Search results

This paper aims to find a way to improve the surface insulation, corrosion resistance and mechanical properties of Fe-Cr-Al electrothermal alloy, exploring the best oxidation condition and analyzing the oxidation mechanism.

Electrochemical workstation was used for anodic oxidation, and the effect of current density, ethylene glycol concentration and oxidation time on properties of the film were investigated by resistivity test, scanning electron microscope, electrochemical tests (potentiodynamic polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy) and mechanical tests, and the oxidation process was analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS).

According to the potential-time curves of anodic oxidation and the analysis of XPS, the whole oxidation process can be divided into four stages. When the current density is 0.8 A/dm², the ethylene glycol concentration is 10%, and the oxidation time is 60 min, the film has the best corrosion protection, mechanical properties and surface morphology. The resistivity of the samples is about 13 orders magnitude than that of the matrix.

In this paper, a protective electrically insulating film was prepared by anodic oxidation in an alkaline electrolyte solution. The oxidation conditions were optimized and the oxidation mechanism was analyzed.

Charitable giving in China has moved from being subjected to government attention and public skepticism to receiving government encouragement and public support. The role played by political connections in philanthropy is indisputable, although very few studies have explored their association from the perspective of the country’s first Charity Law of 2016. This study aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the 2016 Charity Law and offers an understanding of the future trends in corporate charitable giving.

Using empirical analysis of data collected from listed companies in China, this study analyzes the impact of political connections on corporate charitable giving before and after the 2016 Charity Law. The study adopts three leading theories from previous research into corporate charitable giving and political connections: corporate social responsibility, resource dependence theory and stakeholder theory. A conceptual framework is outlined, and hypotheses are formulated accordingly.

The results show that political connections have a substantial positive impact on corporate charitable giving, both before and after the implementation of the 2016 Charity Law, which has significantly promoted and increased the amount and proportion of charitable giving. Although the 2016 Charity Law attempted to weaken the political connections of enterprises, the influence of political connections on corporate charitable giving has proved difficult to diminish or eliminate, as charity is dominated by the state.

This study explores the association between political connections and corporate charitable giving from the perspective of China’s Charity Law of 2016.

This paper aims to provide a simple and flexible calibration method of parallel manipulators for improving the position accuracy only using partial pose information.

The overall idea of this method is to use BP neural network to fit the relationship between calibration parameters and measurement parameters and then adjust calibration parameters according to measurements.

The calibration method significantly improves the position accuracy of the six-axis parallel manipulator. Simulation shows that the accuracy can be improved by increasing the number of positions consisted of samples to train BP neural network, and when the position number is increased, the descent velocity of fitting error is decreased.

The method is general for various parallel mechanisms and simple for measurement process. It can be applied to the calibration of various mechanisms without analyzing the mathematical relationship between measurements and calibration parameters. The measurement parameters can be flexibly selected to simplify measurement process, which saves calibration cost and time.

This paper aims to investigate whether family CEOs benefit investment efficiency under uncertainty with Chinese family firms and to test the moderating effect of ownership structure, including family ownership, the separation of family control from family ownership and the multiple large shareholder structure.

Fixed-effects models are designed for a sample of 5,734 firm-year observations for Chinese family firms from 2009 to 2014.

The results show that investment efficiency is low under uncertainty, and having family CEOs can reduce this negative relationship. Further analysis reveals that for firms with family CEOs, the negative effect of uncertainty on investment efficiency is weaker when the family has higher ownership, when family control is less separated from family ownership, or when family firms have multiple large shareholder structures.

The authors do not distinguish founder-CEOs and descendant-CEOs. Most of Chinese family firms are still managed by founders, so the authors cannot explore the generation effect although different generations manage firms differently. Because family succession is becoming a more and more important problem in China, further research may be able to explore the generation effect.

This paper suggests that in emerging economies with weak investor protection, outside minority shareholders can avoid expropriation from family owners by investing in firms with large family ownership, little separation of family control from ownership or multiple large shareholder structure. In addition, policymakers can encourage institutional investors to participate in family business to improve corporate governance.

