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The pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) based on smartphones has been widely applied in continuous indoor positioning. However, when the position of the mobile phone and the walking patterns of the pedestrian are mixed, traditional PDR tends to become confused and thus degrade performance. To address this issue, this paper aims to propose an improved PDR scheme by focusing on gait pattern recognition and the impact of short-period but negative transitions on tracking.

The overall solution uses the inertial sensor integrated within the phone for positioning. A binary classifier-based change point detection algorithm is used to identify the transition points in pedestrian gait. Additionally, to enhance the accuracy of gait recognition, this paper presents a combined CNN-attention-based bi-directional long short-term memory(ABiLSTM) model, integrating convolutional neural networks (CNN), bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) and an attention mechanism, to recognize the current gait pattern. The outcomes of this gait pattern recognition are then applied to PDR. Based on distinct gait patterns, corresponding PDR strategies are devised to enable continuous tracking and positioning of pedestrians.

Through experimental verification, the CNN-ABiLSTM model achieves a gait recognition accuracy of 99.52% on the self-constructed data set. The pedestrian navigation estimation method proposed in this paper, which is based on gait recognition assistance, demonstrates a 32.56% improvement in accuracy over traditional positioning algorithms in multi-gait scenarios.

The improved PDR scheme algorithm significantly enhances the robustness and smoothness of pedestrian tracking, particularly during multiple gait transitions. This, in turn, provides strong support for the utilization of low-cost inertial sensors integrated within mobile phones for indoor positioning applications.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.