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The rapid advancement of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) presents significant opportunities for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. However, despite their potential, UAV applications face numerous barriers, including technical, regulatory and safety challenges, which hinder their widespread adoption. While existing research highlights these challenges, it provides limited guidance on comprehensive strategies to address them, which in turn may hinder the wider adoption of UAVs. This study seeks to fill this gap by identifying the multi-dimensional challenges associated with UAVs in AEC and developing a strategic roadmap that offers actionable insights for stakeholders, facilitating safer and more efficient UAV integration.

The 24 interviews were conducted to identify the challenges and potential strategies of UAV applications in the AEC industry. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the collected text contents, qualitative analysis was used to construct a conceptual strategy roadmap and focus group meetings were used to verify the roadmap.

The primary technical challenges include short battery life, loss of global positioning system (GPS)/compass and UAV magnetic interference. The critical safety risks are collisions, falls and absence of safety awareness among remote pilots and workers. Additionally, some practitioners struggled to meet operational requirements while maintaining the productivity of AEC flight operations. Furthermore, existing remote pilot training programs are generic and lack trade-specific training content.

Despite the valuable benefits and contributions of this study, it is essential to acknowledge certain limitations encountered, which are outlined below. It is essential to note that the respondents in this study primarily came from Hong Kong, and the challenges may vary in different countries or regions. However, it is worth mentioning that the study interviewed specialists with international project experience who provided their insights from a global perspective.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the multi-dimensional challenges and strategies of UAV adoption in the AEC industry. The strategic roadmap will guide stakeholders to take proper actions for the safe integration of UAVs into the AEC industry.

This empirical study contributes to understanding stakeholders’ needs and engagement with regard to the new technology adoption. It also proposes a novel strategic roadmap for addressing the challenges through collaborative efforts among all relevant stakeholders, promoting safe and efficient UAV uses in the AEC sector.

This study is dedicated to investigate why Mainland Chinese students pursuing higher education in Hong Kong are more likely to return to first-tier cities in Mainland China rather than stay in Hong Kong after graduation, despite Hong Kong’s increasing efforts to retain them as talent. By identifying the rationale that leads them to make such a choice, a critical gap in talent retention strategies for emerging education hubs can thus be addressed.

Through semi-structured interviews among 20 Mainland Chinese students have recently graduated from Hong Kong institutions, this study analyzes the two-way push and pull factors between Hong Kong and first-tier cities in China, elucidating how international students are influenced by various factors and make the common decisions to go to first-tier cities rather than Hong Kong after graduation.

The study reveals that while Hong Kong’s favorable visa policies and sector-specific employment opportunities serve as significant pull factors, they are outweighed by the comparative advantages of first-tier cities in mainland China. The comparative advantages of first-tier cities in China, including stronger economic incentives, better social integration prospects and more attractive talent recruitment policies, ultimately determine students' destination choices.

One major limitation lies in the relatively small and specific sample size, which may not fully capture the diversity of experiences among the targeted population. Moreover, the potential destinations of graduates are not limited to Hong Kong or the first-tier cities in China.

This research extends the traditional two-way push-pull theory by integrating comparative advantage analysis, offering a nuanced framework to evaluate international student mobility and talent retention dynamics. The research simultaneously provide insights for policymakers and higher education institutions to refine talent retention strategies, enhance the appeal of emerging education hubs and better align policies with global student mobility trends.

The purpose of this study is to explore how to select a suitable supply chain collaboration paradigm (SCCP) based on the intelligent manufacturing model (IMM) of enterprises.

Given the fit between internal collaboration and external collaboration, we propose a model to select a suitable SCCP based on two-sided matching between SCCPs and IMMs. In this decision problem, we invited five university scholars and seven related consultants to evaluate SCCPs and IMMs based on the regret theory, which is used to obtain the perceived utility and matching results. The evaluation values are comfortably expressed through probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs). Also, we set the lowest acceptance threshold to improve the accuracy of matching results.

The findings indicate that the characteristics of IMMs can significantly influence the selection of SCCPs, and an SCCP is not suitable for all IMMs. Interestingly, the study findings suggest that the selection of SCCP is diverse and multi-optional under the constraints of IMMs.

Existing studies have explored supply chain collaboration (SCC) in Industry 4.0 to improve supply chain performance, but less attention has been paid to the impact of the match between SCCPs and IMMs on supply chain performance. And even fewer studies have addressed how to select a suitable SCCP in different IMMs. This study provides a unique contribution to the practice of SCC and expands the understanding of supply chain management in Industry 4.0.

