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This study develops an empirical framework to address how large third-party sellers (TPSs) can apply customer acquisition strategies to improve their performance in consumers’ person-goods matching process and how the platform firm’s similar strategies moderate the effects of TPSs’ strategies.

Using data collected from the top ten TPSs from a Chinese e-commerce platform, the fixed effect model is used to validate the conceptual model and hypotheses.

The study results show that both market detection strategy and matching optimization strategy can help large TPSs improve their sales performance. Moreover, the similar market detection strategy applied by the platform firm weakens the effect of large TPSs’ customer acquisition strategies, while the similar matching optimization strategy applied by the platform firm strengthens the effect of large TPSs’ customer acquisition strategies.

This study provides firsthand evidence on the performance of large TPSs’ and the platform firm’s strategies. It demonstrates the effectiveness of large TPSs’ market detection strategy and matching optimization strategy, which can be adopted to meet consumers’ search and evaluation motivations in their person-goods matching process respectively. Moreover, it identifies the role of platform firms by showing the moderating effect of similar strategies adopted by the platform firm on the effect of large TPSs’ customer acquisition strategies.

This study investigates how employees perceive responsible gambling (RG) programs, which are part of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework for minimizing negative impacts associated with problematic gambling. Casino employees have different levels of interaction with gamblers, which could affect employees' opinions about RG.

Surveys at two time periods – baseline (N = 2,192) and one-year follow-up (N = 852) to a new RG program – asked employees at MGM Resorts International (MGM) about their (1) perceptions of program effectiveness, (2) gambling behaviors and beliefs and (3) perceived level of employer support. Two one-way MANCOVAs, with years employed in the gambling industry as the covariate, extended results from a prior study. An additional two-way MANCOVA examined contact-level and year-over-year differences.

Employees who have high contact with gamblers, such as those in security or casino dealer positions, viewed RG programs as less effective than employees who have low contact with gamblers, such as those in culinary or corporate positions.

Employees are vital to harm reduction CSR strategies and MGM should work toward a program with varied RG training content and delivery, depending on the likelihood of employee interaction with active gamblers.

RG programs are key CSR initiatives for hospitality organizations with gambling licenses. Employees play an interactive role in delivering these programs, so their perceptions and understanding help assess program value. This is the first study to examine employee perceptions of a newly-implemented RG program with baseline and follow-up data.

Previous studies on social influence and virtual product adoption have mainly taken users’ purchase behavior as a dichotomous variable (i.e. purchasing or not). Given the prevalence of competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product in online communities, this paper investigated the differences in the effect of social influence on users’ adoption of basic and upgraded choices of a virtual product. It also examined how the effect varies with users’ social status and user-level network density.

A natural experiment was conducted in an online game community. Two competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product were provided for in-game purchase while a random set of users selected from 897,765 players received the notification of their friends’ adoption information. A competing-risk model was used to test the hypotheses.

Social influence exerts a stronger positive effect on users’ adoption of the upgraded virtual product than of the basic virtual product. Middle-status users have the greatest (least) susceptibility to social influence in adopting the upgraded (basic) virtual product than low- and high-status users. User’s network density enhances the effect of social influence on adoption of both virtual products, even more for the upgraded one.

This research contributes to the social influence and product adoption literature by disentangling the different effects of social influence on basic and upgraded versions of a virtual product. It also identifies the boundary conditions that social influence works for each version of the virtual product.

The primary objective of this study is characterizing the anisotropic mechanical properties of corrugated cardboard and simultaneously simulating its drop cushioning dynamic effects under various drop conditions.

Static and dynamic tests were conducted on corrugated cardboard to obtain adequate experimental data in different directions. An effective anisotropic constitutive model is introduced by developing the honeycomb materials model in ANSYS LS-Dyna, and an effective approach is established toward effectively determining the material parameters from the test data obtained. The model is validated by comparing simulation results with experimental data from five drop conditions, including bottom drop, front drop, side drop, 30° side drop and edge drop. Additionally, simulations are conducted to study the cushioning performance of the packaging by dropping the corrugated cardboard at different heights.

The study establishes a fast and effective approach to simulating the drop cushioning performance of corrugated cardboard under various drop conditions, which demonstrates good agreement with experimental data.

This approach is of value for packaging protection and provides guidance for stacking of packaging during transportation.

Previous researches on credit scoring mainly focussed on static modeling on panel sample data set in a certain period of time, and did not pay enough attention on dynamic incremental modeling. The purpose of this paper is to address the integration of branch and bound algorithm with incremental support vector machine (SVM) ensemble to make dynamic modeling of credit scoring.

This new model hybridizes support vectors of old data with incremental financial data of corporate in the process of dynamic ensemble modeling based on bagged SVM. In the incremental stage, multiple base SVM models are dynamically adjusted according to bagged new updated information for credit scoring. These updated base models are further combined to generate a dynamic credit scoring. In the empirical experiment, the new method was compared with the traditional model of non-incremental SVM ensemble for credit scoring.

