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This study examines the potential of foreign business-to-business (B2B) firms to select high-status local partners in emerging markets to achieve positive relationship outcomes. Because a domestic firm’s high status may also promote opportunism, the study also examines if the foreign B2B firms may mitigate such behavior through either or both transaction-specific investments (TSIs) and socialization.

The research is conducted via a model that suggests a positive correlation between high local partner status and the focal relationship outcomes and the moderating effects of structural TSIs and social governance systems. The model was developed and empirically tested using data collected from 96 foreign firms operating in China.

Using multiple regressions, the findings suggest that foreign B2B firms are likely to achieve more beneficial relationship outcomes with high-status local partners. Standing alone, foreign B2B firms’ TSIs mitigate the positive relationship outcomes, whereas their socialization with the high-status partners enhances the beneficial outcomes. Most importantly, combining socialization with TSIs increases beneficial outcomes.

This study adds to B2B marketing, status theory and the application of transaction cost economics (TCE) and social exchange theory to foreign-local B2B exchange relationships in emerging markets. The findings confirm the attractiveness of high status in emerging markets by exploring how the selection, formation and chosen B2B governance processes may lead to competing outcomes of opportunism or success. Future research will benefit from simultaneously securing data from both sides of the dyad.

The paper suggests that foreign B2B firms consider high status as a key criterion in selecting local partners in emerging markets and the importance of managing high-status partners’ potential opportunism by effective governance mechanisms.

This study is one of the first to apply and explore the workings of status theory in the foreign-local B2B partner selection process and relationship outcomes in emerging markets and thereby contributes to B2B marketing, status theory and both TCE and social exchange theories in the focal foreign-local B2B context.

The Bed and Breakfast (B&B) enterprises generally lack sufficient human resources and time to conduct research on important social media marketing factors for visitors’ satisfaction and visitors’ intentions. Therefore, this study aims to provide crucial social media marketing and factors and service quality elements for improving customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in B&B sectors. This study also provides some recommendations for attracting more visitors and increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty through social media.

First, social media marketing factors and service quality elements were identified through the systematic literature review. Then these identified factors and elements were used to design a survey questionnaire for collecting data. The research data included responses of 64 B&B enterprises and 625 customers. The collected data was analyzed by feature selection approaches including Decision Tree algorithm and Information Gain to identify the key factors for improving customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

The findings of this study determined that featured choice is an important social media marketing factor, and assurance is the common service quality element for both B&B enterprises and their customers in terms of satisfaction and loyalty.

This study adds a value to the growing literature on customer satisfaction and loyalty in B&B sectors by exploring key social media marketing factors and service quality elements. The study reveals several implications for theories and practices. The findings hopefully help B&B enterprises better social media marketing with less workforce and budget.

Online video advertisement is a wide-ranging phenomenon on the internet that provides huge opportunities for business enterprises. The revenues of website service providers come primarily from advertisement. However, it is rare to find research focusing on consumer attitudes toward online video advertisement. This study aims to investigate consumer attitudes toward advertisement while they are watching online videos on YouTube.

The paper followed Brackett and Carr’s (2001) Web Advertising Attitudes Model and combined it with the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the flow theory. This study investigates consideration of the factors affecting attitudes toward advertisement and the influence on shopping intention and purchase behavior.

The findings indicate that entertainment, informativeness, irritation and credibility have a shopping influence on purchase attitudes. Flow, on the other hand, does have an influence on shopping intention and purchase behavior. The discussion and conclusion have been further discussed.

This study provides a comprehensive model for online video advertisement. This model was based on Brackett and Carr’s model, combining the users and gratifications theory, TRA and flow theory to develop an online video advertisement model. Researchers can consider this model as a framework and use it to capture a more complete picture of the relevant phenomena in their works.

The purpose of this study was to develop a new folding method for modeling complicated folded fabric with surfaces of revolution.

Irregular wrinkles and mesh distortions easily appear in the fold modeling of a complex curved surface. Aimed at this key technical problem, the segmentation mapping folding method (SMFM) is proposed in this paper. First, high-precision flattened planes were obtained by using segmentation mapping techniques. Second, the segmented planes were transformed into a folded and continuous geometric model by using matrix transformations. Finally, initial stress was used to modify the geometric folding errors, which ensured agreement with the inflated flexible fabric’s geometry and the original design.

Compared with the traditional folding method, SMFM has the advantages of good finite-element mesh quality, large radial compression rate, regular folds, etc. The surface area error and the volume error of the inflated single torus established by SMFM were only 1.2 per cent, showing that SMFM has high modeling accuracy. The numerical results of an inflatable re-entry vehicle are presented to demonstrate the reliability, feasibility and applicability of SMFM. Moreover, the stress modification reduced the problems of stress concentration and mesh distortions, improving the accuracy and stability of the numerical calculations.

