Search results

The pandemic has caused severe disruptions and significant losses in various industries. In particular, the nursing service industry has been greatly affected, leading to increased service costs and attrition of nursing service provider (NSP) residents. Although prior studies suggest that outsourcing may mitigate losses from disruptions, there still lacks a detailed analysis of whether and when to adopt such a disruption solution.

This study develops a two-period game-theoretical model to explore the impacts of demand and cost disruptions caused by the pandemic on NSPs’ operational strategies, suppliers’ strategy choices and equilibrium prices and demand.

The results present several novel managerial insights. First, we suggest that higher demand and cost disruptions decrease service demand, but do not necessarily prompt an NSP to outsource nursing services. Interestingly, we find that even when the service cost of the outsourcing strategy is low, the NSP may still insist on the in-house strategy. Additionally, the equilibrium strategy does not always result in lower prices and higher demand.

Our findings provide insightful takeaways for NSPs to cope with the pandemic in the nursing service industry. The results also offer theoretical support for other industries to recover from demand and cost disruptions.

The study aims to address a critical gap in existing healthcare payment schemes and care service pricing by recognizing the influential role of patients' decisions on self-management efforts. These decisions not only impact health outcomes but also shape the demand for care, subsequently influencing care costs. Despite the significance of this interplay, current payment schemes often overlook these dynamics. The research focuses on investigating the implications of a novel behavior-based payment scheme, designed to align incentives and establish a direct connection between patients' decisions and care costs. The primary objective is to comprehensively understand whether and how this innovative payment scheme structure influences key stakeholders, including patients, care providers, insurers and overall social welfare.

In this paper, we propose a game-theoretical model to incorporate the performance of self-management with the demand for healthcare service, compare the patient's effort decision for self-management and provider's price decision for healthcare service under a behavior-based scheme with that under two implemented widely payment schemes, that is, co-payment scheme and co-insurance scheme.

Our findings confirm that the behavior-based scheme incentives patient self-management more than current schemes while reducing their possibility of seeking healthcare service, which indirectly induces the provider to lower the price of the service. The stakeholders' utility under various payment schemes is sensitive to the cost of treatment and the perceived health utility of patients. Especially, patient health awareness is not always benefited provider profit, as it motivates patient self-management while diminishing the demand for care.

We provide a novel framework for characterizing behavior-based payment schemes. Our results confirm the need for modification of the current payment scheme to incentivize patient self-management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate dynamics of causal interactions and financial risk contagion among BRICS stock markets under rare events.

Two methods are adopted: The new causal inference technique, namely, the Liang causality analysis based on information flow theory and the dynamic causal index (DCI) are used to measure the financial risk contagion.

The causal relationships among the BRICS stock markets estimated by the Liang causality analysis are significantly stronger in the mid-periods of rare events than in the pre- and post-periods. Moreover, different rare events have heterogeneous effects on the causal relationships. Notably, under rare events, there is almost no significant Liang's causality between the Chinese and other four stock markets, except for a few moments, indicating that the former can provide a relatively safe haven within the BRICS. According to the DCIs, the causal linkages have significantly increased during rare events, implying that their connectivity becomes stronger under extreme conditions.

The obtained results not only provide important implications for investors to reasonably allocate regional financial assets, but also yield some suggestions for policymakers and financial regulators in effective supervision, especially in extreme environments.

This paper uses the Liang causality analysis to construct the causal networks among BRICS stock indices and characterize their causal linkages. Furthermore, the DCI derived from the causal networks is applied to measure the financial risk contagion of the BRICS countries under three rare events.

This study aims to enhance an enterprise’s private cloud services by optimally determining the ownership of cloud computing resources and responsibility for maintenance and operations. The core objective is to identify the most cost-effective private cloud deployment model at the intersection of technology and business considerations.

This study evaluates three ownership and responsibility models, each encompassing decisions related to candidate data center locations, resource provisioning, and demand placements. Drawing from the cloud computing literature, these models are referred to as deployment models. The research formulates a private cloud deployment model selection problem and introduces an established Lagrangian-relaxation-based optimization approach, combined with a novel greedy relieving-pooling heuristic, to facilitate model selection.

