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This study proposed an extended theory of planned behaviour (TPB), that is, considering that behavioural beliefs, normative beliefs and control beliefs (beliefs) will influence perceived service quality (PSQ) on food delivery services. PSQ (behavioural intention) will influence electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) (behaviour). In addition, exogenous variables including information from online ratings and consumer groups will affect the strength of the relationship between received service quality and EWOM on food delivery service.

This study aimed to investigate the mediation (PSQ) and moderation (Online ratings and consumer groups) effects on the extended TPB for Taiwanese consumers (n = 823).

This study first found a positive relationship between different beliefs and PSQ (behavioural intention). In addition, there is a positive relationship between PSQ and EWOM. Online rating has a moderating effect between PSQ and EWOM. Consumer group has a moderating relationship between PSQ and EWOM.

This study first found that the three stages of beliefs-intention-behaviour for consumers on food delivery service are reciprocal with two paths, starting with offline-to-online in terms of generating the positive relationship between individual belies and PSQ. Next, it can generate positive power to return online with a behaviour of EWOM. In addition, online ratings can enhance and strengthen the positive effect between PSQ and EWOM.

Maximum k vertex cover problem is a significant combinatorial optimization problem with various applications, such as transportation planning, social networks and sensor placement. Up to now, no practical algorithm has ever been proposed to solve this problem. Therefore, this paper aims to present an efficient local search algorithm LSKVC combining three methods for it.

First, the quick incremental evaluation method is proposed to update the related vertex scores following each addition or removal incrementally rather than recalculating them, which can speed up the algorithm. Second, the configuration checking method forbids vertices whose configuration has not changed since the last removal from being added into the candidate solution again, which can avoid the cycling problem effectively. Third, the two-stage exchange method swaps the pairs of inside and outside vertices separately rather than simultaneously, which can guarantee the tradeoff between the accuracy and complexity of the algorithm.

The proposed algorithm LSKVC is compared with the traditional GRASP algorithm and the well-known commercial solver CPLEX on DIMACS and BHOSLIB benchmarks. For the best solutions, the LSKVC algorithm is significantly superior to GRASP and CPLEX on DIMACS instances and the CPLEX solver fails, and the LSKVC algorithm slightly outperforms GRASP on the BHOSLIB instances. In addition, we undertake comparative studies of the offered methodologies and demonstrate their efficacy.

In previous research, the focus on the maximum k-vertex cover problem primarily centered around exact algorithms and approximation algorithms, with limited application of heuristic algorithms. While heuristic algorithms have been well-explored for the closely related Minimum Vertex Cover problem, they have seen limited application in the context of the maximum k-vertex cover problem. Consequently, existing algorithms designed for the Minimum Vertex Cover problem do not exhibit satisfactory performance when applied to the maximum k-vertex cover problem. In response to this challenge, we have undertaken algorithmic improvements specifically tailored to address this issue.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the inhibition efficiency and mechanism of a specific carboxylate corrosion inhibitor which consists of benzoic acid and dimethylethanolamine on steel surface.

The performance of carbon steel influenced by this organic inhibitor under different concentration of Cl⁻ and immersion time was studied by linear polarization resistance and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy in a simulated concrete pore (SCP) solution. The surface morphology and composition of steel was also analyzed by optical microscopy, SEM and EDS to investigate the effect of inhibitor on the pattern of the steel surface after long-term immersion.

Carboxylate of benzoic acid and dimethylethanolamine can increase the chloride threshold level and decrease the corrosion area of carbon steel in SCP solution with 0.6 mol/L Cl⁻ even after 120 days exposure. The inhibition mechanism of inhibitor lies in quick adsorption and buffering effect at initial time then formed deposited layer on steel surface after long-term immersion in chloride-rich environment.

It demonstrated that the carboxylate corrosion inhibitor not only can improve the chloride threshold level for carbon steel but also effectively decrease the corrosion rate even in chloride-rich SCP solution after long-term immersion, which is different form the conventional amino alcohol.

The simulated temperature profile of the printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) during reflow soldering process deviates from the actual profile. To reduce this relative deviation, a new strategy based on the Kriging response surface and the Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) optimizing method is proposed.

The simulated temperature profile of the PCBA during reflow soldering process deviates from the actual profile. To reduce this relative deviation, a new strategy based on the Kriging response surface and the MOGA optimizing method is proposed.

Several critical influencing parameters such as temperature and the convective heat transfer coefficient of the specific temperature zones are selected as the correction parameters. The hyper Latins sampling method is implemented to distribute the design points, and the Kriging response surface model of the soldering process is constructed. The updated model is achieved and validated by the test. The relative derivation is reduced from the initial value of 43.4%–11.8% in terms of the time above the liquidus line.

A new strategy based on the Kriging response surface and the MOGA optimizing method is proposed.

Sina Weibo and Twitter are the top microblogging platforms with billions of users. Accordingly, these two platforms could be used to understand the public mood. In this paper, the authors want to discuss how to generate and compare the public mood on Sina Weibo and Twitter. The predictive power of the public mood toward commodity markets is discussed, and the authors want to solve the problem that how to choose between Sina Weibo and Twitter when predicting crude oil prices.

