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The national logistics policy report published by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Tourism in 2011 proposes to establish international logistics strategy teams in 10 different regions around Japan to satisfy the increasing demand for advance transportation infrastructure and stay competitive in Asia Pacific. The globalization of world economies creates many opportunities as well as challenges for international logistics companies to gain more business chances in this changing environment. The purpose of this paper is to improve service quality of international logistics companies and explores the quality function deployment in terms of quality evaluation method. The logistics service is particularly characterized by offering a series of transport solution and including other logistics activities. The major customers of the logistics services are the industrial clients. The customer satisfaction is key managerial mission since the competitiveness is a growing issue in this industry. The quality function deployment is one of the unique procedures to expose the requirements of customer and transform them into managerial tasks by cross correlation analysis between requirements and technical measures. The empirical study is performed to investigate service quality of the logistics industry by focusing on a group of leading logistics companies.

This study analyzes how digital technologies collaboration, and technological capabilities affect tourism products' advantage and supply chain resilience via virtual integration and customer service capabilities.

To achieve the goals of this study, a digital transformation model was formulated based on the real option theory (ROT) and digital competencies perspective. Data were collected from travel agencies in Taiwan. This study uses the partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique to analyze the research model, and 384 samples were collected from travel agencies for analysis.

The research results point out that digital technology collaboration and technical capabilities affect virtual integration and customer service capabilities; customer service capabilities should also be regarded as key influencing variables to improve tourism product advantages and supply chain flexibility.

This study shares a unique perspective on the digital transformation model, which includes antecedents, mediators and moderators, to construct the critical effects for analyzing the tourism products' advantage and supply chain resilience.

This paper aims to provide a new method to study and improve the dynamic characteristics of the four-column resistance strain force sensor through the elastomer structure design and optimization.

Based on the mechanism analysis method, the authors first present a dynamic characteristic model of the four-column resistance strain force sensors’ elastomer. Then, the authors verified and modified the model according to the Solidworks finite element simulation results. Finally, the authors designed and optimized two types of four-column elastomers based on the dynamic characteristic model and verified the improvement of sensor dynamic performance through a hammer knock dynamic experiment.

The Solidworks finite element simulation and hammer knock dynamic experiment results show that the relative error of the model is less than 10%, which confirms the accuracy of the model. The dynamic performance of the sensors based on the model can be improved by more than 30%, which is a great improvement in sensor dynamic performance.

The authors first present a dynamic characteristic model of the four-column elastomer and optimize the four-column sensors successfully based on the mechanism analysis method. And a new method to study and improve the dynamic characteristics of the resistance is provided.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of political connections on the association between firms' business strategy and their tax aggressiveness in an emerging economy such as China.

The authors study a large sample of Chinese public firms from 2011 to 2017 using a panel regression model. In addition, a change analysis, an instrument variable test and alternative measures/samples are implemented as robustness tests.

Firms adopting innovative business strategy are more tax aggressive overall. However, innovative firms with political connections are less tax aggressive compared to those without political connections.

This paper contributes to the understanding of firms' tax behaviors in an emerging economy setting. It suggests that there are costs associated with political connections, such as foregone tax saving opportunities, which are understudies in the prior literature.

This study aims to understand the perceived emotions of human–artificial intelligence (AI) interactions in the private sector. Moreover, this research discusses the transferability of these lessons to the public sector.

This research analysed the comments posted between June 2022 and June 2023 in the global open Reddit online community. A data mining approach was conducted, including a sentiment analysis technique and a qualitative approach.

The results show a prevalence of positive emotions. In addition, a pertinent percentage of negative emotions were found, such as hate, anger and frustration, due to human–AI interactions.

The insights from human–AI interactions in the private sector can be transferred to the governmental sector to leverage organisational performance, governmental decision-making, public service delivery and the creation of economic and social value.

