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This paper aims to explore the impact of business environment on high-quality economic development (HQED) and clarify the role of technological innovation and government intervention in this relationship.

Based on China’s provincial panel data from 2010 to 2019, this paper adopts the system generalized method of moments to empirically analyze the influential mechanism and heterogeneity of the business environment on HQED. Furthermore, the authors construct a dynamic panel threshold model to test the threshold effect of government intervention.

The results indicate that optimizing the business environment can significantly promote HQED, technological innovation plays a partial mediating role in the impact of business environment on HQED, mainly by enhancing the intensity of innovation input and increasing innovation output to facilitate HQED. Government intervention can regulate the impact of business environment on HQED, and there is a double threshold effect, and it possesses an inverted U-shaped feature of first promoting and then inhibiting.

This paper examines the influence path of business environment on HQED from the perspective of technological innovation and government intervention, filling the gap in the study of provincial business environment. Moreover, the conclusions furnish a theoretical basis for optimizing the business environment and facilitating the HQED in China.

The purpose of this paper is to study the controller design of flexible manipulator. Flexible manipulator system is a nonlinear, strong coupling, time-varying system, which is introduced elastodynamics in the study and complicated to control. However, due to the flexible manipulator, system has a significant advantage in response speed, control accuracy and load weight ratio to attract a lot of researchers.

Since the order of flexible manipulator system is high, designing controller process will be complex, and have a large amount of calculation, but this paper will use the dynamic surface control method to solve this problem.

Dynamic surface control method as a controller design method which can effectively solve the problem with the system contains nonlinear and reduced design complexity.

The authors assume that the dynamic parameters of flexible manipulator system are unknown, and use Radial Basis Function neural network to approach the unknown system, combined with the dynamic surface control method to design the controller.

Based on the perspective of complexity theory, the operation process of property insurance companies can be regarded as a complex dynamic nonlinear chaotic system. This paper aims to measure the operating efficiency of 29 Chinese domestic property and casualty (P&C) companies and 18 foreign-invested P&C companies from 2011 to 2017 and outline the path to achieving high-quality development.

The data were obtained from the Chinese Insurance Yearbook and China Statistical Yearbook 2012–2018. The data envelopment analysis method was used to calculate the technical efficiency of property insurance companies and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is used for configuration analysis of determinants affecting technical efficiency.

This paper founds the average technical efficiency of Chinese domestic P&C insurance companies was 0.914 and that of foreign-invested P&C insurance companies was 0.895. The average total factor productivity of Chinese domestic P&C insurance companies was 1.058 and that of foreign-invested P&C insurance companies was 1.051. There were three modes to improve the company’s technical efficiency, with high loss ratio and low reinsurance ratio, poor employee education and higher leverage ratio and high leverage ratio and low reinsurance ratio as the core conditions.

This study puts forward four applicable, targeted and proven ways to improve the technical efficiency of China’s P&C insurance industry. These configurations were verified by the cases of existing property insurance companies, which can provide practical references for the insurance industry.

This study analyzes in-depth how knowledge-intensive small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can achieve higher new product development (NPD) process performance in the epidemic era and examine the internal development mechanism of knowledge-intensive SMEs in the process of continuous digital transformation.

This issue is tested with partial least squares on data collected via a survey conducted from November 2021 to February 2022. The sample comprises 487 knowledge-intensive SMEs operating in China.

The results indicate that one form of cross-functional ambidexterity, market development strategy (MDS), plays an important role in process performance from an inside-out financial perspective and an outside-in customer perspective. Simultaneously, product innovation efficiency (PIE) mediates the relationship between MDS and the above results. Big data analytics capabilities (BDACs) positively regulate the relationship between MDS and PIE.

The authors do not consider other contingency factors. Future research should introduce influential factors such as leadership and competitive intensity to further distinguish the effects of MDS on NPD process performance.

The study findings offer suggestions to help knowledge-intensive SME managers better manage their NPD process by making better use of their limited resources in developing countries such as China.

This study is one of only a few to adopt a process-oriented perspective to specifically examine how one form of cross-functional ambidexterity, MDS, impacts knowledge-intensive SME process performance in the epidemic era. This study also extends the theoretical framework of cross-functional ambidexterity to BDAC research.

