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Establishment of wholly owned subsidiaries in a foreign market is central to international marketing because sole ownership and high commitment facilitate firm's marketing in the local market. Drawing on knowledge-based theory, this study extends the current understanding of firm's sequential establishments of wholly owned subsidiaries in a host country.

Swedish firms' establishments of wholly owned subsidiaries in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States were analyzed using a longitudinal approach.

A firm's broad international experience is associated with an acquisition in any phase, while mode experience and value-adding experience are associated with postinitial acquisitions. There is no association between mode experience and greenfield investments.

Knowledge-based theory explains a firm's choice of establishment mode when establishing in the same host country. Effects of marketing experiences are due to the establishment mode and different experiences explain choices for initial and postinitial establishments.

In choosing between a wholly owned subsidiary in terms of an acquisition or a greenfield investment, for a foreign establishment the firm is advised to consider the impact of marketing experiences and establishment phase.

Research is needed on how experiences affect choices between foreign establishment modes where the firm is the sole owner. This study is the first to focus on the choice between wholly owned subsidiaries in terms of acquisitions and greenfield investments, and the impact of experience and phase of establishment in a particular host country.

This study aims to explore whether seeking recommendations for doctors from offline word-of-mouth or online reviews influences patient satisfaction after treatment, and how the source of recommendation affects this effect.

Using a unique dataset of more than three million reviews from a popular Chinese online health community, this study used the coarsened exact matching method and built fixed-effect models to conduct empirical analysis.

The results suggest that selecting doctors according to recommendations can improve patient satisfaction and mitigate their dissatisfaction when encountering service failures. However, online recommendations were found to be less effective than offline sources in improving patient satisfaction.

This study provides important insights into patient satisfaction and doctor-patient relationships by revealing the antecedents of satisfaction and the potential for improving this relationship. It also contributes to the understanding of how recommendations in the healthcare context can improve patient satisfaction and alleviate the negative impact of service failures.

This chapter focuses on exploring challenges encountered by the neglected group of employees who live alone and do not have children, particularly in relation to work-life balance (WLB). We first question the conventional WLB discourse – predominately surrounded by addressing work-family conflicts. We next discuss how this formulates debates about the equality and fairness of HR policies affecting various groups of employees, with solo-living individuals being excluded. In addition to previously documented work-life issues, we articulate difficulties related to the pursuit of independence, freedom, balancing, and healthy work-life experiences for and specific to solo-living women academics. We conclude that our insights on “vulnerability” may lead to feminist approach being incorporated into work-life policy development in order to better engage underrepresented groups of employees, accommodate the needs of “others” and promote collective flourishing.

The motivation of value co-creation among the multi-actor in sharing economy was an important topic in interactive marketing communication research. This study investigated how customer gratitude expression leads to value co-creation of PSPs in the sharing economy, and also investigates the moderating effect of platform benevolent climate.

A three-wave field survey (Study 1) and two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) were given to respondents with sharing economy practitioners.

First, customer gratitude expression positively influenced PSP's perceived meaningful work, which in turn enhanced their value co-creation intention. Second, PSP's perceived platform benevolent climate moderated the relationship between customer gratitude expression and PSP's perceived meaningful work.

Prior research discussed PSPs' value co-creation intention mainly from the perspective of platforms and PSPs, but few considered customer-PSP interaction perspective. This study revealed how customer gratitude expression influences PSP's value co-creation intention in highly interactive digital business context, examined the boundary condition of gratitude expression, and extended the application scenarios of social information processing theory.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of solving turbulent flows based on smoothed finite element method (S-FEM). Then, the differences between S-FEM and finite element method (FEM) in dealing with turbulent flows are compared.

The stabilization scheme, the streamline-upwind/Petrov-Galerkin stabilization is coupled with stabilized pressure gradient projection in the fractional step framework. The Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations with standard k-epsilon model are selected to solve turbulent flows based on S-FEM and FEM. Standard wall functions are applied to predict boundary layer profiles.

This paper explores a completely new application of S-FEM on turbulent flows. The adopted stabilization scheme presents a good performance on stabilizing the flows, especially for very high Reynolds numbers flows. An advantage of S-FEM is found in applying wall functions comparing with FEM. The differences between S-FEM and FEM have been investigated.

The research in this work is limited to the two-dimensional incompressible turbulent flow.

The verification and validation of a new combination are conducted by several numerical examples. The new combination could be used to deal with more complicated turbulent flows.

The applications of the new combination to study basic and complex turbulent flow are also presented, which demonstrates its potential to solve more turbulent flows in nature and engineering.

This work carries out a great extension of S-FEM in simulations of fluid dynamics. The new combination is verified to be very effective in handling turbulent flows. The performances of S-FEM and FEM on turbulent flows were analyzed by several numerical examples. Superior results were found compared with existing results and experiments. Meanwhile, S-FEM has an advantage of accuracy in predicting boundary layer profile.