Beyond the positive impacts of AI in government strategies, implementing AI can elicit negative emotions in users and potentially negatively impact the brand of private and government organisations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research bridging the gap by identifying the predominant negative emotions after a human–AI interaction.

To enrich the research on the economic consequences of enterprise digital development from the perspective of capacity utilization.

Using a sample of listed firms from 2010 to 2020, this paper exploits text analysis of annual reports to construct a proxy for enterprise digital development.

Results show that enterprise digital development not only improves their own capacity utilization but also generates a positive spillover effect on the capacity utilization of peer firms and firms in the supply chain. Next, based on the incomplete information about market demand and potential competitors when making capacity-building decisions, the mechanism tests show that improving the accuracy of market forecasts and reducing investment surges are potential channels behind the baseline results. Cross-sectional tests show the baseline result is more pronounced when industries are highly homogeneous and when firms have access to less information.

This paper contributes to the research related to the economic consequences of digital development. With the development of the digital economy, the real effects of enterprise digital development have also triggered extensive interest and exploration. Existing studies mainly examine the impact on physical operations, such as specialization division of labor, innovation activities, business performance or total factor productivity (Huang, Yu, & Zhang, 2019; Yuan, Xiao, Geng, & Sheng, 2021; Wang, Kuang, & Shao, 2017; Li, Liu, & Shao, 2021; Zhao, Wang, & Li, 2021). These studies measure the economic benefits from the perspective of the supply (output) side but neglect the importance of the supply system to adapt to the actual market demand. In contrast, this paper focuses on capacity utilization, aimed at estimating the net economic effect of digital development by considering the supply-demand fit scenario. Thus, our findings enrich the relevant studies on the potential consequences of digital development.

Lack of access to finance is a major constraint to the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurship in developing countries. The recent proliferation of mobile phone services, access to the internet and emerging technologies has led to a surge in the use of FinTech in Africa and is transforming the financial sector. This paper aims to examine whether FinTech developments heterogeneously contribute to the growth of digital finance for SMEs and entrepreneurship in 47 African countries from 2013 to 2020.

The paper uses a novel method of moments quantile regression, which deals with heterogeneity and endogeneity in diverse conditions for asymmetric and nonlinear models.

The empirical results reveal that the rise of FinTech companies offering services in Africa heterogeneously increases digital finance for SMEs and entrepreneurship in their different stages of growth. FinTech developments have a strong and positive impact in countries with higher levels of digital finance than those with lower levels. FinTech developments and digital finance positively and significantly influence entrepreneurship in Africa, particularly in the nascent and transitional development stages of entrepreneurship. Institutional quality has a considerable positive moderating effect when used as a control rather than an interaction variable.

The results suggest the need to promote FinTech developments in Africa: to provide a wide range of alternative digital finance schemes to SMEs and to promote entrepreneurship, especially in countries where entrepreneurship is in the nascent and transitional development stages. The results also underscore the need to promote FinTech development through supportive regulations and institutional quality to reduce risks related to FinTech and digital financing schemes.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first attempts to account for the often overlooked heterogeneity effects and show that the influence of FinTech developments is not homogenous across the varying development stages of digital finance and entrepreneurship.

The study’s purpose is to understand how online communities, thanks to their knowledge-sharing potential, can help to achieve the principles of a human-centered society. The social capital theory is applied to understand knowledge contribution and knowledge sharing in online communities.

A qualitative approach based on a single case study of an international online community is adopted.

The case study highlights how each social capital facet unfolds within the online community to model efficient knowledge exchange among members. The developed social capital generates benefits at three interconnected system levels: micro (individuals), meso (companies), and macro (society).

The paper makes several contributions to the literature on Society 5.0, social capital theory, and knowledge management by bringing the needed empirical evidence on how to exploit online digital technologies to generate the benefits associated with Society 5.0. It also demonstrates that social capital theory is a valuable theoretical lens through which to explain how knowledge-sharing and exchange mechanisms in online communities contribute to shaping a human-centered society.