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The purpose of this paper is to attempt to investigate farmer’s positional concerns in rural China, and how the positional concerns correlate with household expenditures on visible goods.

The authors conduct a survey-based experiment to measure farmers’ positional concerns, and employ econometric models to examine the determinants of the degree of positional concern and how the positional concern affects household expenditures on visible goods.

The authors find that Chinese farmers have strong positional concerns for income, and high-income households are more concerned with relative position. Furthermore, there is a significant difference between males and females with respect to correlation between degree of positionality and household expenditures on visible goods. For females, there is a positive correlation between degree of positionality and household expenditures on clothes, restaurants, and mobile phones, respectively. For males, there is a positive correlation between degree of positionality and household expenditures on mobile phones.

The government policy thus should pay attention to the positional goods, and the relevant consumption tax by increasing the prices of visible goods could be considered or suggested in the future even in the rural areas.

This paper provides complementary evidence on Chinese farmers’ positional concerns, and how the degree of positional concern relates to household expenditures on visible goods.

This paper examines the impact of residents’ human capital investment inequality on the urban–rural income gap, using China’s provincial panel data from 1997 to 2013. The results show that, at the national level as well as at the regional level, residents’ overall human capital investment inequality has a positive significant impact on the urban–rural income gap. In addition, the impact of overall human capital investment inequality increased monotonically from the eastern region inward to the western region. In terms of the relative impact of each component of human capital investment inequality on the urban–rural income gap, migration investment inequality appears to have the greatest impact at the national level, whereas health investment inequality has the greatest impact on the urban–rural income gap in the eastern region, and education investment inequality exhibits the greatest impact in the central and western regions. We also investigate the impact of human capital investment inequality on the urban–rural income gap over different periods. The results show that residents’ overall human capital investment inequality had a positive impact on the urban–rural income gap in the period 1997–2008, but the impact rapidly shrunk in 2009–2013. Furthermore, the impact of residents’ health investment inequality on the urban–rural income gap shows a downward trend, and the impact of residents’ education investment inequality trended slightly upward from 1997 to 2008, and then rapidly shrunk in 2009–2013. Finally, the impact of residents’ migration investment inequality was only significant in 1997–2002.

Business model innovation is a new way for Chinese firms to compete in the global economy. Due to the unique context in China, the authors aim to clarify what is a business model, how to design a business model, and how different designs affect firms' competitive advantages in China.

Literature review and multiple case studies (i.e. Dinghan Technology, Flush Network, Aier Eye, and Huayi Brothers) are used.

After defining business model, the authors integrate the activity system approach and the configurational approach to construct a unique framework for business model design, and four different models for Chinese firms emerge, namely, focused cost innovation, integrated cost innovation, focused value innovation, and integrated value innovation. Then the authors explore the main mechanisms through which different designs could help firms achieve competitive advantages.

Business model matters for Chinese firms. The authors' results provide a roadmap for Chinese entrepreneurs to design effective and efficient business models. Future success of Chinese new firms depends on the continuous improvement of their business model.

The authors' results contribute to a better understanding of business model, particularly in the context of China. The authors also contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by providing insights of how to configure entrepreneurial activity system to gain competitive advantages.

The purpose of this paper is to reduce the drag loss and study the effects of operating conditions and groove parameters such as flow rate and temperature of automatic transmission fluid, clearance between plates, groove depth and groove ratio on the drag torque of a wet clutch for vehicles, parametric analysis of the drag torque model of wet multi-plate friction clutch with groove consideration.

Both experimental and numerical research was carried out in this work. Parametric groove models, full film lubrication flow model and pressure distribution model are established to investigate the effects of the grooves on drag torque of a wet clutch. Multigrid method is used to simplify the solution.

In this paper, a drag torque model of a wet multi-plate friction clutch based on the basic theory of viscous fluid dynamics is examined through experimental and numerical methods that take grooves into account, and the change trend of drag torque with operating conditions and groove parameters is analyzed.

Multigrid method is used to solve the governing equations, which simplifies the solution process because of the restrictions and interpolation operations between the adjacent layers of coarser and fine grids. These works provide insight into the effect regularity of operating conditions and groove parameters on drag torque of a wet multi-plate friction clutch. Furthermore, variable test conditions and sufficient experimental data are the main functions in the experimental research.

Nurses' work engagement is critical for the service quality of the hospital. Thus, investigation on the influencing factors of nurses' work engagement has become an important issue. This study addresses this issue by exploring the effect of daily family-to-work conflict (FWC) on next-day work engagement among Chinese nurses.

The theoretical model was tested using 555 experience sampling data from 61 nurses collected for 10 workdays in China.