The present study uses a meta-analysis technique to explore the association between corporate governance and dividend policy. The extant literature delivers inconclusive findings on the relationship between corporate governance and dividend policy. Therefore, this study aims to resolve the issues and deliver comprehensive results.

The study involves a meta-analysis of 53 research studies using preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses and population, intervention, comparison, outcome and study design approaches. The paper examines the impact of moderators: corporate governance structure (Anglo-American, communitarian or emerging system) and dividend distribution metrics (dividend over net income, dividend over total assets and absolute amount of dividend/dividend per share). The study involves subgroup analysis and meta-regression analysis to examine the impact of moderators.

The study’s results specify that board size and percentage of female directors significantly impact the dividend decisions of the company. In addition, subgroup analysis and meta-regression results demonstrate that dividend measurement proxy moderates the association between corporate governance and dividend policy.

Based on the existing literature surveyed, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study is the first to conduct a meta-analysis on the relationship between corporate governance and dividend policy. This paper is unique and the first one of its kind (to the best of the authors’ knowledge) to cover all these moderating variables under an umbrella and consolidate the results to understand the existing knowledge and direct future research in the area of corporate governance and dividend decisions.

This study aims to explore the impact of perceived information quality on customers' self-efficacy and knowledge and how these factors subsequently influence perceived value and intentions to participate and visit.

A video scenario was used to depict a co-creation dining experience, with participants recruited through self-selected convenience sampling. Data were collected from 472 participants who viewed a video showcasing co-creation dining in restaurants. Structural equation modeling was applied to test the proposed hypotheses.

Results indicate that perceived information quality significantly enhances customers' knowledge and confidence. Increased knowledge and self-efficacy lead to higher perceived value, which subsequently boosts customers' intentions to participate and visit. Additionally, knowledge and self-efficacy partially mediate the relationship between perceived information quality and perceived value.

This study applies framing and processing theories, highlighting how clear, engaging presentation enhances perception, comprehension and self-efficacy in the co-creation process. Practical recommendations for restaurants include developing instructional materials, staff training and tiered experiences to improve customer engagement.

This study provides new insights into the role of information quality in shaping customer perceptions and behaviors in co-creation dining experiences, highlighting the importance of knowledge and self-efficacy in enhancing perceived value and participation intentions.

This paper aims to reveal the green governance role played by stock connect in transition economies from the perspective of corporates’ environmental violations and provides implications for the coordination and optimization of subsequent stock market liberalization and green transformation policies in pursuit of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

With the data of Chinese listed enterprises, this paper takes the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect or Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect in China as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) model to identify the impact of stock market liberalization on the corporates’ environmental violations.

The findings reveal that the stock market liberalization significantly restrains the corporates’ environmental violations. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity tests, including excluding two-way effects, adjusting the year of policy implementation, replacing the core variables, introducing the regional fixed effects and excluding the interference effect of other relevant policies during the sample period. Furthermore, the stock market liberalization is beneficial for upgrading information disclosure quality, improving internal governance capability, strengthening environmental protection incentives, and thus restrains corporates’ environmental violations. Meanwhile, heterogeneity tests show that the inhibitory effects are more significant in those grouped samples which is large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden.

We make two marginal contributions to the current literature. First, this paper enriches the literature on the factors influencing corporate environmental violations by focusing on how the macro-level financial policy influences the micro-level corporate environmental violations. One the one hand, prior studies mainly focused on the consequences of corporate environmental violations; however, there is still a puzzle that the effect of stock market liberalization cannot be fully justified to influence corporate environmental violations. The findings help explain this puzzle by examining that stock market liberalization can restrain corporate environmental violations. Moreover, prior studies mainly focused on corporate share price (Yunsen Chen et al., 2022), market liquidity (Han Kim and Singal, 2000), information disclosure (Liang, Lin, and Chin 2012), corporate governance (Bae and Goyal, 2010) and corporate violations (Lingyun Xiong et al., 2021), but not on corporate environmental violations. We assume that the suppression effect of stock market liberalization on corporate environmental violations can help reduce corporate environmental violations, improve corporates’ awareness of environmental compliance. Second, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the literature on stock market liberalization by investigating the restraining effect of Stock Connect on corporate environmental violations from the perspective of information channel, corporate governance channel and motivation channel, which is of practical significance. Moreover, we investigate the differences in the inhibitory effects of stock market liberalization on different enterprises' environmental violations, from firm size, property rights, enterprise assessment results, tax burden to geographical location, which is conducive to the construction of a green financial system and the promotion of sustainable economic development. Our results show that firms which are large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden tend to compliance with environmental laws. These findings emphasize the importance and benefits of Stock Connect.

