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This study aims to examine an emerging product–place co-branding marketing practice in China’s rural areas. The role of this practice in inclusive development is analyzed from the perspectives of value proposition innovation, market legitimacy, media coverage and brand value. Both research and practice indicate value proposition innovation to exert an important influence on brand value enhancement, but little is known about the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying this relation.

A moderated mediation model is constructed to examine whether market legitimacy mediates the relationship between value proposition innovation and brand value. vWhether this mediating process is moderated by media coverage is also examined. The primary data are collected from semi-structured interviews and observations conducted with two common cases to develop proper scales for value proposition innovation and market legitimacy. The research includes 100 product–place co-brandings published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2019. Hypotheses are tested using hierarchical regression and a Bootstrap model.

Value proposition innovation has a positive effect on brand value, and market legitimacy partially mediates this relationship. Media coverage positively moderates the relationship between value proposition innovation and market legitimacy, and positively moderates the mediating effect of market legitimacy; the higher the media coverage, the stronger the mediating effect of market legitimacy.

Based on data availability and accessibility, the study sample focused on indicators from 100 brands in 2019. If the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs discloses consecutive annual information for other years, future studies could explore panel data to further test the study’s conclusions from a longitudinal perspective.

First, this paper adds to the emerging literature on product–place co-branding business models by examining the relationship between value proposition innovation and brand value. Second, this paper enriches institutional theory by including market legitimacy as a mediator between value proposition innovation and brand value. Third, this paper identifies the moderating role of media coverage, thus broadening the theoretical implications of institutional theory with respect to improving market legitimacy.

Robots come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from manipulators in the industrial assembly line, to house cleaners, and to carebots of the elderly and sick. In recent years entertaining robots have been developed to engage adults and children into playing and learning. There are however no robots that have been specifically designed to entertain pets. The purpose of this paper is to present a prototype developed to engage pets into outdoor playing.

A prototype that can engage a dog or a cat into playing was designed, built, and tested by a group of senior students. The enclosure of the prototype has the shape of a round shell. Within this shell there is a sensor interfacing unit, which can interpret sounds generated by the animals, and a light and sound system designed to interact with the animals.

The testing results showed that the prototype was able to fulfill requirements for outdoor playing, such as being waterproof and able to travel through grass. Testing of the individual sensor interfacing circuits demonstrated the interactive capability. Dogs were chosen to be the subjects to be entertained. However, it is envisioned that a smaller version of this prototype can be suitable for cats.

This is the first prototype that explores ways to entertain pets when their human owners are absent or busy. The prototype developed is a good start for any intelligent robotic systems specifically designed to entertain pets.

Gallic acid is a substance that is widely found in nature. Initially, it was only used as a corrosion inhibitor to retard the rate of corrosion of metals. In recent years, with intensive research by scholars, the modification of coatings containing gallic acid has become a hot topic in the field of metal protection. This study aims to summarize the various preparation methods of gallic acid and its research progress in corrosion inhibitors and coatings, as well as related studies using quantum chemical methods to assess the predicted corrosion inhibition effects and to systematically describe the prospects and current status of gallic acid applications in the field of metal corrosion inhibition and protection.

First, the various methods of preparation of gallic acid in industry are understood. Second, the corrosion inhibition principles and research progress of gallic acid as a metal corrosion inhibitor are presented. Then, the corrosion inhibition principles and research progress of gallic acid involved in the synthesis and modification of various rust conversion coatings, nano-coatings and organic resin coatings are described. After that, studies related to the evaluation and prediction of gallic acid corrosion inhibition on metals by quantum chemical methods are presented. Finally, new research ideas on gallic acid in the field of corrosion inhibition and protection of metals are summarized.

Gallic acid can be used as a corrosion inhibitor or coating in metal protection.

There is a lack of research on the synergistic improvement of gallic acid and other substances.

The specific application of gallic acid in the field of metal protection was summarized, and the future research focus was put forward.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper systematically expounds on the research progress of gallic acid in the field of metal protection for the first time and provides new ideas and directions for future research.

This study aims to deliver a new perspective on how the interaction of independent and cooperative innovation affects firm digitization. Based on resource constraint theory, this study argues that the aforementioned interaction negatively affects firm digitization. The moderating role of managerial discretion is also discussed in light of the principles of the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) framework.

The proposed hypotheses are empirically tested using a negative binomial modeling approach. The data used are from A-share listed companies in China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2006 to 2020.

This study suggests that the interaction of independent innovation and cooperative innovation negatively impacts digitization. In addition, this study argues that environmental discretion and organizational discretion weaken the negative impact of the mentioned interaction on digitization. However, additional discretion in the Chinese context has no effect on above relationships.

This study explores the impact of the interaction of independent and cooperative innovation on digitization and incorporates managerial discretion into this framework based on the AMC framework.

As a kind of knowledge-intensive team coordinated across physical distance, it is necessary to construct a meta-knowledge driven transactive memory system (TMS) for the knowledge management of distributed agile team (DAT). This study aims to explore the comprehensive antecedents of TMS establishment in DATs and considers how TMS establishment is affected by herding behavior under the artificial intelligence (AI)-related knowledge work environment that emerges with technology penetration.

The data derived from 177 students of 52 DATs in a well-known Chinese business school, which were divided into 26 traditional knowledge work groups and 26 AI-related task groups to conduct a random comparative experiment. The ordinary least squares method was used to analyze the conceptual model and ANOVA was used to examine the differences in herding behavior between the control groups (traditional knowledge work DATs) and treatment groups (DATs engaged in AI-related knowledge work).

