, the government can increase a number of cooperative societies in the region by giving more focus to knowledge- and awareness-based instruments like education, information center, rural associations, communication services and roads. These campaigns can attract more people to join the cooperatives and then get the different economic and social advantages from the cooperatives in order to ensure household food security.

Some studies found that state, leadership, success history of the cooperative and autonomous status are the most important factors that determine not only the expansion of cooperatives in terms of a number of and types but also for the success of the cooperatives. This study, however, found the importance of information- and knowledge-based mechanisms as a basis to attract more people so that increase in a number of and types of the cooperative societies. Thus, the result of the study is significant for policy makers, social science students, researchers and cooperative societies.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the ill‐conditioned problem for the non‐equigap GM(1,1) control model by using the method of multiple transformations.

Owing to noises and interferences from both inside and outside of the system, many control systems contain unequal intervals and sharp variation which may result in undesirable systems instability. In order to ensure the stability and efficiency of grey forecasting control model, the data transformation for a raw series is an important and useful method for enhancing accuracy and improving ill‐condition of the non‐equigap GM(1,1) model.

This paper discusses the quantitative relations between the multiple transformation and the parameters of the non‐equigap GM(1,1) model in detail, and studies the effect of the multiple transformation on the condition number of the non‐equigap GM(1,1) model.

Accessibility and availability of data are the main limitations based on which model will be applied.

Choosing an appropriate multiple of transformation cannot only eliminate dimension, lessen computation and maintain high accuracy, but also largely reduce the condition number of the model and improve the ill‐condition of non‐equigap GM(1,1) model effectively.

This paper seems to be the first to discuss the stability problems for the non‐equigap GM(1,1) model.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize a microemulsion and investigate its tribological properties as lubricant. Magnesium alloy warm rolling experiments were conducted. Surface morphology was observed and wear form was summarized. The composition of surface residues was analyzed, which sheds light on the lubrication mechanism of microemulsion.

A microemulsion was prepared with a proper amount of oil, surfactant, cosurfactant, water and other additives for magnesium alloy strip warm rolling. Tribological properties, such as maximum non-seizure load (P_B), friction coefficient (μ) and wear scar diameter (D) of the microemulsion were measured and compared with those of emulsion and rolling oil on an MR-10A four-ball tribotester. The extreme pressure anti-wear coefficients (O) were calculated and compared. Warm rolling experiments were carried out on a Ф 170/400 × 300 mm four-high rolling mill at 240°C to compare the finish rolling thickness and surface quality of rolled AZ31B magnesium alloy strip under four lubrication states, namely, no lubrication, rolling oil, microemulsion and emulsion. The surface morphology after warm rolling was observed with confocal laser scanning microscope and scanning electron microscope, respectively. The composition of surface residues was analyzed with energy dispersive spectrometry and X-Ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

Surface morphology indicated that pitting wear, adhesive wear and ploughing wear were three main forms of wear in magnesium alloy warm rolling. Microemulsion had excellent lubrication properties with less residual oil remaining. Two types of adsorption layers formed on magnesium alloy strip surface were responsible for lubrication properties. MgSO₄ and magnesium stearate in the reaction layer played a key role in anti-wear and friction-reduction in warm rolling.

The study is original and gives valuable information on lubrication mechanism of microemulsion in warm rolling of magnesium alloy strips.

The purpose of this paper is to further explore the co-citation and bibliographic-coupling relationship among the core authors in the field of Chinese information science (IS), to expose research activity and author impact, and to make induction analyses about Chinese IS research patterns and theme evolution.

The research data include 8,567 papers and 70,947 cited articles in the IS field indexed by Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index from 2000 to 2009. Author co-citation analysis, author bibliographic-coupling analysis, social network analysis, and factor analysis were combined to explore co-citation and bibliographic-coupling relationships and to identify research groups and subjects.

Scholars with greatest impact are different from the most active scholars of Chinese IS; there is no uniform impact pattern forming since authors’ impact subjects are scattered and not steady; while authors’ research activities present higher independence and concentration, there is still no steady research pattern due to no deep research existing. Furthermore, Chinese IS studies can be delineated by: foundation or extension. The research subjects of these two parts, as well as their corresponding/contributing authors, are different under different views. The general research status of core authors is concentrated, while their impact is broad.

The combined use of some related methods could enrich the development and methodology research of the discipline, and the results establish a reference point on the development of IS research.

The purpose of this paper is establishing a general mathematical model and theoretical design rules for 3D printing of biomaterials. Additive manufacturing of biomaterials provides many opportunities for fabrication of complex tissue structures, which are difficult to fabricate by traditional manufacturing methods. Related problems and research tasks are raised by the study on biomaterials’ 3D printing. Most researchers are interested in the materials studies; however, the corresponded additive manufacturing machine is facing some technical problems in printing user-prepared biomaterials. New biomaterials have uncertainty in physical properties, such as viscosity and surface tension coefficient. Therefore, the 3D printing process requires lots of trials to achieve proper printing parameters, such as printing layer thickness, maximum printing line distance and printing nozzle’s feeding speed; otherwise, the desired computer-aided design (CAD) file will not be printed successfully in 3D printing.

Most additive manufacturing machine for user-prepared bio-material use pneumatic valve dispensers or extruder as printing nozzle, because the air pressure activated valve can print many different materials, which have a wide range of viscosity. We studied the structure inside the pneumatic valve dispenser in our 3D heterogeneous printing machine, and established mathematical models for 3D printing CAD structure and fluid behaviors inside the dispenser during printing process.

Based on theoretical modeling, we found that the bio-material’s viscosity, surface tension coefficient and pneumatic valve dispenser’s dispensing step time will affect the final structure directly. We verified our mathematical model by printing of two kinds of self-prepared biomaterials, and the results supported our modeling and theoretical calculation.

For a certain kinds of biomaterials, the mathematical model and design rules will have unique solutions to the functions and equations. Therefore, each biomaterial’s physical data should be collected and input to the model for specified solutions. However, for each user-made 3D printing machine, the core programming code can be modified to adjust the parameters, which follows our mathematical model and the related CAD design rules.

This study will provide a universal mathematical method to set up design rules for new user-prepared biomaterials in 3D printing of a CAD structure.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, prioritize and categorize the critical success factors (CSFs) for configuration management (CM) and devise a CM activity model to help practitioners in the effective implementation and continuous improvement of the process.

A mixed method research with in‐depth interviews is used, followed by questionnaire survey.

In total, 21 CSFs organized in seven groups have been identified and prioritized on the basis of criticality in the implementation of the CM process. A significant difference is observed in the perception of CM professionals from the level of their experience and CM certification/training on the criticality of these factors.

This research only focuses on the aerospace and defence industry because of their common contextual understanding of CM. Further research could be done in commercial sectors to determine if the factors are common, or if there is a particular sector bias.

Extensive scope exists for industries to enhance product development methodologies by concentrating on factors responsible for the maturity of the CM process. The importance of CM is seen through its inclusion in multiple standards which require companies to implement a high level of robustness in the design and through life focus.

A detailed search of the peer reviewed journals and practitioner literature highlights no formal study on CSFs in the field of CM. This study will help CM practitioners to develop plans to achieve their goals and improve the CM process on the basis of these outlined concepts.