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The purpose of this study is to investigate how a country's competitive tax policy influences its inward foreign direct investments (FDI) in the Asia–Pacific region, even when given particular constraints (e.g., population, public governance, skilled labor, and so on) exist.

The paper uses the system GMM estimation approach to test the hypothesis. Data on FDI, corporate income tax, and various confounding factors were drawn from Ernst and Young's worldwide corporate tax guide, the World Bank, and other sources to create a panel of 28 economies over the period 2000–2016.

The present research confirms the negative association between corporate income tax (CIT) and FDI inflows. The effects of other confounding factors on FDI net inflows are also supported (e.g., connectivity, GDP per capita, population, skilled labor, and trade openness). Our results support the argument that foreign investments may be more sensitive to CIT. Therefore, CIT is an effective indicator to observe international tax competition.

The present research uses rich data on statutory CIT and other economic and public governance factors to investigate the relationship between tax competition and FDI inflows in the Asia–Pacific region. The findings add important supplements to the nuanced understanding of the political-economic dynamics in this region, especially when cut-throat tax competition, trade tensions, and stagnant economic growth have been key challenges for global economies.

Personal thermal management in functional textiles is in increasing demand for health care, outdoor activity and energy saving. Thus, developing new strategies is highly desired for radiative cooling and/or heating by manipulation of the transmissivity, reflectivity and absorptivity of the textiles within solar energy and human body heat radiation ranges.

Inorganic additives including TiO2, Fe2O3, carbon black (CB), graphene and mica were incorporated into polymer films. The inorganic additives' full spectrum properties and thermal responses were comprehensively investigated.

The CB composite film showed the highest absorptivity over the full solar to human body radiation spectrum. The mica-white (mica-w) (mica coated with TiO2) and mica-red (mica-r) (mica coated with Fe2O3) composites showed the lowest solar energy absorptivity and a strong body heat radiation reflectivity. Furthermore, according to composites' thermal responses to the simulated solar and human body radiations, CB and mica are promising for both cooling and heating when applied in dual-functional thermal management textiles.

Research has limitation related the amount of additives which can be added to textile. When powder is added to polyester yarn, the amount is limited by 2–3%. When powder is added to the composite which is used for printing, the amount of powder is limited by 5%.

A lot of apparel, especially sport apparel, contains prints. Decoration is one part of print application. Now, a lot of companies work under development of different additives, which provide additional properties to apparel. The closest targets for powder added to prints are cooling and heat retention. Quite often, inorganic additives possess dual properties: the inorganic additives may be heat reflective which his needed for heat retention, but may have high-thermal conductivity, which works well for cooling. Human body has complicated mechanism of heat exchange: convection, radiation and moisture evaporations play main role. The same additive may be cooling if there is a contact with skin but may be heating (IR reflective) if placed in the second or third layer. Thus, effect is needed to be studied first before real application.

This work could provide a comprehensive guideline for the rational design and application of thermal management composite textile materials by revealing the full solar to human body radiation performance of a series of inorganic materials.

Some initiatives have been proposed and implemented to facilitate successful project delivery and improve coordination and collaboration in the design, construction and management phases of project development. Building information modeling (BIM) is one of those initiatives that, though recent, however, have made a significant impact on the construction industry in some countries. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper aims to explore the critical success factors for BIM implementation in the architecture, engineering and construction industry of Hong Kong through a mixed research method (structured empirical questionnaire survey and expert interviews).

The most influential success factor relates to the client’s acceptance with BIM projects, proper organizational structure to support a BIM system within the company and financial aid from the government to set up the BIM system. The expert interviewees also stressed the need for willingness from project staff members to learn and utilize BIM.

This study has contributed to the establishment of more practical and effective strategies for ensuring full adoption of BIM in Hong Kong. Practical recommendations for enhancing BIM adoption in the construction industry were highlighted.

This study has established the key drivers leading to the success of BIM implementation in Hong Kong, as well as in the perspective of construction experts on how to enhance its uptake in construction projects.