Drawing on both Type I and Type II agency theory perspectives, the authors argue that although family CEOs can generally benefit firms’ investment efficiency, the benefits vary with firms’ ownership structure. In other words, family CEOs are not absolute agents or stewards but some extent of combination of both.

Despite extensive research into the effect of organizational learning processes on firm performance, it remains unclear how and when learning orientation influences the international performance of international new ventures (INVs). Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how learning orientation drives the international performance of INVs.

Structural equation modeling is used to test the research model with questionnaire data from mainland Chinese INVs.

Results show that: learning orientation positively influences entrepreneurial bricolage; entrepreneurial bricolage positively influences the international performance of INVs; entrepreneurial bricolage plays a mediating role between learning orientation and international performance; degree of internationalization (DOI) weakens the effect of entrepreneurial bricolage on international performance.

This study makes a useful supplement to the INV literature by revealing that entrepreneurial bricolage plays a mediating role in the relationship between learning orientation and the international performance of INVs. It also contributes to the entrepreneurial bricolage literature by introducing entrepreneurial bricolage into the empirical research of INVs and identifying the learning orientation antecedents and performance consequences of entrepreneurial bricolage. In addition, this paper enriches the understanding of the boundary conditions for how entrepreneurial bricolage affects international performance showing that DOI has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between entrepreneurial bricolage and international performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the operation strategies of a manufacturer who produces brown and green product simultaneously.

The authors establish three models to examine the joint decisions of pricing and advertising. Three advertising strategies are: non-advertising investment (NA), advertising investment for brown product (BA) and advertising investment for green product (GA).

The theoretical analysis shows that advertising investment can substantially increase the product greening level and manufacturer's profit. More importantly, we find that the GA strategy is more likely to be the best strategy as the advertising investment efficiency increases. The BA strategy is more likely to be preferred as the R&D cost increases. Finally, the modeling results are verified by numerical experiments, and more insights are obtained.

This paper considers the case in which a single manufacturer produces the brown and green product simultaneously. In fact, many manufacturers in the market produce brown and green product at the same time. Furthermore, in addition to advertising investment for brown product and green product, manufacturers can also invest in advertising for brands.

The paper contributes to the investigations on green production and advertising decisions of a manufacturer who produces brown and green products simultaneously.

This paper presents the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm in conjuction with the fuzzy logic method in order to achieve an optimized tuning of a proportional integral derivative controller (PID) in the DTC control loops of dual star induction motor (DSIM). The fuzzy controller is insensitive to parametric variations, however, with the PSO-based optimization approach we obtain a judicious choice of the gains to make the system more robust. According to Matlab simulation, the results demonstrate that the hybrid DTC of DSIM improves the speed loop response, ensures the system stability, reduces the steady state error and enhances the rising time. Moreover, with this controller, the disturbances do not affect the motor performances.

Governments all over the world are increasingly entering into partnership agreement with the private sector through public–private partnership (PPP) models for the development and management of public projects and services. Thus, the purpose of this study is to first examine the factors that enter into government's attitude, value for money (VFM) and PPP-based waste management projects (WMPs) in Ghana. Further, this study examines the relationship between PPP-based waste management and VFM, along with the mediating role of government's attitude.

Data were collected through a survey questionnaire from four metropolitan municipal assemblies of Ghana. This study’s sample consisted of 230 respondents, and structural equation modeling was employed to conduct an empirical analysis. The structured model had evaluated the critical success factors (CSFs). Subsequently, the measurement model helped in the path analysis of the proposed model.

The authors found a nonpositive relationship between PPP-based WMPs and VFM; however, government's attitude will influence the achievement of VFM. Reliance on quality targets is ranked as the highest CSF in PPP-based WMPs in Ghana. Also, incentives for private sector participation and effective private sector participation are ranked as the least CSFs.

Most of the questionnaire's items were self -rated by employees of municipal assemblies who were not policymakers. This must have increased the possibility of common method bias. In addition, the study was limited to Ghana (a developing economy); therefore, the generalization of the results should be done with much caution.