This paper takes the Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect as a quasi-natural experiment and investigates the impact of capital market liberalization on the corporate debt maturity structure. It also aims to provide some policy implications for corporate debt financing and further liberalization of the capital market in China.

Employing the exogenous event of Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect and using the data of Chinese A-share firms from 2010 to 2020, this study constructs a difference-in-differences model to examine the relationship between capital market liberalization and corporate debt maturity structure. To validate the results, this study performed several robustness tests, including the parallel test, the placebo test, the Heckman two-stage regression and the propensity score matching.

This paper finds that capital market liberalization has significantly increased the proportion of long-term debt of target firms. Further analyses suggest that the impact of capital market liberalization on the debt maturity structure is more pronounced for firms with lower management ownership and non-Big 4 audit. Channel tests show that capital market liberalization improves firms’ information environment and curbs self-interested management behavior.

This research provides empirical evidence for the consequences of capital market liberalization and enriches the literature on the determinants of corporate debt maturity structure. Further this study makes a reference for regulators and financial institutions to improve corporate financing through the governance role of capital market liberalization.

The study explores the mechanism between employee demand–ability fit and promotability ratings. Moreover, we examine whether political skill moderates the relationship above.

The present study received 260 effective supervisor-rated questionnaires from various industries in Taiwan.

The results reveal that employee demand–ability fit positively relates to promotability ratings, and task performance mediates the above relationship. In addition, political skill positively moderates the relationship between employee demand–ability fit and task performance.

We used the supervisor rating for our variables to test the hypotheses.

Live streaming e-commerce, which integrates real-time video interaction with online shopping, has quickly become a popular sales channel. It not only allows for immediate feedback but also builds a sense of trust and connection between streamers and consumers. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), we investigate how central and peripheral route factors affect consumers’ trust building and purchase intentions. Additionally, we identify consumer involvement as a key moderator affecting the relationship between central route factors and trust in product as well as the relationship between peripheral route factors and trust in streamer.

To test the research model, we collected data from 423 consumers on TaoBao Live.

The findings show that information completeness, accuracy and currency positively affect trust in the product, while perceived physical characteristic similarity, streamer humor attractiveness and passion attractiveness positively affect trust in the streamer. Trust in the streamer positively influences trust in the product, which subsequently impacts purchase intention. Moreover, involvement moderates the effects of information accuracy, currency, perceived physical characteristic similarity and passion attractiveness on trust.

First, we examine the direct influence of product- and streamer-related cues on consumer trust and purchase intention through distinct pathways. Second, we adopt ELM to explain the process of consumer trust building by investigating how central and peripheral route factors influence purchase intention through consumer trust in live streaming settings. Third, we incorporate involvement as a crucial moderator, shedding light on the boundary conditions of trust building in live streaming e-commerce.

This research aims to develop a blockchain smart contract–enabled framework to resolve power imbalance problems in construction payment.

This research adopts a design science research method to develop the blockchain smart contract–enabled framework. The authors then develop a prototype system. Finally, the authors evaluate its performance in solving power imbalance-induced payment problems.

The results show that the prototype system can resolve power imbalance problems in construction payment by allowing project participants to make transparent and decentralized decisions that are self-enforceable by blockchain smart contracts.

This study provides theoretical explanations for how blockchain smart contracts can resolve power imbalances in construction payment; based on that, it proposes a novel blockchain smart contract–enabled method to rebalance the power of stakeholders in construction payment. Thus, it contributes to the body of knowledge on blockchain technology and construction payment.

This study moves beyond a conceptual framework and develops a practical blockchain smart contract system for resolving power imbalances in construction payment, strengthening construction project members' confidence in using blockchain technology.

The proposed blockchain smart contract–enabled solution helps mitigate negative social impacts associated with late payment and non-payment. Furthermore, the research maximizes trust among participants in payment processes to inspire collaborative culture in the construction industry.

This paper introduces a novel blockchain smart contract integrated method, allowing project stakeholders to resolve power imbalance problems in construction payment through decentralized decision-making.