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The purpose of this paper is to study the use of outsourcing as a mechanism to cope with supply chain uncertainty, more specifically, how to deal with sudden arrival of higher priority jobs that require immediate processing, in an in-house manufacturer's facility from the perspective of outsourcing. An operational level schedule of production and distribution of outsourced jobs to the manufacturer's facility should be determined for the subcontractor in order to achieve overall optimality.

The problem is of bi-criteria in that both the transportation cost measured by number of delivery vehicles and schedule performance measured by jobs’ delivery times. In order to obtain the problem's Pareto front, we propose dynamic programming (DP) heuristic solution procedure based on integrated decision making, and population-heuristic solution procedures using different encoding schemes based on sequential decision making. Computational studies are designed and carried out by randomly generating comparative variations of numerical problem instances.

By comparing several existing performance metrics for the obtained Pareto fronts, it is found that DP heuristic outperforms population-heuristic in both solutions diversity and proximity to optimal Pareto front. Also in population-heuristic, sub-range keys representation appears to be a better encoding scheme for the problem than random keys representation.

This study contributes to the limited yet important knowledge body on using outsourcing approach to coping with possible supply chain disruptions in production scheduling due to sudden customer orders. More specifically, we used modeling methodology to confirm the importance of collaboration with subcontractors to effective supply chain risk management.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that various disposition patterns in terms of the price changes are plausible under the Prospect Theory (PT), which argues that investors have a greater tendency to sell assets that have risen in value since the purchase than those that have fallen. Numerous empirical evidences have shown that investors demonstrate the disposition effect (DE). This study highlights that, when the disposition measure is defined by the stock price changes, the PT predicts the DE indeed. It also indicates other seemingly contradicting disposition patterns: the reversed disposition effect and the pattern of the symmetry over gains and losses.

To show that the disposition effect is only one of the disposition patterns under the preference of PT, as part of this study the authors apply the mental account theory and propose two decision criteria for the gain and loss accounts, respectively, (i.e. maximum loss tolerated and minimum gain required). An empirical analysis was performed from a large‐scale market survey in Taiwan to examine individual investors' disposition patterns.

The findings show that more than 50 percent of individual investors demonstrate their disposition patterns other than the disposition effect. Many investors show the reversed disposition effect or the pattern of symmetry (holding about the same magnitude of gains or losses before realization).

This study answers the questions which, to the authors' knowledge, have not been incorporated in the studies of the PT or the DE: first, when do investors sell losers which they are inclined to hold on to? Second, for how long do they hold winners which they are eager to sell? The authors' arguments allow various disposition patterns to exist simultaneously, without changing the value function in the PT of convexity over losses and concavity over gains and without requiring strict assumptions on the expected stock returns.

We challenge the discontinuity (also called incompatibility) hypothesis of generalized and particularistic trust, suggesting that the two types of trust are incompatible. This view is problematic because if so, it remains unclear, for instance, how communities scoring high in particularistic trust can ever develop further when transferring trust to spheres outside the community is not an option. In this research, we explore the potential permeability of different types of trust in an emerging market context using the case of China.

Using a purposeful sampling technique, we gathered data among Chinese professionals (n = 290) in the Jingjinji Metropolitan Region in Tianjin. We analyzed the data by performing structural equation modeling.

As we identify interdependencies between generalized and particularistic types of trust, our results speak in favor of the continuity hypothesis. We find that the more people trust other people from an outside group (out-group trust), the less they trust quasi-familiar others (in-group trust). Further, in-group trust increases once the environment urges people to engage in informal network (guanxi)-based transactions.

Advancing the common view of China being a typical low-trust society, in which distrust in strangers (outsiders) prevails, we find a recent trend of an increase in general trust, which might lead to increases of out-group and in-group trust alike. Contrary to the wide spread idea that guanxi is declining in the present day, we find guanxi to be persistent.

To improve the performance of the krill herd (KH) algorithm, in this paper, a series of chaotic particle-swarm krill herd (CPKH) algorithms are proposed for solving optimization tasks within limited time requirements. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In CPKH, chaos sequence is introduced into the KH algorithm so as to further enhance its global search ability.

This new method can accelerate the global convergence speed while preserving the strong robustness of the basic KH.

