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The improved classical model makes it possible that the evaluation strategy has an optimal tendency, which reveals the purpose of this paper is to facilitate the first price sealed-bid auction more in line with the actual situation. To be more specific, there are several merits in the improvement process. On the one hand, the bid-winning probability can be improved for the bidder; on the other hand, the real market value of the subject matter can be more clearly recognized for the employer.

Bayesian estimation and grey system theory are referenced in this paper, with the use of double-parameter estimation, little historical data and expert experience. Specific implementation steps are as follows: first of all, using the double-parameter Bayesian estimation to correct the actual valuation of the bid matter v, then introducing the threat factor grey number R in the auction model, giving the improving of the optimal grey quotation and grey expectation utility under the two-party game and finally taking the aerospace component procurement as an example, simulating the bidding process of the bidding parties to arrive at the optimal bid strategy.

The improved model shows that the optimal strategy will change with the threat factor rather than a fixed value. When the threat factor grey number R follows [0.4, 0.6], the optimal quotation strategy will appear, which means quotation is higher than 50% of the bid matter's valuation.

The improved model proposed in this paper can strengthen the cost control in the Chinese commercial space process and optimize the pricing strategy for the final launch.

The modified model changes the habit that the bidder's valuation of the bid subject to mainly come from experience and to prompt the model for making full use of little historical data on the foundation of the former. It can reduce the subjective judgment error in the game results; finally, the practical cases are simulated in MATLAB at the same time, and the simulation effect is good, so we can get some more realistic conclusions on this basis.

Over the past three decade, China has established a housing finance system that borrows from the collective experiences of advanced economies. After examining the evolution of China’s housing finance system, the paper focuses on analyzing its challenges and recent changes. The paper argues that China’s highly-centralized financial system prefers financial stability but neglects financial liberalization, and then resulted in severe financial repression, which hurts the efficiency and equality of the housing finance service. After recovering from the 2008 financial crisis via high-cost financial intervention, China took some policy innovations to promote a decentralized finance mechanism, expand finance resources, and support affordable housing financing, through which China hopes to provide a more stable, affordable, and equal housing finance service to help more households own homes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how microblog communication enabled a new form of hybrid net-roots third-sector organization that rely heavily on the internet to achieve multiple organizational successes in civil society, social movement and service providing in China, where the government holds predominating power over the third sector.

A qualitative inductive analysis was conducted to analyze two successful organizations’ Sina tweets sent from their Weibo debuts to the dates when they achieved their first milestone successes. In the analysis, the author iteratively alternated between emic data coding and etic reference to literature on social movement rhetoric and nonprofits’ microblog communication.

This study developed an indigenous communication framework featuring three key communication strategies: changing perceptions, mobilizing action, and building and maintaining relationships, each associated with specific tactics. These strategies and tactics allowed both organizations to tap into social media’s interactive features to engage publics and construct legitimacy.

This paper enriches social media-based communication research and classic social movement rhetoric, and further illustrates strategic communication’s active role in reacting to and reforming institutional contexts. Findings from study might be extended to address similar problems experienced by nonprofits across countries, especially within those that operate in a context where institutional separation from a predominant government is unavailable.

This original communication framework developed in this study crystalizes strategic microblog use by a nascent type of nonprofit when fulfilling functions reflects civil society, social movements and traditional nonprofit organizations in an understudied political and social context.

Every second, vast amounts of data are generated and stored on the Internet. Data scraping makes these data accessible and usable for business and scientific purposes. Web-scraped data are of high value to businesses as they can be used to inform many strategic decisions such as pricing or market positioning. Although it is not difficult to scrape data, particularly when they come from public websites, there are six key steps that analysts should ideally consider and follow. Following these steps can help to better harness the business value of online data.

The oil and gas industry is a crucial economic sector for both developed and developing economies. Delays in extraction and refining of these resources would adversely affect industrial players, including that of the host countries. Supplier selection is one of the most important decisions taken by managers of this industry that affect their supply chain operations. However, determining suitable suppliers to work with has become a phenomenon faced by these managers and their organizations. Furthermore, identifying relevant, critical and important criteria needed to guide these managers and their organizations for supplier selection decisions has become even more complicated due to various criteria that need to be taken into consideration. With limited works in the current literature of supplier selection in the oil and gas industry having major methodological drawbacks, the purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated approach for supplier selection in the oil and gas industry.