The results show that the new model is able to continuously and dynamically adjust credit scoring according to corporate incremental information, which helps produce better evaluation ability than the traditional model.

This research pioneered on dynamic modeling for credit scoring with incremental SVM ensemble. As time pasts, new incremental samples will be combined with support vectors of old samples to construct SVM ensemble credit scoring model. The incremental model will continuously adjust itself to keep good evaluation performance.

This paper aims to focus on the rise and decline of the Qing dynasty in Chinese history, and tries to explain the evolutionary phenomenon that when a dynasty became strong, it replaced the former established but deteriorating one, and then at the end of its development, it disappeared eventually by using interest models developed herein.

Systemic interest models are introduced to the study of Chinese history quantitatively. First, by briefly going over the history of Qing, the reasons for its rise and fall are analyzed qualitatively. Second, the concept of interest is generalized under some proper assumptions so that several interest models are established. At the end, intriguing conclusions are drawn by analyzing the numerical solutions of these interest models.

Comparing this paper's results of numerical solutions with the Qing's history, we can see that the stability of a country was essentially an external appearance of the conflict of interests between the ruling and ruled classes. Usually, the eventual social turbulence happened when the balance of interests deteriorated and was tilted excessively to one social class, and ended when the imbalance reached another state of equilibrium. Moreover, the stability of a country always appeared to be a cycle of “turbulence→peace→turbulence→ċ” which is similar to the evolutionary characteristics of general systems indicated by the systemic yoyo model. Furthermore, the cycle can be found in all the feudal dynasties throughout Chinese history.

The interest models presented in this article can be applied to the study of other social problems, such as corporation governance, the analysis of the national economic relationships, and others.

The concept of interest is generalized in this paper, and the relevant interest models provide good conclusions in our analysis of social and historical phenomena.

From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the establishment of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) by the Manchu conquerors, the new rulers designated the late-Ming liberal ideologies as heretics, and they resurrected the most conservative form of Confucianism as the political orthodoxy. Under the principle of filial piety given by this orthodoxy, the whole empire was imagined as a fictitious family with the emperor as the grand patriarch and the civil bureaucrats and subjects as children or grandchildren. Under the highly centralized administrative and communicative apparatus of the Qing state, this ideology of the fictitious patrimonial state penetrated into the lowest level of the society. The subsequent paternalist, authoritarian, and moralizing politics of the Qing state contributed to China’s nontransition to capitalism despite its advanced market economy, and helped explain the peculiar form and trajectory of China’s popular contention in the eighteenth century. I also argue that this tradition of fictitious patrimonial politics continued to shape the state-making processes in twentieth-century China and beyond.

It is unattainable that entrepreneurs engage equivalent resources in public and private morality because of the limitation of resources. This study aims to conduct experiments to test how entrepreneurial deviation in morality affects legitimacy perception of consumers to entrepreneurs.

This study conducted secondary data analysis and experiment to test how entrepreneurial deviation in morality affects legitimacy perception of consumers to entrepreneurs.

The experimental results show that entrepreneurial deviation in morality negatively affects legitimacy perceptions of consumers to entrepreneurs. Specifically, when public moral is higher than private moral, consumers have negative perceptions of pragmatic legitimacy to entrepreneurs, because consumers perceive deviation behaviors disobey the norm “Li”. However, entrepreneurial private morality excels public morality, consumers have negative perceptions of social legitimacy to entrepreneurs because consumers perceive deviation behaviors disobey the norm “Qing”. Moreover, the authors examined entrepreneurial values moderate the effects of moral deviation and legitimacy perceptions.

This study expands the ethical marketing of entrepreneurs from the perspective of the deviation between public morality and private morality.

This research offered a systematic and comprehensive literature review in analysing current studies on employee ecological behaviour (EEB) strategies and settings to determine various emphasised workplace ecological behaviour areas and contribute a precise mapping for future research.

This systematic literature review method involved 106 peer-reviewed articles published in reputable academic journals (between 2000 and the first quarter of 2021). This study was confined to a review of empirical papers derived from digital databases encompassing the terms ‘Employee green behaviour’, ‘Green behaviour at workplace’, ‘Employee ecological behaviour’, ‘Employee Pro-environmental behaviour’ and ‘Pro-environmental behaviour at workplace’ in the titles.

This study identified relevant journal articles (classified as EEB at work) from the current body of knowledge. Notably, much emphasis was identified on EEB over the past two decades. Overall, most studies employing quantitative approaches in both developed and emerging nations. Notably, ecological behaviour application garnered the most significant attention from scholars among the four focus areas in the literature review: (i) EEB concepts, models, or reviews, (ii) EEB application, (iii) EEB determinants and (iv) EEB outcomes.

Significant literature gaps indicate this field to be a relatively novel phenomenon. Thus, rigorous research on the topic proves necessary to develop a holistic understanding of the subject area.

This study expands the current body of knowledge by providing the first comprehensive systematic review on EEB themes, methods, applications, determinants, contextual focus, outcomes and recommending future research agenda.