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While spontaneous and voluntary knowledge contribution in online communities promotes value co-creation, dysfunctional knowledge behaviors hamper the effectiveness and development of such communities. The study conceptualizes physicians' proactive knowledge sharing and knowledge withholding behaviors in physician-driven online health communities (OHCs) and integrates the theories of role identity as well as communal and exchange relationships to understand the root causes and motivations behind these two types of knowledge behaviors.

The authors collected survey data from 166 users from one of the largest physician-driven OHCs in China and applied the covariance-based structural equation modeling approach to test the hypotheses.

The findings suggest that (1) physicians' professional role identity had a positive indirect effect on proactive knowledge sharing behaviors through communal motivation, and work pressure weakened this indirect effect; and (2) professional role identity had a negative indirect impact on knowledge withholding behaviors through exchange motivation.

This study extends proactive knowledge sharing and knowledge withholding behaviors from the organizational management domain to the online environment, exploring the underlying causes and motivations behind both behaviors in the unique context of physician-driven OHCs. The findings offer practical suggestions for the effective management of OHC platforms, as well as policy implications that respond to the workforce shortage of healthcare providers, a crisis that is unfolding globally.

Entrepreneurs and individual sellers heavily leverage their social ties embedded in social media, expressive or instrumental, to penetrate the market and achieve business success. However, the extant social commerce literature offers limited understanding on how different forms of buyer−seller social ties embedded in social media affect buyers' purchase behaviors. The study draws on the theoretical lens of social ties and proposes an integrative theoretical framework to understand the direct and indirect influences of expressive and instrumental ties (ExTSM and InTSM) between buyers and sellers on buyers' purchase intention (PI) in social commerce.

The authors first validated the measures of ExTSM and InTSM with survey data from 166 Weibo commerce buyers. They then tested their theoretical framework and hypotheses with survey data from 246 buyer−seller dyads in WeChat commerce.

With a buyer-centric view, (1) ExTSM and InTSM, respectively, had a direct negative and a positive influence on PI; (2) both trust and perceived product value displayed inconsistent mediation effects on the negative relationship between ExTSM and PI; and (3) only perceived product value mediated the positive influence of InTSM on PI. From sellers' viewpoint, (1) their ExTSM and InTSM with buyers were mixed up, and (2) the mingled social ties negatively impacted buyers' purchase intention.

The findings of the study advance the theoretical understanding of social commerce and offer practical guidance for small and medium-sized enterprises to effectively utilize social media for business purposes.

This study aims to explore the dimensions and sub-factors of Airbnb hosts’ affinity-seeking strategies. It also aims to build a conceptual framework of hosts’ affinity-seeking strategies and their impact on Airbnb guests’ feelings of affection toward their host and/or the homestay and their behavioral intentions.

Based on 150,161 Inside Airbnb online reviews in three major US cities, this study uses semantic analysis to explore processes through which hosts’ affinity-seeking strategies are constructed.

A conceptual framework is proposed to identify two dimensions (warmth and competency) and their sub-factors (“presenting friendly attitudes,” “showing personality traits,” “providing service and help” and “promoting social interaction and sharing”) of Airbnb homestay hosts’ affinity-seeking strategies. The framework shows a positive relationship between these strategies and guests’ affection and behavior in response.

The research findings provide valuable insights to hosts for improving their affinity and strengthening their competitive advantages. They also offer guidance to destination management organizations on how to build a positive destination image.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to conceptualize Airbnb homestay hosts’ affinity-seeking strategies. It contributes to the literature by incorporating social cognition theory and service theory in the analysis of these strategies.

The purpose of this study is to generate diversified results for temporally ambiguous queries and the candidate queries are ensured to have a high coverage of subtopics, which are derived from different temporal periods.

Two novel time-aware query suggestion diversification models are developed by integrating semantics and temporality information involved in queries into two state-of-the-art explicit diversification algorithms (i.e. IA-select and xQuaD), respectively, and then specifying the components on which these two models rely on. Most importantly, first explored is how to explicitly determine query subtopics for each unique query from the query log or clicked documents and then modeling the subtopics into query suggestion diversification. The discussion on how to mine temporal intent behind a query from query log is also followed. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposal, experiments on a real-world query log are conducted.

Preliminary experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of producing the candidate query suggestion for temporally ambiguous queries.

This study reports the first attempt to generate query suggestions indicating diverse interested time points to the temporally ambiguous (input) queries. The research will be useful in enhancing users’ search experience through helping them to formulate accurate queries for their search tasks. In addition, the approaches investigated in the paper are general enough to be used in many domains; that is, experimental information retrieval systems, Web search engines, document archives and digital libraries.

With China’s economic growth slowing down and the growth rate of fiscal revenue decreasing, the pressure on local government debts is further increasing. Under this background, it is of great significance to clarify the relation between local government debts and China’s economic growth in order to give full play to the positive role of local debts in stabling growth. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Therefore, this paper explores the impact of Chinese local government debt on economic growth from theoretical and empirical aspects, respectively, and compares the regional differences between different debts and economic growth dynamics.