To address this problem, this paper proposes a new uncertain decision framework. A grey-Delphi approach is first applied to aid in the evaluation and refinement of these various available criteria to obtain the most important and relevant criteria for the oil and gas industry. The grey systems theoretic concept is adopted to address the subjectivity and uncertainty in human judgments. The grey-Shannon entropy approach is used to determine the criteria weights, and finally, the grey-EDAS (evaluation based on distance from average solution) method is utilized for determining the ranking of the suppliers.

To exemplify the applicability and robustness of the proposed approach, this study uses the oil and gas industry of Iran as a case in point. From the literature review, 21 criteria were established and using the grey-Delphi approach, 16 were finally considered. The four top-ranked criteria, using grey-Shannon entropy, include warranty level and experience time, relationship closeness, supplier’s technical level and risks which are considered as the most critical and influential criteria for supplier evaluation in the Iranian oil and gas industry. The ranking of the suppliers is obtained, and the best and worst suppliers are also identified. Sensitivity analysis indicates that the results using the proposed methodology are robust.

The proposed approach would assist supply chain practicing managers, including purchasing managers, procurement managers and supply chain managers in the oil and gas and other industries, to effectively select suitable suppliers for cooperation. It can also be used for other multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) applications. Future works on applying other MCDM methods and comparing them with the results of this study can be addressed. Finally, broader and more empirical works are required in the oil and gas industry.

This study is among the first few studies of supplier selection in the oil and gas industry from an emerging economy perspective and sets the stage for future research. The proposed integrated grey-based MCDM approach provides robust results in supplier evaluation and can be used for future domain applications.

The purpose of this study to introduce a new extended framework to evaluate and rank the sustainable suppliers based on the different sustainable criteria in the manufacturing companies using a new fuzzy decision-making approach.

This paper introduces a new approach using decision-making and Pythagorean fuzzy sets (PFSs) to assess the best sustainable supplier. To doing so, this study integrated the entropy, stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and weighted aggregates sum product assessment (WASPAS) methods under PFSs. To calculate the criteria weights, the combined entropy-SWARA method is used to compute the objective weight and subjective weight, respectively. Furthermore, the WASPAS model is utilized to rank sustainable supplier alternatives.

The results of the analysis found that occupational health and safety systems had the highest rank among other criteria, followed by green product and eco-design, green R&D and innovation and green technology. In addition, the findings of the paper demonstrated that the extended approach was efficient and useful for selecting and evaluating the best sustainable supplier in the manufacturing companies.

Recent years have witnessed a number of studies aimed at incorporating the sustainability standards into the supplier selection problem; however, only a little research has been conducted on developing a fuzzy method for decision-making in a manner to assess and choose suppliers with high sustainability in the insurance market, encompassing the three above-mentioned sustainability criteria.

This paper aims to examine the evolution of house prices in China and especially the effects of different financing channels on China’s house prices.

The author use the own theoretical framework and proceed to test the testable hypotheses by using the autoregressive distributed lag bounds test approach for cointegration analysis and the unrestricted error correction model. Quarterly time series data from Q1 2002 to Q2 2016 are used.

The results suggest that in the short run, bank loans to real estate development and scale of shadow banking have significant positive effects on house prices. In the long run, the scale of shadow banking and disposable income affects house prices positively and significantly.

This study provides more insights into how and to the extent different financing channels affect China’s house prices, particularly the impact of shadow banking on the house prices.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the numerical methods in tunnel engineering and their capabilities to indicate the fracture and failure in all kinds of tunneling methods such as New Austrian Tunneling Method, tunnel boring machine and cut‐cover. An essential definition of numerical modeling of tunnels to determine the interaction between geo‐material (soil and rock) surrounding the tunnel structure is discussed.

Tunnel geo‐material (soil and rock) interaction requires advanced constitutive models for the numerical simulation of linear, nonlinear, time‐dependent, anisotropic, isotropic, homogenous and nonhomogeneous behaviors. The numerical models discussed in this paper are developed in finite element method (FEM), finite deference method (FDM), boundary element method and discrete element method and these tools are used to illustrate the behavior of tunnel structure deformation under different loads and in complicated conditions. The disadvantage of this method is the tunnel lining assumed an independent structure under fixed load which is unable to model soil‐lining interaction. Predicting the effect of all natural factors on tunnels is the most difficult method. The above‐mentioned numerical methods are very simple and quick to use and the results are conservative and practical for users. One of the most significant advantages of the numerical method is in predicting the critical area surrounding the tunnel and the tunnel structure before making the tunnel construction due to different loads.