This study suggests to develop a network of private sector consortiums considering international and national participants who are engaged in PPPs in order to ensure successful delivery and hence valuing for money.

This study offers a novel perspective to investigate the relationship of PPP-based WMPs and VFM and shows how the government's attitude mediates this relationship.

This paper aims to reveal the influencing mechanism of the interaction between institutional environments in the home and host country on the accelerated internationalization of entrepreneurial enterprises from emerging economies (EE). The authors want to open the black box of home-country institutional environments’ moderating mechanism on the relationship between host-country institutional environments and accelerated internationalization.

The authors chose a massive interview method and case study method to answer this question. According to our standards, the authors chose four high-tech companies in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces as case study samples. During investigation in the four case companies, the authors collected print data of 150 pages and electric data of 3 pages. Then, the authors excavated concepts in data through open coding, axial coding and select-type coding and identified concepts’ dimensions and connections between them.

Well-developed home-country institutions can reduce the inhibitory effect of under-developed host-country institutions on the accelerated internationalization of entrepreneurial enterprises from emerging economies. Under-developed institutional environments in the home country are beneficial for entrepreneurial enterprises from EE to develop the institutional capability for entrepreneurial enterprises with stronger institutional capability from emerging economies. The inhibitory effect of under-developed institutional environments in the host country on their accelerated internationalization is weaker. The positive moderating role played by institutional voids in the home country on the relationship between institutional voids in the host country and the accelerated internationalization are mediated by the institutional capability of entrepreneurial enterprises from emerging economies.

The authors just refined the definition of institutional capability and divided its dimensions. Issues such as operationalization of institutional capability and the development of measurement scale are also worthy for future quantitative research. Considering the inherent defect of case study and that these four case companies are from Chinese high-tech industry, the external validity our research may be limited. The theoretical model that was constructed generally captured the relationships between dual institutional environments, institutional capability and EE entrepreneurial firms’ accelerated internationalization decision. Future studies may use a large-scale sample to verify the all propositions the authors introduced to draw more steady and reliable empirical study results.

The conclusions have significant implications for governments in EE to construct friendly institutional environments for international entrepreneurship and for entrepreneurial firms to implement internationalization strategies.

Policy makers should establish well-developed normative and cognitive institutional environment by cultivating global-orientated and open national culture and organizing experience exchange conference, thereby speeding up the implementation of internationalization strategies and further improving international competitiveness for a country.

First, the authors defined institutional capability as firms’ ability of establishing relationships with institution actors, adapting to institutional contexts, changing existing institutions or creating new ones to gain potential interests and suggested that it consists of three dimensions. Second, institutional voids in the home country positively moderate the relationship between under-developed institutional environments in the host country and the accelerated internationalization of entrepreneurial firms from EE. At last, institutional capability of firms negatively moderates the relationship between under-developed institutional environments in the host country and the accelerated internationalization of entrepreneurial firms from EE.

Preparing CrAlN coatings on the surface of silicon nitride bearings can improve their service life in oil-free lubrication. This paper aims to match the optimal process parameters for preparing CrAlN coatings on silicon nitride surfaces, and reveal the microscopic mechanism of process parameter influence on coating wear resistance.

This study used molecular dynamics to analyze how process parameters affected the nucleation density, micromorphology, densification and internal stress of CrAlN coatings. An orthogonal test method was used to examine how deposition time, substrate temperature, nitrogen-argon flow rate and sputtering power impacted the wear resistance of CrAlN coatings under dry friction conditions.

Nucleation density, micromorphology, densification and internal stress have a significant influence on the surface morphology and wear resistance of CrAlN coatings. The process parameters for better wear resistance of the CrAlN coatings were at a deposition time of 120 min, a substrate temperature of 573 K, a nitrogen-argon flow rate of 1:1 and a sputtering power of 160 W.

Simulation analysis and experimental results of this paper can provide data to assist in setting process parameters for applying CrAlN coatings to silicon nitride bearings.