In the theoretical model part, this paper constructs a three-sector dynamic game model, under the two circumstances of whether local government is subject to debt constraints, and examines the relation between local government debt and economic growth and other variables through numerical simulation. Research shows that when the government is not constrained by debt, there is an inverted “U” relation between government debt and economic growth. When the government is constrained by debt, the economic growth rate gradually decreases as the government debt increases.

In the theoretical analysis part, this paper tries to estimate the amount of local debts under different calibers and examines the impact of different types of local government debts on China’s economic growth and their regional differences. The results show that excessive accumulation of government hidden debts in the eastern region is not conducive to economic growth, while explicit debts in the central and western regions significantly contribute to local economic growth. The results of empirical analysis are basically consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model.

We propose a local linear functional coefficient estimator that admits a mix of discrete and continuous data for stationary time series. Under weak conditions our estimator is asymptotically normally distributed. A small set of simulation studies is carried out to illustrate the finite sample performance of our estimator. As an application, we estimate a wage determination function that explicitly allows the return to education to depend on other variables. We find evidence of the complex interacting patterns among the regressors in the wage equation, such as increasing returns to education when experience is very low, high return to education for workers with several years of experience, and diminishing returns to education when experience is high. Compared with the commonly used parametric and semiparametric methods, our estimator performs better in both goodness-of-fit and in yielding economically interesting interpretation.

Non-financial information disclosure may reflect the quality of corporate financial reports or disclosure policy choices. The authors examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and accounting conservatism and also investigate channels through which such effects are transmitted. The purpose of this paper is to explore how CSR, as non-financial information that has received widespread attention, affects choices regarding corporate financial policy.

Using ordinary least squares regression, the authors analyze China CSR Score data for 2010–2018. They control certain influencing variables related to the nature and characteristics of enterprises and discover that CSR can effectively increase accounting conservatism. Then, they extract the components of market reactions to CSR and study the market reaction path of CSR as it affects financial policy. They also conduct a robustness test to ensure that the results are not accidental in a complex environment.

The results reveal the influence of non-financial information on firms’ financial policy. In addition, the results confirm the attraction of liquidity and investor attention as the major market reaction channels by which CSR significantly promotes accounting conservatism. Additionally, other critical paths of influence deserve further exploration. The results remain robust for alternate measures of accounting conservatism, different components of CSR, other proxies on CSR, endogenous testing and alternate estimation methods.

The study represents the first analysis of the influence of CSR information disclosure on accounting conservatism in emerging markets, and it undertakes a preliminary exploration to clarify the mechanism of CSRs’ role in accounting conservatism. The results also provide a policy reference for external supervision and internal governance of enterprises. Thus, the results can help company managers maintain a favorable corporate image and establish a high-level investor protection mechanism.

This study aims to theorize and empirically examine how guanxi in Chinese collectivistic culture affects entrepreneurs to leverage the structural holes they occupy when it comes to promoting knowledge transfer.

To examine the hypotheses, this study used a mixed-methods research approach where quantitative questionnaires and social network analyses were used through 365 Chinese entrepreneurs, and qualitative semistructured interviews were conducted through 50 Chinese entrepreneurs.

In a Chinese entrepreneur’s guanxi network, structural holes will impede knowledge transfer among network members, but guanxi will moderate this impeding effect.

By revealing how “structural hole controllers” become “structural hole fillers” under the moderating influence of guanxi in Chinese collectivistic culture, this study recognizes the different roles that persons who occupy a structural hole play in different situations, which advances structural hole theory. In addition, by exploring how entrepreneurs orchestrate these structural holes to create a strong guanxi network that can be infinitely extended, this study reveals a means to achieve both advantages of bonding and bridging social capital simultaneously, which generates a theoretical contribution to social capital integration.

This study suggests Chinese entrepreneurs to cultivate guanxi to improve their needs in decision-making by giving renqing, returning renqing, earning mianzi and giving mianzi.

By showing how Chinese entrepreneurs leverage their guanxi and structural holes to facilitate knowledge transfer, this study identifies the critical entrepreneurial behavior that promotes business development, thereby contributing to the literature of knowledge management, entrepreneurship and social network.

With the rapid development of social media in the past few years, some dark aspects of usage have appeared, e.g., Weibo addiction. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to address the question of how Weibo keeps users hooked.

The study utilizes the netnography method to explore the symptoms of Weibo addiction and how it is formed.

First, some Weibo users have typical symptoms of addictive behavior, such as withdrawal, loss of control and general living problems; second, narcissism plays an important role in the process of Weibo addiction and has a stronger effect on content generation than content consumption; third, some users use Weibo as a means to alleviate anxiety, but they can then become more anxious owing to addiction; and fourth, the effect of comments has two sides – on the one hand, comments are one kind of feedback to posts, satisfying posters’ social needs, while on the other hand, a storytelling system consists of one post and its comments, upon which some Weibo users become more dependent.

This research is only a preliminary, exploratory study. Therefore, care should be taken when interpreting these findings.

This study should help social media service providers and users to pay attention to the risk of social media addiction. Social media service providers should take social responsibility, design more user-oriented guidelines for marketing ethics and launch more responsible marketing activities. Users should enhance self-control and better balance social media use and offline real life.

Netnography has not been widely used as an addictive behavior research technique. This study is further bolstered because it has also noticed the difference of addiction mechanisms between addictive micro-bloggers and their followers.