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Drawing on social identification theory, this research aims to explore an important mechanism – patients’ perceived empathy from a hospital, which is defined as caring, individualized attention provided by the hospital – that explains how service quality influences patients’ loyalty to the hospital.

This study adopts a structural equation modelling framework to estimate the mediation relationship between service quality and patient loyalty using two studies based on hospital employees and patients.

In Study 1, hospital staff survey data showed that service quality enhanced patients’ perceived empathy from the hospital. In Study 2, the authors confirmed and extended the findings of Study 1 by using patient survey data that suggested that patients’ empathy mediated the relationship between service quality and patients’ loyalty to the hospital.

The results of the two studies suggested that service quality increased patients’ empathy, which in turn improved patients’ loyalty to a hospital. The results extend the customer loyalty literature by exploring the critical antecedents and mechanisms of customer loyalty in the healthcare context. The studies interpret healthcare phenomena from the service aspect of fulfilling patients’ unique needs and providing a good hospital service experience. Moreover, the authors offer an insightful approach to explaining the service quality–patient loyalty linkage in the healthcare industry. Important theoretical and managerial contributions and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The concept of postponement has been developed over many years. Past empirical research has been conducted almost entirely in Western countries. This paper aims to investigate the current status of postponement applications in Greater China (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) to ascertain the effects of some determinants (i.e. environmental uncertainty, production techniques, and information system (IS) maturity) on postponement application.

A field survey of big manufacturers of electronic/information technology, clothing, and electric appliances is conducted. A total of 106 usable responses are received from 411 surveys yielding a satisfactory response rate of 25.8 percent.

The result indicates that the number of applications of postponement in Greater China is growing and the incidence of postponement applications is higher than in the Western countries. Environmental uncertainty, production techniques, and ISs maturity have have positive effects on applications of postponement techniques. Some specific postponement strategies for the three industries studied are noted.

From an exploratory perspective, the findings present in this paper may be useful in the sense that they give a broad and general picture of the current situation of the use of postponement in certain industries in Greater China.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between attractiveness of athlete endorsers, match‐up, and consumers' purchase intention embedded in the China context.

The authors used a 3×2×2 between‐subject experimental design. Specifically, in this 12‐scenario study depicting a purchase experience they manipulated endorser attractiveness levels (high/middle/low), endorser‐product match‐up (high/low), and product type (to prevent single product bias).

The results showed that no matter whether the attractiveness is high, middle, or low, the high endorser‐product match‐up could produce higher purchase intention than the low endorser‐product match‐up could. Moreover, the purchase intention generated by the high‐attractive endorser with low match‐up would be higher than that generated by low‐attractive endorser with high match‐up.

This research demonstrates that endorsers' attractiveness, even compared to match‐up factor, and could affect consumers' purchase intention more significantly in China sport market. Practically speaking, the result suggests the companies which are related to sports should try their best to choose a highly attractive athlete endorser with outstanding performance and good morality in order to increase consumers' purchase intention.

The existence and form of interaction effects between service quality and satisfaction are still uncertain. The main purpose of this study is to examine whether satisfaction moderates the relationship between service quality and behavioral intentions.

A structured questionnaire was distributed to the out‐patients of 12 regional hospitals (the middle level) in Taiwan.

The findings show that the forms of moderators played by satisfaction are not always the same under different dimensions of service quality (i.e. reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy). Satisfaction positively moderates the influence of reliability/empathy on behavioral intentions, but negatively moderates the relationships between responsiveness/assurance and behavioral intentions.

This study reveals the moderating role of satisfaction in the translation from service quality to behavioral intentions in health care services. Moreover, the natures of the moderating effects are not the same for different service quality dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to present the state-of-the-art E-commerce logistics in supply chain management by investigating worldwide implementations and corresponding models together with supporting techniques via furniture industry.

Typical E-commerce logistics companies from North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific are comprehensively investigated so as to get the lessons and insights from these practices.

Future technologies like Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, and Cloud Computing would be possibly adopted to enhance the E-commerce logistics in terms of system level, operational level, and decision-making level that may be real time and intelligent in the next decade.

