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This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

In an international merger and acquisition, the merged company often faces many difficulties. If we look into this case, China’s Fosun took many measures to conquer barriers and set a solid foundation: aligning the strategy of the company, choosing the allies, understanding local legal system as well as taking special measures concerning the real conditions. These together raise the possibility for Chinese companies to overcome international challenges.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The paper aims to find the correlation between the microparameters and the macroparameters of the soil. The study aims to calibrate the macroscale and microscale parameters of rolling resistance contact models to successfully apply the discrete element method to do some research of the geotechnical problem.

The paper opted for an exploratory study using the PFC3D to simulate the triaxial tests that include more than 50 cases and the coupling analysis method, which considering several effect of various factors.

The paper provides a quantitative relationship between the macroparameters and microparameters of the rolling resistance linear model and a method for fast calibration of macroscopic parameters is proposed and verified by a triaxial test example.

This paper provides the quantitative relationship of micro and macroparameters in the rolling resistance linear model by studying a single factor and considering the coupling effect of various factors and a fast method for the calibration of microparameters based on the rolling resistance linear model is proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to study the reasons and decision-making processes of heterogeneous firms’ bribery behavior, and how they will affect an aggregate economy’s development and corruption status.

The authors build a dynamic model to study a firm’s joint decision to bribe and invest, and how the decision is determined by its production and infrastructure status. The authors simulate the firm-level decision and development paths, and then build an aggregate economy consisting of heterogeneous firms. The authors then also simulate the development and corruption growth paths of the economy, by calibrating the model according to Chinese manufacturing firms in 2012.

Following the simulation results, the authors conduct counterfactual policy analyses. By comparing between the simulation results of two different counterfactual scenarios, the authors study how a government could control bribing better – as to decrease the number of bribers, and the average amount of the bribery payments. It is found that directly raising the bribery costs works more efficiently in controlling corruption, compared with reducing the benefits received by the bribers. The finding provides insightful policy implications for the government to clear up its economy.

The paper makes a novel and unique contribution to the literature by filling the current theoretical gap. The authors introduce a dynamic firm-level model to interpret firms’ bribery decisions and replicate the aggregate stylized facts. The paper innovatively treats bribery as both discrete and continuous decisions. Given both types of bribery decisions, now the authors can successfully simulate and quantify a firm’s intertemporal status and growth path.

This study explores food delivery app users and technology acceptance model as a theoretical underpinning. This study thus investigated the determinants of usefulness, ease of use and intention to use for food delivery app service.

The variables of delivery time, diverse menu, quarantine, review quality and ease of use are employed as determinants of usefulness. The antecedents of ease of use are easy registration and easy payment. This study also examined the association between ease of use, usefulness and intention to use. This study collected data using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and the number of valid observations for statistical analysis was 484. A structural equation model was used to test the hypotheses.

Regarding the results, usefulness was positively affected by delivery time, quarantine, review quality and ease of use. Additionally, ease of use was positively impacted by easy registration and easy payment. Finally, this study showed that ease of use positively affects both usefulness and intention to use, and usefulness is positively associated with intention to use.

This study contributes to the literature by ensuring the explanatory power of technology acceptance model for food delivery app.

Live-streaming e-commerce is becoming a new way for many consumers to shop. During the live broadcast process, the interaction between anchors and customers plays a decisive role on consumers' purchasing decisions. This study aims to explore how two types of interaction between the anchor and the customers (i.e. task-oriented interaction and relationship-oriented interaction) affect customers' purchase decisions.

The study establishes a model based on online trust theory and multi-sensor interaction theory. To validate the model, we carried out five simulated live-streaming events and collected data through a scenario-based survey of the viewers participating in the live-streaming (N = 244). Structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypotheses.

Both task-oriented interaction and relationship-oriented interaction have a positive impact on users' purchase decisions through the mediation of virtual touch, emotional trust and cognitive trust. Sense of power has opposite moderating effects on the impacts of relationship-oriented interaction on emotional trust and cognitive trust.

This study enriches the theory of live-streaming e-commerce by demonstrating the decisive roles of two types of anchor–customer interaction, the mediation roles of virtual touch, cognitive trust, and emotional trust in customer purchase decisions, as well as the moderating effect of sense of power on customer decision-making processes. The findings provide practical insights for anchors and live-streaming platforms about how they should arrange live-streaming content to enhance consumer purchasing decisions.

This paper aims to investigate the approach combine the deep learning (DL) and finite element method for the magneto-thermal coupled problem.

To achieve the DL of electrical device with the hypothesis of a small dataset, with ground truth data obtained from the FEM analysis, U-net, a highly efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to extract hidden features and trained in a supervised manner to predict the magneto-thermal coupled analysis results for different topologies. Using part of the FEM results as training samples, the DL model obtained from effective off-line training can be used to predict the distribution of the magnetic field and temperature field of other cases.

The possibility and feasibility of the proposed approach are investigated by discussing the influence of various network parameters, in particular, the four most important factors are training sample size, learning rate, batch size and optimization algorithm respectively. It is shown that DL based on U-net can be used as an efficiency tool in multi-physics analysis and achieve good performance with only small datasets.

It is shown that DL based on U-net can be used as an efficiency tool in multi-physics analysis and achieve good performance with only small datasets.

The study aims to investigate the effects of pre-loading histories (pre-shearing and pre-consolidation) on the liquefaction behaviour of saturated loose sand via discrete element method (DEM) simulations.

The pre-shearing history is mimicked under drained conditions (triaxial compression) with different pre-shearing strain levels ranging from 0% to 2%. The pre-consolidation history is mimicked by increasing the isotropic compression to different levels ranging from 100 kPa to 300 kPa. The macroscopic and microscopic behaviours are analysed and compared.

Temporary liquefaction, or quasi-steady state (QSS), is observed in most samples. A higher pre-shearing or pre-consolidation level can provide higher liquefaction resistance. The ultimate state line is found to be unique and independent of the pre-loading histories in stress space. The Lade instability line prematurely predicts the onset of liquefaction for all samples, both with and without pre-loading histories. The redundancy index is an effective microscopic indicator to monitor liquefaction, and the onset of the liquefaction corresponds to the phase transition state where the value of redundancy index is one, which is true for all cases irrespective of the proportions of sliding contacts.

The liquefaction behaviour of granular materials still remains elusive, especially concerning the effects of pre-loading histories on soils. Furthermore, the investigation of the effects of pre-consolidation histories on undrained behaviour and its comparison to pre-sheared samples is rarely reported in the DEM literature.