We review and discuss theoretical approaches from both within and outside of institutional organization theory with regard to their specific insights on what we call “regionalized zones of meaning” – that is, clusters of social meaning that can be distinguished from one another, but at the same time interact and, in specific configurations, form distinct societies. We suggest that bringing meaning structures back into focus is important and may counter-balance the increasing preoccupation of institutional scholars with micro-foundations and the related emphasis on micro-level activities. We bring together central ideas from research on institutional logics with some foundational insights by Max Weber, Alfred Schütz, and German sociologists Rainer Lepsius and Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. In doing so, we also take a cautious look at “practices” by discussing their potential place and role in an institutional framework as well as by exploring generative conversations with proponents of practice theory. We wish to provide inspiration for institutional research interested in shared meaning structures, their relationships to one another, and how they translate into institutional orders.

Beyond a mandated use, rationales behind executive choice to accept or reject building information modelling (BIM) are ambiguous. BIM acceptance is complex for organisations, and existing decision-making models are impractical to make realistic choices. A practical solution must assist a holistic reflection of internal and external BIM success factors. Nevertheless, extant literature is largely focused on software use and awareness. Thus, this paper aims to suggest a novel framework for assessing firm readiness, aimed at facilitating BIM uptake.

Extant explanatory studies are inadequate in assessing the soft nature of BIM uptake. Thus, a design science research was employed as an alternative methodology. A means-end analysis was utilised for solution incubation, and cross-disciplinary reasoning, the strategy to establish valid solutions on firm readiness. Previous studies were reviewed on BIM, technology acceptance (generally) and complexity.

“Technology attitude” is presented as involving more holistic variables than a simplistic reliance on software use to mirror BIM acceptance. Technology acceptance model (TAM) is appropriate to explain BIM attitude attributes, but its current use is sub-optimal. Selective information processing and unconscious thought theory were integrated into TAM to explain attitude formation from multiple perspectives, resulting in a novel BIM attitude scale (BIMAS). Upon verification, the proposed framework will facilitate an objective authentication of biases that associate with BIM acceptance.

Whilst BIM readiness is assessed largely with a primary focus on theory building, practical relevance must be at the forefront of BIM development. This study articulates that design science research can enhance the practical relevance of BIM adoption models. BIM acceptance attitude must be assessed through a verified scale contrary to the assessment of self-biases of executives in literature. BIMAS suggests a testable solution for this. Theory building research must be the future focus to enhance the relevance of this initial solution.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Introduces the special issue on the theme “Network/multiplayer games and security”. Outlines the topics covered by the papers within, with the objective of alerting technical and systems librarians to issues which might concern them and provide them with a wider framework of experience from which they can learn and adapt to their own circumstances.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the configurations of short life cycle, low quality, design and price, influence customer purchase intention in fast fashion and high technology industries in China.

The traditional thinking is that products with high quality and low price will win more customers. However, the authors can notice that high quality products usually have high cost. Therefore, it is necessary to do more research on how customers can accept low quality products. The authors take fast fashion products and smart phones as empirical studies, collecting data from customer’s online survey. Based on the methodology of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, the authors analyse the relationship between the factors of short life cycle, low quality, design and price and influence customer purchase intention.

The authors find that price is the most important influencing factor. Low price is a strong competitive factor in the market. As to low quality products, low price can be achieved relatively more easily than with high quality products, resulting from relatively poorer raw material or configurations. Hence the connection between quality and price may give an idea to enterprises that customers will accept low quality products with low price. Moreover, according to the research, different generations are equally affected by the low price condition, regardless of customer gender and household income.

Because the study only focuses on fast fashion and smart phones industries, future work needs to replicate this study with individual data for different industries and with alternative methods to reinforce the confidence in the research. Meanwhile , this research studied mainly the customer perspective, it would be desirable to extend the study to the enterprise perspective and find out the difficulties that limit them in using low quality products to meet market needs. This may revel some cultural differences in purchase behavior among different countries and the discussed industries can be expanded to a larger area.

The study offers a number of managerial implications. With the rapid changes in people’s aesthetic sense and developing high-tech, it is more and more necessary for companies to think about how to win more customers and earn more profits. Low quality products have advantages as they will lower companies’ costs in many dimensions, improving the speed of supply. It helps firms to take low quality products into consideration and think whether they will influence different aspects of the company assistance firms to get a deeper understanding of customer psychology and make better decisions on their products.

The paper fills the gap in the research field by exploring how consumer behavior is affected by different conditions.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.