The results showed that knowledge diversity, professional knowledge, self-efficacy and social system use had significantly positive effects on the establishment of TMS. Interestingly, the authors also find that herding behavior may promote the process of establishing TMS of the new team, and this effect will be more significant when AI tasks are involved in team knowledge work.

By exploring the comprehensive antecedents of the establishment of TMS, this study provided a theoretical basis for knowledge management of DATs, especially in AI knowledge work teams. From a practical perspective, when the DAT is involved in AI-related knowledge works, managers should appropriately guide the convergence of employees’ behaviors and use the herding effects to accelerate the establishment of TMS, which will improve team knowledge sharing and innovation.

This study aims to investigate the antecedents of frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors in the hospitality industry. Anchored in transactional stress theory, affective events theory and motivation theories, a conceptual model was built to explore the impacts of hindrance stressors on boundary-spanning behavior.

Data were collected from frontline employees in the hospitality industry in the USA. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used.

The findings revealed that despite hindrance stressors’ negative indirect impact on frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors, intrinsic motivation worked effectively to reduce hindrance stress and influence subsequent emotions leading to boundary-spanning behaviors.

This study provides substantial and detailed strategies for hospitality practitioners who are pressed to alleviate the hindrance stressors from which frontline employees frequently suffer, foster employees’ positive emotions and ease negative emotions while promoting boundary-spanning behaviors. Cultivation of employees’ intrinsic motivation and emotional management is encouraged, as is effective organizational structure and management intervention. All of these are deemed helpful in buffering employees’ work-related stress while motivating them to go above and beyond their nominal duties.

Very few studies have examined how “bad” hindrance stressors affect boundary-spanning behaviors. Rather than suggesting that hindrance stressors are relevant only to counterproductive behaviors, this study extends both the stress and boundary-spanning literature by uncovering the impact of hindrance stressors on frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors while accounting for the roles of workers’ motivation and emotion.

Sharing project information is critical for the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns. However, few users share medical crowdfunding projects on their social networks, and the sharing behavior of medical crowdfunding projects on social networking sites has not been well studied. Therefore, this study explored the factors and potential mechanisms influencing users’ sharing behaviors on networking sites.

A research model was developed based on the attribution-affect model of helping and social capital theory. Data were collected using a longitudinal survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the collected data. We conducted post hoc analyses to validate the results of the quantitative analysis.

The analysis results verified the effects of perceived external attribution, perceived uncontrollable attributions, and perceived unstable attributions on sympathy and identified the effect of sympathy and social characteristics of medical crowdfunding users on sharing behavior.

This research provides a comprehensive theoretical understanding of users’ sharing behavior characteristics and provides implications for enhancing the efficiency of medical crowdfunding activities.

Customer referral programs (CRPs) are popular; however, they often generate low referral rates. The authors propose that certain CRP referral tasks may hinder consumers’ referral likelihood. This study aims to explore the effects of referral tasks (communication content and approach) on customers’ referral likelihood on social platforms and the role of self-construal.

This study establishes a theoretical model based on online social platforms and conducts three scenario-based experiments. The authors obtain data from consumers on Sojump platform and test the hypotheses using analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis and mediation analysis in SPSS. The valid sample sizes for these three experiments are 288, 203 and 214, respectively.

Three experimental studies indicate that communication content and approach have a significant effect on referral likelihood. Furthermore, the effect of communication content on referral likelihood depends on the communication approach. Self-construal plays a moderating role in the effect of communication content and approach on perceived social costs.

CRPs typically involve tasks and rewards; consumers are asked to complete a referral task and then receive a reward. Both tasks and rewards can affect an individual’s willingness to participate; however, existing studies on CRP focus primarily on the reward component. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to systematically investigate the role of referral tasks (communication content and approach) in CRPs. The authors extend the related research by examining the impact of referral tasks on consumers’ willingness to recommend. In addition, this study introduces self-construal into CRPs research.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how book group recommendations can be used as a meaningful way to suggest suitable books to users, given the increasing number of individuals engaging in sharing and discussing books on the web.

The authors propose reviews fine-grained classification (CFGC) and its related models such as CFGC1 for book group recommendation. These models can categorize reviews successively by function and role. Constructing the BERT-BiLSTM model to classify the reviews by function. The frequency characteristics of the reviews are mined by word frequency analysis, and the relationship between reviews and total book score is mined by correlation analysis. Then, the reviews are classified into three roles: celebrity, general and passerby. Finally, the authors can form user groups, mine group features and combine group features with book fine-grained ratings to make book group recommendations.

Overall, the best recommendations are made by Synopsis comments, with the accuracy, recall, F-value and Hellinger distance of 52.9%, 60.0%, 56.3% and 0.163, respectively. The F1 index of the recommendations based on the author and the writing comments is improved by 2.5% and 0.4%, respectively, compared to the Synopsis comments.

Previous studies on book recommendation often recommend relevant books for users by mining the similarity between books, so the set of book recommendations recommended to users, especially to groups, always focuses on the few types. The proposed method can effectively ensure the diversity of recommendations by mining users’ tendency to different review attributes of books and recommending books for the groups. In addition, this study also investigates which types of reviews should be used to make book recommendations when targeting groups with specific tendencies.