In this paper, for the first time, a folding method for modeling complicated folded fabric is proposed. This methodology can be used to model the multidimensional compression and regular folds of complex surfaces of revolution that cannot be flattened and to improve the accuracy and stability of the numerical calculations.

Live streaming has become an extremely popular form of online service and allows live audiences to give virtual gifts or money to their favorite streamers. This study aims to investigate the impact of the audience's multidimensional social presence on their attitudes toward live streamers and intentions to give money or gifts to streamers, based on the interactive marketing perspective. This study considers live audiences' gift-giving intentions by integrating the theory of multidimensional social presence, which includes awareness, cognitive social presence and affective social interaction, and the theory of reasoned action (TRA).

This study invited audiences who had watched live streaming from several popular live-streaming platforms to respond to a web questionnaire. The unit of analysis was at the individual level. This study applied the purposive sampling technique for data collection. A sample of 258 eligible responses to the online survey was analyzed using SPSS software and the causal relationships between the measurement variables of this research model were verified through structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that the audiences' awareness of participating in live streaming enhanced their cognitive and affective social presence, which positively affected their attitudes toward live streamers. These attitudes had a further significant effect on their gift-giving intentions. Cognitive social presence and affective social presence were found to play significant mediating roles in the relationship between awareness and attitudes toward live streamers.

This study examines audiences' intention to give gifts to their favorite live streamers, based on the interactive marketing perspective. The interactive relationship between live streamers and online audiences is developed by audience members through the process of inner psychological transformation, which is measured through the multidimensional construct of social presence. This occurs through a mutual influence relationship in which awareness simultaneously influences cognitive social presence and affective social presence, and cognitive social presence impacts affective social presence.

The study contributes three noteworthy findings to the theory development through the integrated perspective of the TRA and the theory of social presence. (1) Exploring the influence of belief factors on internal psychological responses and intention in live streaming to expand an innovative application of the TRA. (2) Adopting the multidimensional social presence can help researchers more clearly describe various live-streaming situations and extend the research scope of the social presence theory to live-streaming interactive marketing strategies. (3) From the perspective of live-streamer marketing, this study broadens the research fields of electronic commerce and interactive marketing.

This study provides four practical implications for platform managers and live streamers. (1) To induce favorable attitudes toward live streamers, live streamers initiate various interactive activities sequentially to establish a social presence with the audience. (2) Live streamers should devote themselves to forming a joyful atmosphere for their followers, as this will trigger audiences' affective social presence to generate positive attitudes and increase followers' intentions. (3) To attract and retain young followers, live streamers must devise interesting content and provide fresh services. (4) Platform managers must create useful widgets to assist live streamers in managing their channels and followers.

Building friendly real-time interaction between the live streamer and the audience is an important task in live streaming and further influences the income of the live streamer and the platform. The study provides an effective approach to building friendly real-time interaction for the live streamer and manager of live-streaming electronic commerce through the interactive marketing perspective. The approach can help the live streamer manage nice communication with their audience and obtain virtual money and gift-giving from the audience.

The paper formulates a bi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear programming model, aimed at minimizing the total labor hours and the workload unfairness for the multi-skilled worker assignment problem in Seru production system (SPS).

Three approaches, namely epsilon-constraint method, non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm 2 (NSGA-II) and improved strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA2), are designed for solving the problem.

Numerous experiments are performed to assess the applicability of the proposed model and evaluate the performance of algorithms. The merged Pareto-fronts obtained from both NSGA-II and SPEA2 were proposed as final solutions to provide useful information for decision-makers.

SPS has the flexibility to respond to the changing demand for small amount production of multiple varieties products. Assigning cross-trained workers to obtain flexibility has emerged as a major concern for the implementation of SPS. Most enterprises focus solely on measures of production efficiency, such as minimizing the total throughput time. Solutions based on optimizing efficiency measures alone can be unacceptable by workers who have high proficiency levels when they are achieved at the expense of the workers taking more workload. Therefore, study the tradeoff between production efficiency and fairness in the multi-skilled worker assignment problem is very important for SPS.

The study investigates a new mixed-integer programming model to optimize worker-to-seru assignment, batch-to-seru assignment and task-to-worker assignment in SPS. In order to solve the proposed problem, three problem-specific solution approaches are proposed.

