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Examines the three‐way interaction between budget emphasis, participation and task difficulty affecting managerial performance within the framework suggested by Harrison (1992) with a sample of 197 functional heads from Singaporean and Australian manufacturing companies. The results support a three‐way interaction between budget emphasis, budgetary participation and task difficulty affecting managerial performance and second, cultural differences between Singapore and Australia (pertaining to power distance) which interact neither with budgetary participation nor budget emphasis. The results also suggest that high budgetary participation (regardless of budget emphasis) in high task difficulty situations and high budget emphasis (regardless of budgetary participation) in low task difficulty situations are associated with improved managerial performance in Singapore and Australia.

The development of low-carbon production is impeded by the investment costs of green technology research and development (R&D) and carbon emission reduction while facing the uncertain risk of emission reduction investment. With the government's carbon emission constraints, green manufacturers implement the advance selling strategy to increase both profit and reduction level. However, few studies consider the consumer's green preference and emission constraints in advance selling market and spot market independently. The authors' paper investigates the optimal strategies of advance selling pricing and reduction effort for green manufacturers to maximize profits.

The authors' paper designs a stochastic model and investigates the manufacturer's optimal strategies of advance selling price and emission reduction efforts by categorizing different purchasing periods of low-carbon consumers. With the challenges of uncertain demand and government's emission constraints, the authors' develop the non-linear optimization model to investigate the manufacturer's profit-oriented decisions.

The results show the government's carbon constraints cannot influence the manufacturer's profit, but the consumer's low-carbon preference in the advance selling period can. Interestingly, the manufacturer will make fewer reduction efforts even when the consumers have stronger environmental awareness. In addition, the increasing consumer price sensitivity will exacerbate the profit loss from mandatory emissions reduction. Overall, for achieving a win–win situation between emission reduction and profit growth, green manufacturers should not only consider the sales strategies, market demand, and government constraints in a low-carbon market, but also pay attention to the uncertainty of green technology innovation.

With the consideration of the government's carbon emission constraints, uncertain demand, and low-carbon consumer's preferences, the authors' study innovatively incorporates the joint impacts of advance selling strategy and emission reduction effort strategy and then differentiates between two cases that pertain to the diverse carbon emission regulations.

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 rapid growth of the solo economy in the Asia-Pacific area indicates an economic transition. In East Asia, solitary households are growing along with low marital rates and birth rates under high economic pressure. Because of these population changes, malls must provide good quality service to meet the specific needs of solitary households and social households. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this study, relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction (CS), perceived value, corporate image and customer loyalty were compared between social and solitary customers of Taiwan click-and-mortar malls. The effects of five service quality dimensions on CS and customer loyalty were investigated by structural equation modeling.

The analytical results show that all hypothesized relationships among factors were supported with the exception of the impact of perceived value on satisfaction and the impact of the corporate image on satisfaction. Additionally, the comparison between solitary and social customers showed that service quality, corporate image and customer loyalty have strong relationships without differences between both kinds of customers. Solitary and social customers only differed in the impact of perceived value on loyalty.

The managerial implication of this study is that, to satisfy both social and solitary customers and to increase their loyalty, Click-and-mortar malls (CAM malls) should apply different service quality strategies for social and solitary customers. To satisfy both types of customers, a strategy for increasing visible cares should be applied in social customers, and a strategy for increasing the perception of reliability, assurance and visible cares should be applied in solitary customers. To enhance the loyalty of solitary customers, a CAM mall should enhance the value perceived by solitary customers, which can help CAM malls increase the loyalty of solitary customers in the solo economy.

The solo economy is a hot topic in East Asia because the issue of solo economy impacts the market. A CAM mall must evolve its business to attract solitary customers. However, no studies compared perceived quality, satisfaction, perceived value, corporate image and loyalty between solitary customers and social customers. This study is the first study investigated the business model of CAM malls.

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.

This paper aims to explore one question: to what extent does urban rehabilitation impact the housing search cost of the low-income tenants.

This paper adopts the fixed effects time-on-market (TOM) model and pricing model to study the research question.

Urban rehabilitation lifts the subdivided units (SDUs’) prices by around 7%. For the SDU located in old districts, urban rehabilitation gives rise to the rental price up by 11%–12%. The SDUs in the area without urban rehabilitation experience a short marketing period of 16%–17%. The SDU located in the old district that is without urban rehabilitation would have a short marketing time.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the pioneering research to investigate the relationship between rehabilitation and low-income rental housing from the improved search theory. The improved search theory posits that under the circumstance of urban rehabilitation, low-income tenants’ options are limited and the search behavior will be restricted in the affordable areas, and then TOM will be shortened. With the concentration of SDUs in Hong Kong, the test of the search theory is broken down into two hypotheses. (H1) Urban rehabilitation leads to low-income housing prices increase. (H2) Low-income housing located in areas without urban rehabilitation has a shorter TOM.

This paper aims to examine the optimal sourcing strategies and pricing decisions of competing toy manufacturers and to discuss how manufacturers’ decisions are impacted by competition.

The authors consider a single-period model to characterise the competition between two competing toy manufacturers. Both of them are free to choose between virgin material and recycled material. The authors consider two types of consumers: sensitive consumers who are concerned about product safety and prefer the toy made of virgin material and insensitive consumers who do not care what material is used in the toy. The competing manufacturers play a Cournot competition.

The results reveal a special case of a win-win situation for both the manufacturer and the consumer. In addition, an increasing number of sensitive consumers does not always raise the price of virgin-material toys.

The authors derive the manufacturer’s equilibrium sourcing strategies, corresponding market-clearing prices and profits obtained.

The paper investigates how toy manufacturers’ optimal sourcing strategies are impacted by competition, considering market segments.

This chapter analyses the efficiency of African airlines using a two-stage network DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) model. Network DEA models usually take into account the production process with intermediate inputs derived from the first stage and a second stage that departs from it. This fundamental feature enables one to view the airline production process as a carry-over activity. The analysis covers the 2010–2013 period. The relative efficiency ranks are presented and policy implications are derived.

The low-temperature sintering of silica glass combined with additive manufacturing (AM) technology has brought a revolutionary change in glass manufacturing. This study aims to carry out in an attempt to achieve precious manufacturing of silicate glassy matrix through the method of slurry extrusion.

A low-cost slurry extrusion modelling technology is used to extrude silicate glassy matrix inks, composed of silicate glass powder with different amounts of additives. Extrudability of the inks, their printability window and the featuring curves of silicate glassy matrix are investigated. In addition, the properties of the low-temperature sintering green part as a functional part are explored and evaluated from morphology, hardness and colour.

The results showed that the particle size was mainly distributed from 1.4 µm to 5.3 µm, showing better slurry stability and print continuity. The parameters were set to 8 mm/s, 80% and 0.4 mm, respectively, to achieve better forming of three-dimensional (3D) samples. Besides, the organic binder removal step was concentrated on 200°C–300°C and 590°C–650°C was the fusion bonding temperature of the powder. The hardness values of 10 test samples ranged from 588 HL to 613 HL, which met the requirements of hard stones with super-strong mechanical strength. In addition, the mutual penetration of elements caused by temperature changes may lead to a colourful appearance.

The custom continuous AM technology enables the fabrication of a glass matrix with 3D structural features. The precise positioning technology of the glass matrix is expected to be applied more widely in functional parts.