This study identifies the optimal deployment model for a representative instance using real test-bed data from the US, demonstrating the private cloud deployment model selection problem. Various numerical examples are analyzed to explore the influence of environmental parameters. Generally, the virtual PC model is optimal for low demand arrival rates and resource requirements, while the on-premises PC model is preferable for higher values of these parameters. Additionally, the virtual PC model is found to be optimal when enroute latency coefficients are large.

This study contributes to the literature by formulating an optimization problem that integrates performance, financial, and assurance metrics for enterprises. The introduction of a solution approach enables enterprises to make informed decisions regarding ownership and responsibility design. The study effectively bridges the gap between academic research and industry demands from a business perspective.

Most employees are forced to telework due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which brings novel, disruptive, and critical challenges both in work and life. Based on event system theory and equity theory, this research explores how and when forced teleworking event strength (i.e. novelty, disruption, and criticality) affects employees’ work and life-related outcomes.

We conducted two studies to test the hypothesized moderated mediation model (Study 1: an experiment survey, N = 141; Study 2: a time-lagged survey, N = 243) with employees forced to telework from China.

The results largely support our hypotheses. Study 1 indicates that the manipulation of forced teleworking event strength (high vs low) is effective, and the main effect of forced teleworking event strength on work-family conflict is significant. Moreover, Study 2 shows that work-family conflict mediates the relationship between forced teleworking event strength (i.e. novelty, disruption, and criticality) and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Furthermore, perceived overqualification positively moderates the relationship between work-family conflict and CWB. In detail, the relationship between work-family conflict and CWB becomes stronger when perceived overqualification is higher.

This research provides a new perspective on how forced teleworking event strength impacts CWB and advances the literature on the relevant theories.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the tea stem natural dye was extracted from tea stem waste and applied to dyeing silk fiber, after which the properties of dyed samples were tested and analyzed.

The dyeing process was optimized using the response surface methodology (RSM) approach. Dyeing temperature, pH and time were chosen as variables and the color difference value as a response. The properties of dyed samples were tested and analyzed.

The optimized dyeing process was as follows: dyeing temperature 70°C, pH 3.5 and time 110 min. The K/S and color difference value of silk fiber dyed with the optimal process dye enzymatic oxidation with laccase was 1.4 and 27.8, respectively. The silk fiber dyed has excellent color fastness, antioxidant and antibacterial property, which greatly increases the added value of the dyed products. Furthermore, the optimized dyeing process did not significantly affect the strength properties and handle of the silk fiber.

Researchers have not used statistical analysis to optimize the process of dyeing process of silk fiber by tea stem natural dye enzymatic oxidation with laccase using response surface methodology. Additionally, this dyeing process was a low-temperature dyeing process, which not only saves energy consumption and reduces silk fiber damage but also obtains superbly dyeing results and biological functional properties, achieve the effects of waste utilization and clean dyeing.

We explore the driving forces behind the channel choices of the manufacturer and the platform by considering asymmetric selling cost and demand information.

This paper develops game-theoretical models to study different channel strategies for an E-commerce supply chain, in which a manufacturer distributes products through a platform that may operate in either the marketplace channel or the reseller channel.

Three primary models are built and analyzed. The comparison results show that the platform would share demand information in the reseller channel only if the service cost performance is relatively high. Besides, with an increasing selling cost, the equilibrium channel might shift from the marketplace to the reseller. With increasing information accuracy, the manufacturer tends to select the marketplace channel, while the platform tends to select the reseller channel if the service cost performance is low and tends to select the marketplace channel otherwise.

All these results have been numerically verified in the experiments. At last, we also resort to numerical study and find that as the service cost performance increases, the equilibrium channel may shift from the reseller channel to the marketplace channel. These results provide managerial guidance to online platforms and manufacturers regarding strategic decisions on channel management.

Although prior research has paid extensive attention to the driving forces behind the online channel choice between marketplace and reseller, there is at present few study considering the case where a manufacturer selling through an online platform faces a demand information disadvantage in the reseller channel and sales inefficiency in the marketplace channel. To fill this research gap, our work illustrates the interaction between demand information asymmetry and selling cost asymmetry to identify the equilibrium channel strategy and provides useful managerial guidelines for both online platforms and manufacturers.