Ting‐Toomey's (1988) face‐negotiation theory of conflict predicts that choice of conflict style is closely associated with face‐negotiation needs, which vary across cultures. This study investigated this prediction in a workplace setting involving status and face‐concern with a sample of 163 Anglo‐Australian and 133 Chinese university students who were working full or part‐time. The association of type of communication (direct or cautious) according to type of face‐threat (self or other) and work status (subordinate, co‐worker or superior) with preferences for three conflict management styles (control, solution‐oriented, non‐confrontational) was examined for the two cultural groups. The results showed that: (1) as predicted by the individualist‐collectivist dimension, Anglo respondents rated assertive conflict styles higher and the non‐confrontational style lower than their Chinese counterparts; (2) overall, both Anglo and Chinese respondents preferred more direct communication strategies when self‐face was threatened compared with other‐face threat; (3) status moderated responses to self and other‐face threat for both Anglos and Chinese; (4) face‐threat was related to assertive and diplomatic conflict styles for Anglos and passive and solution‐oriented styles for Chinese. Support was shown for Ting‐Toomey's theory; however the results indicated that, in applied settings, simple predictions based on only cultural dichotomies might have reduced power due to workplace role perceptions having some influence. The findings were discussed in relation to areas of convergence and the two cultural groups; widening the definition of “face”; and providing a more flexible model of conflict management incorporating both Eastern and Western perspectives.

This paper examines nationalism as a driver of political risk and how it can lead to supply chain disruptions for foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs).

Conceptual research based on a review of the literature on nationalism and supply chain risk management.

This research unveils how economic nationalism could engender supply chain disruptions via discriminatory practices toward all foreign MNEs and how national animosity may generate additional risks for the MNEs of nations in conflict with one another. These discriminatory practices include an array of host government and grassroots actions targeting foreign MNEs. While economic nationalism and national animosity emanate from within a host country, they may stimulate geopolitical crises outside the host country and thereby affect the international supply chains of foreign MNEs.

This research lays the foundation for analytical and empirical researchers to integrate key elements of nationalism into their studies and recommends propositions and datasets to study these notions.

This study shows the implications that nationalist drivers of supply chain disruptions have for foreign MNEs and thus can help managers to proactively mitigate such disruptions.

This study reveals the importance of integrating notions of national identity and national history in supply chain research, since they play a key role in the emergence of policies and events responsible for supply chain disruptions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a novel stabilization scheme to handle convection and pressure oscillation in the process of solving incompressible laminar flows by finite element method (FEM).

The semi-implicit stabilization scheme, characteristic-based polynomial pressure projection (CBP3) consists of the Characteristic-Galerkin method and polynomial pressure projection. Theoretically, the proposed scheme works for any type of element using equal-order approximation for velocity and pressure. In this work, linear 3-node triangular and 4-node tetrahedral elements are the focus, which are the simplest but most difficult elements for pressure stabilizations.

The present paper proposes a new scheme, which can stabilize FEM solution for flows of both low and relatively high Reynolds numbers. And the influence of stabilization parameters of the CBP3 scheme has also been investigated.

The research in this work is limited to the laminar incompressible flow.

The verification and validation of the CBP3 scheme are conducted by several 2 D and 3 D numerical examples. The scheme could be used to deal with more practical fluid problems.

The application of scheme to study complex hemodynamics of patient-specific abdominal aortic aneurysm is also presented, which demonstrates its potential to solve bio-flows.

The paper simulated 2 D and 3 D numerical examples with superior results compared to existing results and experiments. The novel CBP3 scheme is verified to be very effective in handling convection and pressure oscillation.

Despite some attempts to integrate the market orientation construct into the international marketing area, most conceptual and empirical studies have been conducted in the context of domestic operations. To address this gap we examine whether competitive intensity moderates the relationships among the components of market orientation and export performance. Data was used from 197 Brazilian export companies. Results suggest that interfunctional coordination enhances customer and competitor orientation. Moreover, customer orientation has no direct effect on export performance, while competitor orientation has a positive effect on firm’s international performance. Findings also indicate that competitive intensity moderates all the relationships tested in the model.

Online review bias research has predominantly focused on self-selection biases on the user’s side. By collecting online reviews from multiple platforms and examining their biases in the unique digital environment of “Chinanet,” this paper aims to shed new light on the multiple sources of biases embedded in online reviews and potential interactions among users, technical platforms and the broader social–cultural norms.

In the first study, online restaurant reviews were collected from Dianping.com, one of China's largest review platforms. Their distribution and underlying biases were examined via comparisons with offline reviews collected from on-site surveys. In the second study, user and platform ratings were collected from three additional major online review platforms – Koubei, Meituan and Ele.me – and compared for possible indications of biases in platform's review aggregation.

The results revealed a distinct exponential-curved distribution of Chinese users’ online reviews, suggesting a deviation from previous findings based on Western user data. The lack of online “moaning” on Chinese review platforms points to the social–cultural complexity of Chinese consumer behavior and online environment that goes beyond self-selection at the individual user level. The results also documented a prevalent usage of customized aggregation methods by review service providers in China, implicating an additional layer of biases introduced by technical platforms.

Using an online–offline design and multi-platform data sets, this paper elucidates online review biases among Chinese users, the world's largest and understudied (in terms of review biases) online user group. The results provide insights into the unique social–cultural cyber norm in China's digital environment and bring to light the multilayered nature of online review biases at the intersection of users, platforms and culture.