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This paper examines the effect of managerial interlocking networks (MINs) on firm risk spillover by using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms.

Applying the complex network approach, we build managerial interlocking networks (MINs) and leverage degree centrality to quantify a manager’s network position. To gauge firm risk spillover, we utilize the conditional autoregressive value at risk (CAViaR) model to compute the value-at-risk. Subsequently, we employ ordinary least squares to investigate the influence of MINs on firm risk spillover.

Our research uncovers a direct correlation between a firm risk spillover and the status of network positions within managerial interlocking networks; namely, the more central the position, the greater the risk spillover. This increase is believed to be due to central firms in MINs having greater connectedness and influence. This fosters a similarity in decision-making across different firms through interfirm managerial communication, thus amplifying the risk spillover. Economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and Guanxi culture furtherly intensify the effects of MINs. Additional analysis reveals that the impact of MINs on the firm risk spillover is significantly noticeable in non-state-owned enterprises, while good corporate governance diminishes the risk spillover prompted by MINs.

Our findings offer fresh insights into the interfirm risk outcome associated with MINs and extend practical guidelines for attenuating firm risk spillover with a view toward mitigating systemic risk.

The authors seek to crack the model of new retail by outlining the unique business model known as community-based omni-channel and data-enabled ecosystem.

The study’s analyses of Hema cases and other examples reveal a new omni-channel model, a community-based and data-enabled ecosystem model.

The ecosystem targets local customers within a limited geographical range. It is also data-enabled and effectively leverages large-scale data on consumers, store operations, supply chains and logistics to ensure the smooth functioning of the ecosystem.

The authors hope the typology brings new insights to the development of omni-channel retail.

To address the various irregularities that occurred during the development of China’s electricity market, particularly the issue of collusive pricing between upstream and downstream firms.

This study constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model involving government regulators, grid operators and power producers to address electricity market pricing chaos. By analyzing the stable strategies within each subject’s evolutionary game, adjustments to the relevant parameters are made to achieve a stable state of strategy selection.

The findings of this study indicate the following: (1) Enhancing the government’s rewards and punishments, increasing speculation and rent-seeking costs for grid operators and modifying tariff sales revenue can promote the integrity of grid operators. (2) Establishing reasonable incentives and penalties can effectively mitigate rent-seeking behaviors resulting from collusive pricing in the power industry. (3) Strengthening the accountability of higher authorities to government regulators and adjusting incentives for grid operators to comply and generators to refrain from rent-seeking behavior can increase the likelihood of rigorous inspections by government regulators.

This study elucidates the impact of factors such as the cost of speculation and sales revenue of grid operators, the cost of rent-seeking by power producers and the strength of rewards and punishments by government departments on the power sector. Adjusting these factors can significantly influence the stability of the three-party evolutionary game, providing valuable insights into the regulatory mechanisms of the power industry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of consumers’ attitudes towards organic food on online impulse buying behaviour as well as the moderating effect of three website features (visual, information and navigation design) on this relationship.

Survey data were collected via an online survey using social media platforms. A total of 653 online questionnaires were collected (response rate = 72.5 per cent) and analysed by applying exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The proposed hypotheses were tested through structural equation modelling.

Social media forums, ratings and reviews shape Chinese consumers’ attitudes towards organic food and positively influence their online impulse buying in this market. Website features are critical for disseminating information on organic food. Informative webpages featuring product quality and certification have a greater moderating effect on purchase. Information cues such as nutritional content; production and processing methods, and environmentally friendliness also influence consumers’ attitudes and thus impulse buying decisions.

Marketers should reconsider their tactics for dealing with modern consumers, as webpages should be user-friendly and visually appealing with a social learning mechanism to drive organic food consumption.

This study bridges a gap in the literature on social commerce initiatives for developing consumers’ attitudes towards organic food and online impulse buying. Further, it proposes measures that can enhance organic consumption and contributes to the literature on the importance of social factors, resulting in enhanced knowledge on the online impulse buying of organic food.

This paper attempts to explore why adult progeny initiate progeny–parents family travel, how two generations interact and deal with intergenerational conflicts during travel and how they evaluate their travel experiences from the perspective of filial piety.

Based on in-depth interviews with both parents and their adult progeny, it is found that “repayment” or “compensation” of filial piety is the most important driving force to family travel with parents, and in many cases an adult child exhibits “overspending” by showing filial obedience. On the other hand, parents occasionally utilize filial piety as cultural resources to fulfill their personal goals and to evaluate their interactions with adult children. Finally, the authors offer an exploratory explanation to why filial generation has a relatively low evaluation while parent generation has a higher evaluation of family trip.

The authors suggest that future study in this particular area should attach much more importance to the “filial piety tool boxes” paradigm, which is in parallel with the paradigm of “concept (values) affecting behavior”.

The contribution of this study is to investigate the family travel process of “taking the elderly people to travel” from the perspective of interaction and filial piety.

Although the differential roles of political and business ties are recognized in the literature, the interplay between political and business ties remains unclear. This study aims to explore how political ties affect the formation of business ties with unfamiliar partners by analyzing how a buyer’s political ties affect the market-based selection of suppliers, an important channel through which the buyer forms business ties with unfamiliar suppliers.

A survey of 204 Chinese manufacturing firms was conducted to elucidate the relationship between political ties and the market-based selection of suppliers.

The findings suggest that buyers with strong political ties are more likely to engage in the market-based selection of suppliers; this positive relationship is diminished when social control is preferred over contractual control in the buyer’s supplier governance and is enhanced when technological uncertainty is high.