Despite the critical role of the policy environment in facilitating the advancement of building information modeling (BIM) as a systemic innovation to reshape traditional facility design, construction and operation processes, scant scholarly attention has been paid to systematically investigating how and why complex BIM policies are concretely and gradually implemented in different regional contexts from a dynamic policy diffusion perspective. This study aims to empirically investigate how different types of BIM policy instruments are dynamically implemented in heterogeneous regions over time and how the diffusion of BIM policies across different regions is comprehensively impacted by both internal efficiency needs and external legitimacy pressures.

This study employed a positivist research paradigm in which BIM policy data from 182 prefecture-level and above cities in China during 2011–2022 were analyzed with quantitative approaches for theory verification. Based on the content analysis of the evolutionary characteristics of the adopted BIM policy instruments in heterogeneous regions over time, the event history analysis (EHA) method was then used to further examine the mechanisms underlying the diffusion of BIM policies across different regions.

The content analysis results show that while environmental instruments (such as technological integration and goal planning) are the primary policy instruments currently adopted in China, recent years have also witnessed increasing adoptions of supply-side instruments (such as fiscal support and information support) and demand-side instruments (such as demonstration projects and tax incentives). After controlling for the impacts of regional fiscal and technical resources, the EHA results illustrate that BIM policy adoption positively relates to regional construction industry scale but negatively relates to regional industry productivity and that compared with public pressures from industry participants, vertical pressures from the central government and horizontal pressures from neighboring regions are more substantial drivers for policy adoption.

As an exploratory effort of using a dynamic policy diffusion perspective to systematically investigate how BIM policies are adopted in heterogeneous regional contexts to facilitate BIM advancement, this study not only characterizes the complexity and dynamics of BIM policies but also provides deepened understandings of the mechanisms underlying policy adoption in the conservative construction industry. The findings hold implications for how multifarious policy instruments can be more effectively and dynamically adopted to facilitate the advancement of BIM and related technologies as innovative solutions in the construction domain.

The purpose of the study is to explain why some foreign firms are accepted in a host country, while others are not.

The paper is conceptual. It first articulates the meaning of firm acceptability in the eyes of host country societies, which remains ambiguous in the current literature. Second, using a social psychological theory, the paper explores the firm-level attributes that can shape the societal judgment of firms’ acceptability.

The paper suggests that foreign firms’ acceptability pertains to the perception to which they can contribute to the host country’s economic development and societal well-being. The judgment of this is carried out by emphasizing three types of organizational cues, which indicate firms’ capacity to contribute.

This conceptual paper contributes to the understanding of firms’ social acceptance in a host country by explicating the meaning of social acceptability and exploring the evaluation mechanism local actors adopt to judge foreign firms. The paper would benefit from empirical investigation by future research.

The meaning of social acceptability of foreign firms remains largely implicit in the literature; likewise, the evaluative mechanism of the firms’ acceptability is little researched. The paper addresses these two issues by undertaking a critical theory stance. It builds on a social psychology theory, multinational corporation (MNC) literature and economic nationalism, thus demonstrating a multidisciplinary approach.

It was verified that the micro-texture in the front and back of the tool at the same time had a positive effect on improving the milling behavior and surface quality of the tool. The purpose of this study is to explore the rationality of simultaneous placement of micro-textures on the front and rear surfaces of ball-end milling cutters, analyze the influence of micro-texture parameters on tool milling behavior and workpiece surface quality, reveal its internal mechanism, and obtain the best micro-texture parameters by optimization.

First, the mechanism of micro-texture is studied based on the energy loss model. Second, the orthogonal experiment is designed to analyze the influence of micro-texture parameters on tool milling behavior and reveal its mechanism by combining simulation technology and cutting experiment. Finally, the parameters are optimized based on the artificial bee colony algorithm.

The results show that the simultaneous placement of micro-texture on the rake face and flank face of the tool has a positive effect on improving the milling behavior and surface quality of the tool. Taking milling force, tool wear and surface roughness as the evaluation criteria, the optimal parameter combination is obtained: the rake face micro-texture diameter is 50 µm, the distance from the micro-texture is 200 µm and the distance from the cutting edge is 110 µm; the diameter of the micro-textured flank is 40 µm, the distance from the micro-texture is 170 µm and the distance from the cutting edge is 130 µm.

Taking milling force, tool wear and surface roughness as the evaluation criteria, the optimal parameter combination is obtained: the rake face micro-texture diameter is 50 µm, the distance from the micro-texture is 200 µm and the distance from the cutting edge is 110 µm; the diameter of the micro-textured flank is 40 µm, the distance from the micro-texture is 170 µm and the distance from the cutting edge is 130 µm, which provides theoretical support for the further study of the micro-textured tool.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-01-2023-0022/