Here, 32 different benchmarks and a gear train design problem are applied to tune the three main movements of the krill in CPKH method. It has been demonstrated that, in most cases, CPKH with an appropriate chaotic map performs superiorly to, or at least highly competitively with, the standard KH and other population-based optimization methods.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This paper aims to represent an improved whale optimization algorithm (WOA) based on a Lévy flight trajectory and called the LWOA algorithm to solve engineering optimization problems. The LWOA makes the WOA faster, more robust and significantly enhances the WOA. In the LWOA, the Lévy flight trajectory enhances the capability of jumping out of the local optima and is helpful for smoothly balancing exploration and exploitation of the WOA. It has been successfully applied to five standard engineering optimization problems. The simulation results of the classical engineering design problems and real application exhibit the superiority of the LWOA algorithm in solving challenging problems with constrained and unknown search spaces when compared to the basic WOA algorithm or other available solutions.

In this paper, an improved WOA based on a Lévy flight trajectory and called the LWOA algorithm is represented to solve engineering optimization problems.

It has been successfully applied to five standard engineering optimization problems. The simulation results of the classical engineering design problems and real application exhibit the superiority of the LWOA algorithm in solving challenging problems with constrained and unknown search spaces when compared to the basic WOA algorithm or other available solutions.

An improved WOA based on a Lévy flight trajectory and called the LWOA algorithm is first proposed.

Studying Chinese higher education internationalization policy-making requires paying attention to the political ontology of China's top-designed policy-making system before proceeding to methodological approaches. The ontology is two-fold: a fixed reality grounded in the structure and agency of the one-party state, and an emergent reality that derives from the pervasive practice of using policy documents to govern. A two-pronged epistemology is proposed to uncover these realities: interpretative and poststructural problematization. Interpretative problematization helps discern how policy-makers frame a problem–solution discourse in policy documents to achieve predetermined strategic objectives. Contrastingly, poststructural problematization views policy documents as prescriptive texts that offer rules on how to behave. The potential methodologies drawn from the tradition of critical policy sociology can be employed to study these two problematizations, thereby unpacking the fixed and emergent realities.

Suggests that misunderstandings frequently occur when trying to understand Chinese language and culture, and so gives the implied meaning of various Chinese expressions and sayings such as greetings, thanks, respect, age, congratulations and taboo subjects.

The primary aim of this study is to investigate how Islamic religiosity shapes the ethical attitude of customer relationship managers while predicting their behaviours.

A survey-based, cross-sectional data is collected from 257 customer relationship managers working in leading Islamic Banks in Pakistan.

Results demonstrate that religiosity positively influences the attitude of managers. Furthermore, the effect of subjective norms to predict ethical intentions is found insignificant which opens a new debate for the scholarly community.

A key contribution of this study is the investigation of Islamic religiosity as a predictor of managerial attitude. Furthermore, the context of Islamic bank managers is a new context of this investigation.

Prior studies on blockholders involvement in earnings management behavior have given rise to alignment and entrenchment perspectives. The alignment perspective states that blockholders are an effective control to reduce earnings management behavior. In contrast, the entrenchment perspective states that blockholders act opportunistically and encourage earnings management behavior. Firms in Indonesia generally have concentrated shares, which is probably in line with the entrenchment perspective. Therefore, this study aims to examine the influence of blockholders on earnings management and the role of religiosity as a moderator of the influence of blockholders on earnings management.

This study uses multiple linear and multi-group regression to analyze 2,238 firm-year observations for firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange period 2015–2021. Multi-group regression is used to test the effect of religiosity on the relationship between blockholders and earnings management.

The finding of this study is that religiosity can mitigate the involvement of blockholders in earnings management, where blockholders positively influence earnings management in non-religious but not religious firms. This finding is expected to solve the agency problem between management with shareholders and the majority with minority shareholders.

Firms should apply religious values in their business activities to prevent or minimize profit manipulation. Another implication is that investors can glance at Sharia stocks when investing because they have lower earnings management or higher-quality financial reports.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study may be the first to investigate the role of religiosity by comparing the effect of blockholders on earnings management between religious and non-religious firms. This study proves that religiosity is a new alternative to mitigating blockholders involvement in earning management and agency problems.