From the perspective of cause and effect, the operational processes of property insurance companies can be considered as historical events. The purpose of this study is to measure the operating efficiency of China's property insurance industry, explore the determinants that affect technical efficiency and outline the path to achieving high-quality development.

We chose 44 Chinese property insurance companies as research objects. The data were obtained from the Chinese Insurance Yearbook and China Statistical Yearbook 2015–2017. First, the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method was used to calculate the technical efficiency of property insurance companies. Then, Tobit regression and quantile regression were adopted to explore the influencing factors of technical efficiency. Finally, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method was employed to summarize the path to improving the operating efficiency of property insurance companies.

The empirical results in the first stage suggested that the operation efficiency of China's property insurance industry was technically inefficient, and the scale efficiency was relatively better than the pure technical efficiency. In the second stage, we observed that the drivers for firm size, reinsurance rate, claim ratio and equity restriction were important determinants of an insurance firm's efficiency.

We also put forward four applicable, targeted and proven ways to improve the technical efficiency of property insurance companies. These configurations are verified by cases of existing property insurance companies, which can provide practical references for the insurance industry.

Our research enriches the insurance literature and efficiency methods, particularly regarding the specific paths of improving the technical efficiency. The relationship between elements and results is analyzed from a systematic perspective, and the research results are not only more consistent with what logic might imply but also more instructive for the improvement of reality.

Today, customers are generally perceived to be demanding higher quality and better performing products, in shorter and more predictable development cycle-times and at a lower cost. These market pressures drive firms to collaborate with possible partners in product development (PD) processes. However, the selection of a suitable partner for an effective PD is not an easy decision and is associated with complexity. The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach to effectively evaluate PD partners.

The proposed evaluation procedure consists of several steps. First, based on a literature review and expert validation, the strategic main and sub-criteria of the PD partner selection process that companies consider the most important are identified. After constructing the evaluation criteria hierarchy, the criteria weights are calculated by applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The VIKOR (a compromise ranking) method is used to obtain the final partner ranking results. A case study is given to demonstrate the potential of the methodology. In the last part of the study, a sensitivity analysis is performed to determine the influence of criteria weights on the decision making process.

The PD partner evaluation model contains three main criteria, namely, partner, collaboration and PD-oriented criteria, with 13 sub-criteria. The market position, competency of the partner, compatibility, technical expertise and complementarity are found as the most considerable evaluation criteria for the ABC case company. Results of the sensitivity analysis from different cases demonstrate that the integrated AHP-VIKOR model is quite sensitive to the weights assigned to the evaluation criteria. This finding underlines the importance of forming a capable, qualified group of experts for the decision-making procedure. The results of the empirical study show that the proposed evaluation framework is practical for solving partner selection problems.

Partner selection is critical to the success of a collaborative PD process. The main contribution of this paper is the definition and development of an effective evaluation framework to guide managers for suitable PD partner selection. In our knowledge, there exists no study in the literature that combines the established AHP VIKOR model for PD partner selection problem. This study can be useful to researchers to better understand PD partner selection problem theoretically, as well as to organizations in designing better satisfying PD partner evaluation systems.

The authors present a location selection model for the field hospital to build after a possible earthquake in Ankara, Turkey using the VIKOR method.

Companies or governments that make location selection decisions to improve their performance in new investment decisions for different service industries. On the other hand, disasters, especially earthquakes, force the governments to evaluate their existing potentialities and develop action plans to improve their middle and long-term preparations. This paper proposes a VIKOR method-based location selection model for the field hospital to build after a possible earthquake. Also, the authors present a methodology using the VIKOR method that how government agencies take action for the field hospital's location selection process via VIKOR methodology.

The modeling and application results show that the field hospital's location selection decision-making process improves considerably using the VIKOR model. This paper shows that the proposed VIKOR-based model can rank alternatives suitability at various criteria targeting to minimize the possible earthquake's impact and obtains a single overall ranking score to select the best alternative.

The study does not consider the uncertain nature of the field hospital selection problem. The application part is restricted to the Ankara case. But the proposed model can easily extend for different locations in the world.

This paper presents the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework study of the establishment of field hospitals and demonstrates its importance when criteria diversity is restricted.