This paper takes the furniture industry for example to illustrate the E-commerce logistics and supply chain management (LSCM). Other industries like electronic appliance industry are not considered.

Opportunities and future perspectives are summarized from practical implementations so that interested parties like E-commerce and logistics companies are able to get some guidance when they are contemplating the business.

E-commerce is booming with the development of new business models and will be continuously boosted in the near future. With large number of enterprises carrying out E-commerce, logistics has been largely influenced.

Insights and lessons from this paper are significant for academia and practitioners for considering E-commerce LSCM.

The mesoscale structure (MS) has a significant impact on the mechanical performance of parts made by additive manufacturing (AM). This paper aims to explore the design and fabrication of force-flow guided reinforcement mesoscale structure (FFRMS) compared with the homogeneous mesoscale structure (HMS), which is inconsistent with the stress field for a given load condition. Some cases were presented to demonstrate the mechanical properties of FFRMS in terms of MS combined with quasi-isotropy and anisotropy.

The paper consists of four main sections: the first developed the concept of FFRMS design based on HMS, the second explored volume fraction control for the proportion of force-flow lines in terms of mechanical property requirement, and the third presented a sequence stacking theory and practical manufacturing process framework and the final sections provided some application case studies.

The main contributions of this study were the definition and development of the FFRMS concept, the application framework and the original case studies. As an example, a typical lug designed with the proposed FFRMS method was fabricated by three different AM processes. The test results showed that both the strength and stiffness of the specimens are improved greatly by using the FFRMS design method.

The superposition of HMS as the basement and force-flow as an indication of the stiffener, leading to a heterogeneous structure, which exhibits more efficient and diversified means compared with the traditional way of increasing the HMS density merely.

The tender documents, an essential data source for internet-based logistics tendering platforms, incorporate massive fine-grained data, ranging from information on tenderee, shipping location and shipping items. Automated information extraction in this area is, however, under-researched, making the extraction process a time- and effort-consuming one. For Chinese logistics tender entities, in particular, existing named entity recognition (NER) solutions are mostly unsuitable as they involve domain-specific terminologies and possess different semantic features.

To tackle this problem, a novel lattice long short-term memory (LSTM) model, combining a variant contextual feature representation and a conditional random field (CRF) layer, is proposed in this paper for identifying valuable entities from logistic tender documents. Instead of traditional word embedding, the proposed model uses the pretrained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model as input to augment the contextual feature representation. Subsequently, with the Lattice-LSTM model, the information of characters and words is effectively utilized to avoid error segmentation.

The proposed model is then verified by the Chinese logistic tender named entity corpus. Moreover, the results suggest that the proposed model excels in the logistics tender corpus over other mainstream NER models. The proposed model underpins the automatic extraction of logistics tender information, enabling logistic companies to perceive the ever-changing market trends and make far-sighted logistic decisions.

(1) A practical model for logistic tender NER is proposed in the manuscript. By employing and fine-tuning BERT into the downstream task with a small amount of data, the experiment results show that the model has a better performance than other existing models. This is the first study, to the best of the authors' knowledge, to extract named entities from Chinese logistic tender documents. (2) A real logistic tender corpus for practical use is constructed and a program of the model for online-processing real logistic tender documents is developed in this work. The authors believe that the model will facilitate logistic companies in converting unstructured documents to structured data and further perceive the ever-changing market trends to make far-sighted logistic decisions.

To understand the thermal insulation of four common structures of sleeping bags and factors influencing the thermal insulation as well as the thermal comfort of people who use four kinds of sleeping bag structures.

Four samples corresponding to four common sleeping bag structures were made and their thermal properties were investigated through a combination of objective instrument measurement and subjective human subject tests.

The porosity of the samples and the length of the interlining had a main impact on the thermal resistances of the four sleeping bag structures. The thermal sensation ratings and the thermal resistances had good consistency. There was a strong correlation between human physiological parameters and thermal sensation evaluation. The male and female have significant differences in thermal sensation of different structures of sleeping bags.

Instrument measurement and human subject tests were combined to study the thermal properties of sleeping bag structures, which had little attention in the past in research fields.