First, this study sheds light on the interplay between political and business ties by revealing how the buyer’s political ties affect the formation of business ties with unfamiliar suppliers, as represented by the market-based selection of suppliers. Second, it uncovers the boundary conditions of the effect of political ties by revealing the moderating effect of social control preference and technological uncertainty. Third, it extends the interorganizational governance structure literature from its focus on the complement-substitute debate on social control and contractual control to examine the contingent effect of a hybrid governance structure.

Online trust is a key factor for successful online transactions. To some extent, online health consultation can be considered an online transaction. Owing to the unique physician–patient relationship, patients' choice of physicians within an online health consultation setting may not only be based on rational judgments but also considerably affected by their feelings. Hence, the purpose of this study was to explore which physicians' attributes affect patients' cognitive and affective trust in physicians, as well as how these two variables and their association affect patients' willingness to choose.

Based on the broad conceptual framework of online trust, this paper proposed a set of hypotheses that were tested through analyzing survey data using structural equation modeling techniques.

Results showed that physicians' ability had a significant positive influence on patients' cognitive trust in the physician; physicians' integrity and benevolence had a significant positive influence on patients' affective trust in the physician; cognitive and affective trust had a significant positive impact on patients' willingness to choose and there were significant positive interactions between affective and cognitive trust.

This study theoretically enriches the generic model of online trust. From the practical perspective, it will provide physicians working in online health consultation platforms and relevant practitioners with baseline information on the topic and advice for decision-making toward service enhancement and clientele improvements.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the union-nonunion pay gap impact separately for wages and bonuses as well as total compensation to include both wages and bonuses in China. The way in which the impact varies as control variables are added is illustrated as is how the impact varies by the type of firm ownership. The overall pay gap is also decomposed into a component due to differences in their pay determining characteristics as well as a component due to differences in their returns to those characteristics. These separate components are also calculated throughout the pay distribution.

Using the 2010 China Family Panel Studies Survey, a nationally representative survey in China, the methodology involves different estimation procedures as appropriate for the nature of the data and the dependent variables. First the authors estimate a single equation to determine the union-nonunion pay gap. Then the authors estimate the union impact on the various components of compensation (wages and bonuses). Next the authors decompose the relative contribution of each factor in explaining the wage gap. Finally, quantile regressions are used to examine the union impact across various levels of the pay distribution.

The authors find a gross union-nonunion pay gap (wages + bonuses) of 42 percent, dropping to 12 percent after controlling for the effect of other pay determining factors. The union impact on wages is only 8 percent, but bonuses are about twice as high for union workers. The union impact is essentially zero for (state-owned firms) SOEs and for foreign-owned firms but it is large at 16 percent for private firms and even larger at 22 percent for government agencies. Of the overall pay gap of 42 percent, about three-quarters is attributable to differences in their endowments of pay determining characteristics and about one-quarter to differences in the returns for the same endowments of characteristics. Quantile regressions reveal that the pure or adjusted union wage premium exhibits a u-shaped pattern being highest in the bottom and to a lesser extent the top of the pay distribution.

There are a dearth of studies examining the union-nonunion pay gap in China. Of the studies that examine this issue, all of them are at the enterprise level with no studies at the individual level. Taking a nationally representative dataset at the individual level, the authors are able to estimate the union-nonunion pay gap in China. The authors identify the portion of the gap that reflects differences in endowments of pay determining characteristics and the portion that reflects different returns to those characteristics, and the relative contribution of the different variables to those components; and how these components change over the pay distribution. The authors also offer explanations for many of these patterns.

This article investigated the relationship between loneliness and anthropomorphic products.

The authors conducted three studies to examine their hypotheses.

The authors confirmed that highly lonely people would like to seek for social relationship. What's more, they may try to compensate by creating a sense of connection with nonhuman products so they will prefer anthropomorphic products. Further, the authors demonstrated that information framework can moderate this effect. Highly lonely consumers would increase their preference to anthropomorphic product under promotion-focus information, whereas they would decrease their preference to anthropomorphic product under prevention-focus information. These effects do not exist in lowly lonely consumers. At the same time, the authors demonstrate that the effect is mediated by perceived social connection.

This article contributes to loneliness literature in the consumer behavior field and proves the moderation effect of the information framework, which can deepen our understanding of the relationship between loneliness and anthropomorphic products.

Epoxy (EP) and polye-caprolactone (PCL) are typical dual-shape memory polymer (DSMP). To get excellent triple-shape memory effect (TSME) polymer composites which are made from EP and PCL. Miscible PCL/EP blend composites have been investigated and compared to the TSMEs with electrospun PCL microfiber membranes/EP composites. Clay montmorillonite (MMT)-modified electrospun PCL microfiber membranes were prepared to improve the shape memory fixities of electrospun PCL microfiber membranes/EP composites.

The morphologies of electrospun PCL microfiber membranes and the cross section of PCL/EP composites were studied using a field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM), and the existence of MMT was confirmed by a transmission electron microscope. Thermal mechanical properties were observed by a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) and a dynamic thermomechanical analysis machine, and the TSMEs were also determined through dynamic mechanical analysis.

Results indicate that the TSMEs of electrospun PCL microfiber membranes/EP composites were excellent, whereas the TSMEs of PCL/EP blend composites were poor. The TSMEs of PCL electrospun microfiber membranes/EP composites significantly improved with the addition of the PCL electrospun microfiber modified with moderate MMT.

Adding a moderate content of MMT into the electrospun PCL fibers, could improve the TSME of the PCL fiber membranes/EP composites. This study was to create a simple and effective method that can be applied to improve the performance of other SMP.

A novel triple-shape memory composite were made from dual-shape memory EP and electrospun PCL fiber membranes.