Nurses' daily FWC is associated with their next-day ego depletion. Moreover, increased ego depletion ultimately reduces their next-day work engagement. In addition, a between-individual factor of frequency of perceived patient gratitude mitigates the effect of FWC on ego depletion and the indirect effect on work engagement via ego depletion.

This study is important to the management of health-care organizations as it carries significant implications for theory and practice toward understanding the influence of FWC among nurses. On the one hand, the authors apply the job demands-resources (JD-R) model as the overarching theoretical framework, which contributes to the authors’ understanding of how FWC impairs work engagement. On the other hand, the authors extend extant theoretical models of FWC by identifying the frequency of perceived patient gratitude as an important contextual factor that counteracts the negative effects of FWC among nurses. Moreover, organizations could encourage patients to express their gratitude to nurses by providing more channels, such as thank-you notes, to offer nurses some support for overcoming the destructive effect of FWC.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how the micro-structure and -properties of wool fibers influence the pilling property of woolen fabrics.

The fuzzing and pilling property of woolen fabrics was investigated, based on micro-scale including basic structural characteristics of wool fibers, wool scale topography and surface friction, etc. Scanning electron microscope was used to analyze wool fiber structure; frictional coefficients were measured by capstan method. Then three different kinds of wool fibers are spun into yarns, then knitted into woolen fabrics, whose pilling grade were estimated by means of Pillbox method.

Results show that the finer the fiber, the fabric pilling degree will be higher; the shorter the fiber, the fabric’s pilling is more serious; the number of pilling is decreasing with the increasing number of crimp; the longer the scales, the better anti-pilling property of fabrics, while the larger the scale thickness, the worse the anti-pilling property; and initially, with the increasing DFEs, fabrics are not easy to pilling, however, there exists a critical value.

Fuzzing and pilling property of woolen fabrics are affected by number of factors, including raw fibers, yarns, fabric tissue and finishing process, etc. In this paper, the authors exclude the influence of yarns’ parameter and fabrics’ tissue, etc., but focus on the micro-structure and -properties of raw wool fibers; and establish a direct connection between fabrics’ pilling property and fibers’ parameters.

Discovering the research topics and trends from a large quantity of library electronic references is essential for scientific research. Current research of this kind mainly depends on human justification. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to identify research topics and evolution in trends from library electronic references efficiently and effectively by employing automatic text analysis algorithms.

The authors used the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a probabilistic generative topic model to extract the latent topic from the large quantity of research abstracts. Then, the authors conducted a regression analysis on the document-topic distributions generated by LDA to identify hot and cold topics.

First, this paper discovers 32 significant research topics from the abstracts of 3,737 articles published in the six top accounting journals during the period of 1992-2014. Second, based on the document-topic distributions generated by LDA, the authors identified seven hot topics and six cold topics from the 32 topics.

The topics discovered by LDA are highly consistent with the topics identified by human experts, indicating the validity and effectiveness of the methodology. Therefore, this paper provides novel knowledge to the accounting literature and demonstrates a methodology and process for topic discovery with lower cost and higher efficiency than the current methods.

A finite element method (FEM) model of the frictional behavior of two rough surfaces with a group of third-body particles confined by the surface asperities is established. By monitoring the stress distribution, friction force and the displacement of the surfaces, how the frictional instability is induced by these particles is studied. This modeling job aims to explore the relation between the meso-scale behavior and the macro-scale frictional behavior of these particles.

By using FEM, a 2D model of two frictional rough surfaces with a group of elastic or elasto-plastic particles confined by surface asperities is established. The Mises stress, macro friction force and displacements of elements are monitored during compressing and shearing steps.

The macro friction coefficient is more stable under higher pressure and smaller under higher shearing speed. The dilatancy of the interface is caused by the elevation effect of the particles sheared on the peak of the lower surface, particles collision and third body supporting. The combined effect of particles motion and surface–surface contact will induce high-frequency displacements of surface units in restricted direction.

Previous studies about third-body tribology are mainly concentrated on the frictional behavior with large number of particles distributed homogeneously across the interface, but this paper focuses on the behavior of third-body particles confined by surface asperities.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-12-2019-0544/

The purpose of this paper is to review the current research on theoretical foundations and applications for CPS from 2017 to 2019 including the applications in library.

This paper is designed in six parts as Introduction, Literature review, Theoretical foundations of CPS, Applications of CPS, CPS’s application in library and Conclusion. The authors review 70 papers and classify them as the above six parts. The authors collected 70 papers from 2017 to 2019 in the academic databases.

This paper reviews 70 papers regarding theoretical foundations and applications for CPS from 2017 to 2019 in the academic databases aiming to provide scholars and practitioners with a comprehensive overview. The contents of the papers in each research category are summarized from theoretical foundations and applications including the CPS applications in library.

A main contribution of this review paper is that it summarizes the current state-of-the-art theoretical foundations and applications for CPS and in libraries systematically.