Numerical modeling is used as control method in reducing the risk of tunnel construction failures. Since some factors such as settlement and deformation are not completely predictable in rock and soil surrounding the tunnel, using numerical modeling is a very economical and capable method in predicting the behavior of tunnel structures in various complicated conditions of loading. Another benefit of using numerical simulation is in the colorful illustrations predicting the tunnel behavior before, during and after construction and operation.

There are not many conducted studies using numerical models to tunnel structures that estimate the critical zones. As some of the methods available have limitation in simulating and modeling the whole tunnel design factors, numerical modeling seems to be the best option, because it is fast, economical, accurate and more interesting in predicating critical zones in tunnel. However, what softwares predict are not always the same as real ground nature conditions in which there is tunnel.

E-commerce refers to the facilitation and delivery of goods and services to the customers employing an electronic arrangement. For an e-commerce firm, the customer service level provided by its suppliers can make or break the firm. The purpose of this research is to help e-commerce enterprises in addressing the vast challenge of complex supplier selection and evaluation process that must be performed vigilantly.

The present study utilizes a three-pronged approach that integrates supplier management practices with the operational business practices of an e-commerce enterprise. In the first step, key performance factors for e-commerce capable suppliers are identified through an expert opinion and existing supplier management literature. Further, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is employed to obtain the efficiency score for each supplier that enables their ranking on various performance parameters. Lastly, the suppliers are classified into different categories based on their performance and efficiency.

Under the proposed classification scheme, top five suppliers, i.e. supplier 1, 7, 9, 11 and 17 are categorized as HE (High Performance and Efficient). It is suggested that e-commerce enterprises must build long-term relationship with the identified top performing suppliers. The study also provides real insights into supplier's performance on a number of objective criteria. Further, the present study enhances the overall performance and productivity of an e-commerce firm by achieving input cost minimization and output quality maximization, simultaneously.

The results are valid for e-commerce enterprises in general. However, the present DEA model can be further evolved when applied in case of any particular e-commerce enterprise depending upon the internal capabilities of that firm. The nuances related to a firm's own supply capability development can be further explored by practitioners and researchers.

The proposed approach is expected to motivate decision-makers to consider using more sophisticated approached like DEA in supplier evaluation processes. Also, as a benchmarking technique, the proposed supplier classification approach is expected to be highly useful for practitioners in real-life settings.

The novel contribution of this study includes the supplier evaluation, ranking and classification for e-commerce enterprises based on the real-life data. The insights would help the practitioners to formulate novel strategies for appropriately investing in supplier relationships.

In modern urban governance, rescue materials storage points (RMSP) are a vital role to be considered in responding to public emergencies and improving a city's emergency management. This study analyzes the siting of community-centered relief supply facilities.

Combining grey relational analysis, complex network and relative entropy, a new multi criteria method is proposed. It pays more attention to the needs of the community, taking into account the use of community hospitals, fire centers and neighborhood offices to establish small RMSP.

The research results firstly found suitable areas for RMSP site selection, including Hanyang, Qiaokou, Jiangan and Wuchang. The top 10 nodes in each region are found as the location of emergency facilities, and the network parameters are higher than ordinary nodes in traffic networks. The proposed method was applied in Wuhan, China and the method was verified by us-ing a complex network model combined with multi-criteria decision-making for emergency facility location.

This method solves the problem of how to choose the optimal solution and reduces the difficulty for decision makers. This method will help emergency managers to locate and plan RMSP more simply, especially in improving emergency siting modeling techniques and additionally in providing a reference for future research.

The method proposed in this study is beneficial to improve the decision-making ability of urban emergency departments. Using complex networks and comprehensive evaluation techniques, RMSP is incorporated into the urban community emergency network as a critical rescue force. More importantly, the findings highlight a new direction for further research on urban emergency facilities site selection based on a combination of sound theoretical basis as well as empirical evidence gained from real life case-based analysis.

1. Material reserve points are incorporated into the emergency supply network to maintain the advantage of quantity.

2. Build emergency site selection facilities centered on urban communities.

3. Use a complex network model to select the location of emergency supplies storage sites.

Material reserve points are incorporated into the emergency supply network to maintain the advantage of quantity.

Build emergency site selection facilities centered on urban communities.

Use a complex network model to select the location of emergency supplies storage sites.