This paper aims to investigate the moisture diffusion behavior in a system-in-package module systematically by moisture-thermalmechanical-coupled finite element modeling with different structure parameters under increasingly harsh environment.

A finite element model for a system-in-package module was built with moisture-thermal-mechanical-coupled effects to study the subsequences of hygrothermal conditions.

It was found in this paper that the moisture diffusion path was mainly dominated by hygrothermal conditions, though structure parameters can affect the moisture distribution. At lower temperatures (30°C~85°C), the direction of moisture diffusion was from the periphery to the center of the module, which was commonly found in simulations and literatures. However, at relatively higher temperatures (125°C~220°C), the diffusion was from printed circuit board (PCB) to EMC due to the concentration gradient from PCB to EMC across the EMC/PCB interface. It was also found that there exists a critical thickness for EMC and PCB during the moisture diffusion. When the thickness of EMC or PCB increased to a certain value, the diffusion of moisture reached a stable state, and the concentration on the die surface in the packaging module hardly changed. A quantified correlation between the moisture diffusion coefficient and the critical thickness was then proposed for structure parameter optimization in the design of system-in-package module.

The different moisture diffusion behaviors at low and high temperatures have seldom been reported before. This work can facilitate the understanding of moisture diffusion within a package and offer some methods about minimizing its effect by design optimization.

This paper aims to compare and analyze the effect of the dual-credit policy and product substitution rate on the automakers’ operational strategies under different production modes (e.g. centralized and independent), and further illustrate which production mode is more conducive to improving new energy vehicle (NEV) development.

The decision-making models for a centralized production mode where an integrated automaker produces both NEVs and fuel vehicles (FVs) and for independent production mode where an NEV automaker faces competition from a traditional FV automaker were formulated. The equilibrium solutions of each production mode were obtained by extreme value and game theory methods. The conclusions of the theoretical analysis were further verified with numerical analyses using IBM-MATLAB R2019a. Some management insights could be obtained by comparison analysis.

Under the dual-credit policy, an increase in the NEV credit trading price will always raise production quantity of NEVs, but only in an independent production mode where a higher trading price will also bring higher total profits to NEV automakers. In addition, only when the NEV credit trading price is high enough, a rising product substitution rate will be more favorable to NEV production and restrain FV production. Furthermore, an independent production mode is more favorable for the initial production of NEVs, but as each of the two vehicle types captures a certain amount of market share, a centralized production mode will be more conducive to the full replacement of FVs by NEVs.

The main contributions of this study include the formulation of decision-making models for FVs and NEVs in not only a centralized production mode but also an independent production mode. Moreover, this paper comprehensively analyzes how the dual-credit policy and product substitution relationship affect automakers’ production and pricing decisions. Then, the specific conditions under which each production mode is more conducive to NEV production and sales are summarized. The results proposed in this study provide scientific managerial insights for automakers and policy makers.

The purpose of this paper is to study the anodic dissolution processes of alloy 690 in NaCl + Na₂S₂O₃ solutions by using digital holography.

The digital holography technique was used to in situ observe the dynamic processes occurring at the electrode|electrolyte interface during the anodic dissolution of alloy 690 in NaCl + Na₂S₂O₃ solutions, both in the presence and absence of a magnetic field (MF).

In 3.5% NaCl + 0.01 M Na₂S₂O₃ solutions, MF inhibited intergranular corrosion (IGC) because it increased the defects in the oxide film and facilitated the uniform adsorption of low concentration of S on these defects due to its stirring effects, which resulted in a weakened adsorption of S at the grain boundaries. Conversely, in 3.5% NaCl + 0.1 M Na₂S₂O₃ solutions, MF promoted IGC by increasing the number of defects in the oxide film, with lots of S species preferentially adsorbing at the grain boundaries. The resultant salt films formed more readily, inhibiting the formation of the oxide film at the grain boundaries.

Through the use of digital holography, it was possible to in situ observe the initiation of IGC at a single grain boundary and its progression to adjacent grain boundaries, regardless of the presence or absence of MF.