An enhanced latent Dirichlet allocation model considering term weights is implemented to generate topics from Sina Weibo and Twitter. Granger causality test and a long short-term memory neural network model are used to demonstrate that the public mood on Sina Weibo and Twitter is correlated with commodity contracts.

By comparing the topics and the public mood on Sina Weibo and Twitter, the authors find significant differences in user behavior on these two websites. Besides, the authors demonstrate that public mood on Sina Weibo and Twitter is correlated with crude oil contract prices in Shanghai International Energy Exchange and New York Mercantile Exchange, respectively.

Two sentiment analysis methods for Chinese (Sina Weibo) and English (Twitter) posts are introduced, which can be reused for other semantic analysis tasks. Besides, the authors present a prediction model for the practical participants in the commodity markets and introduce a method to choose between Sina Weibo and Twitter for certain prediction tasks.

This study aims to explore the relation among US audit partners’ characteristics, their career advancement and audit quality.

This study uses data from Public Company Accounting Oversight Board Form AP, Auditor Reporting of Certain Audit Participants, and publicly available online data sources. The hand-collected data on audit partners’ personal characteristics include gender, work experience and educational background. The measures for audit quality include restatements and audit fees.

The authors find that audit partner characteristics matter for the time it takes an individual to reach partnership after completing a bachelor’s degree. There are significant differences in work experience and educational background between partners in the largest (Big N) audit firms and smaller (non-Big N) audit firms. Audit partner traits are related to audit quality, and the effects differ between Big N and non-Big N partners.

The literature has examined audit partners’ career paths using international data. However, little empirical academic research has examined the career advancement of US audit partners. This study provides initial insights on the career advancement of US partners on a large scale and complements the recent research that examines audit partner characteristics and audit quality in the US market.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of quality loss in transit on e-commerce supply chain pricing, production and financing decisions.

The authors consider a Stackelberg game model with a supplier, logistics firm and e-commerce platform. The logistics firm is capital-constrained and obtains funding from the e-commerce platform by debt financing or equity financing. Through backward induction, this paper first solves the equilibrium results under the two financing schemes and then reveals the financing preferences of all parties.

The results demonstrate that equity financing reduces financing costs and promotes production significantly. However, it may also lead to overproduction, particularly in markets with poor profitability and high cost factors. When the percentage of product quality loss is large, equity financing is preferable. With the increasing of transportation level, the benefits of debt finance are steadily growing. In addition, equity financing is the Pareto dominant scheme for all firms under certain circumstances. The extensions consider hybrid financing and another quality loss type.

The paper derives the equilibrium solutions and financing preferences, then specifies the threshold for applying financing schemes. Provide guidance for logistics firms’ finance model innovation and core enterprise involvement in the logistics industry.

The paper investigates how logistics firms’ financing strategies are impacted by product quality loss.

The purpose of this research is to reveal how to improve the quality of entrepreneurship by exploring the key factor, opportunity development, impacting the innovation strategy of new ventures. It also introduces political and business ties as moderating variables to reveal the uniqueness of entrepreneurial activities in the Chinese context.

Empirical data from 215 entrepreneurs and top executives in Chinese new ventures were gathered through a survey and the statistical method used is the regression model.

The empirical results indicate that: (1) new ventures' opportunity creation positively impacts innovation strategy, while opportunity discovery has a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) impact on innovation strategy; (2) the relationship between opportunity development and innovation strategy is moderated by political and business ties.

This research analyzes and compares the effect of opportunity discovery and opportunity creation on new ventures' innovation strategy. This research further offers an in-depth understanding of the influence mechanism between opportunity development and innovation strategy among Chinese new ventures. Further, the results provide practical guidance for new ventures to develop innovation strategies and for Chinese governments to make entrepreneurial policies.

The purpose of this study is to generate diversified results for temporally ambiguous queries and the candidate queries are ensured to have a high coverage of subtopics, which are derived from different temporal periods.

Two novel time-aware query suggestion diversification models are developed by integrating semantics and temporality information involved in queries into two state-of-the-art explicit diversification algorithms (i.e. IA-select and xQuaD), respectively, and then specifying the components on which these two models rely on. Most importantly, first explored is how to explicitly determine query subtopics for each unique query from the query log or clicked documents and then modeling the subtopics into query suggestion diversification. The discussion on how to mine temporal intent behind a query from query log is also followed. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposal, experiments on a real-world query log are conducted.

Preliminary experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of producing the candidate query suggestion for temporally ambiguous queries.

This study reports the first attempt to generate query suggestions indicating diverse interested time points to the temporally ambiguous (input) queries. The research will be useful in enhancing users’ search experience through helping them to formulate accurate queries for their search tasks. In addition, the approaches investigated in the paper are general enough to be used in many domains; that is, experimental information retrieval systems, Web search engines, document archives and digital libraries.