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Due to the frequent occurrence of data breaches, managing the cost of these events has become one of the biggest challenges confronting modern businesses. Firms urgently require strong security and effective event response strategies to tackle data breaches.

This study first quantified the cost of 196 data breach events between 2016 and 2019 using the event study method and then utilized the crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA) method to investigate the influencing mechanisms of the data breach cost from the configured perspectives of firm, event and response strategy.

The results of the event study revealed significant differences in the cost of data breaches and their influencing factors between traditional and Internet-based firms. While Internet-based firms tended to experience a negative market reaction following a data breach, traditional firms did not show the same pattern. Based on the configuration analysis, six different strategies for cost control were identified, including mitigation and apology strategies for internet-based firms and indifference, fact-statement, silence-keeping and reputation-building strategies for traditional firms.

The findings of this study can provide deeper insights into the market reaction to data breach events as well as their influencing mechanisms. Furthermore, this study offers practical suggestions for corporations to manage and control the strikes of data breach incidents.

Drawing on the Health Belief Model (HBM), this study aims to investigate the roles of health beliefs (i.e. perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, health self-efficacy and cues to action) in promoting college students’ smartphone avoidance intention.

Empirical data were collected through a cross-sectional survey questionnaire administered to 4,670 student smartphone users at a large university located in Central China. Further, a two-step Structural Equation Modeling was conducted using AMOS 22.0 software to test the hypothesized relationships in the research model.

Analytical results indicate that (1) perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits and health self-efficacy positively influence users’ smartphone avoidance intention; (2) perceived barriers negatively influence smartphone avoidance intention, while (3) cues to action reinforce the relationships between perceived susceptibility/perceived benefits and smartphone avoidance intention, but attenuate the relationships between perceived barriers/health self-efficacy and smartphone avoidance intention.

This study demonstrates that HBM is invaluable in explaining and promoting users’ smartphone avoidance intention, thereby extending extant literature on both HBM and smartphone avoidance.

Research on smartphone avoidance is still in a nascent stage. This study contributes to the field by offering a fresh theoretical lens for pursuing this line of inquiry together with robust empirical evidence.

This study aims to examine why users search for images, how users describe their image needs and what the images are used for by analysing questions obtained from two Chinese social Q&A sites, Zhihu and Baidu Zhidao.

A total of 1,402 image questions were collected from Zhihu and Baidu Zhidao. Both quantitative analysis and qualitative content analysis were performed to identify user image needs and the potential differences on the two social Q&A sites.

Question-asker’s intention varies in different platforms. Zhihu users asked questions mainly aiming at a promotion of subsequent discussion, whereas users of Baidu Zhidao often did so to seek information. Syntactic attributes were not frequently used in both two sites. Zhihu users were more likely to express subjective evaluations on images (concept, emotion, theme and style) in their questions than users of Baidu Zhidao. In contrast, questions from Baidu Zhidao showed a tendency to more frequently include descriptive metadata (rights, format, size, quality and authenticity) and semantic attributes (generic activity, specific people, fashion and text) of the images than questions from Zhihu. Learning was an important use on social Q&A sites, especially on Baidu Zhidao. In addition, the images were primarily used to trigger emotion or served a persuasive purpose in Zhihu.

This study contributes to a better understanding of user image search behaviour, and the findings could be used to develop better image services on social Q&A sites. Meanwhile, the image attributes extracted from the questions are conducive to the improvement of image retrieval systems.

This study explored the features of image needs on social Q&A sites, especially considering image use specified in the question. The difference of image needs between two Chinese social Q&A sites (Zhihu and Baidu Zhidao) was identified.

Several multivariate statistical methods were comprehensively used to interpret the temporal, spatial patterns and source identification of surface water pollution in Bohai Bay with the large and complex data. Twelve variables water quality indices were surveyed at 12 sites three times a year (May, August, and October) from 1995 to 2005. Cluster analysis (CA) grouped the eleven years into two clusters, Cluster A (1995 to 2001 except 1998) and cluster B (2002 to 2005 and 1998), and spatial CA divided the entire area into three groups. The results of discriminant analysis showed that the temporal CA and spatial CA were effective with 90% and 83.3% correct assignments, respectively. In cluster A, the pollution sources mainly were nutrient factor from non-point source and Hg pollution, oil and organic pollutions were relatively light. In Cluster B, the organic pollution became the mainly pollution source, and the nutrient pollution was still serious problem. In the results of spatial analysis, the group 1 was mainly affected by anthropogenic pollution, the group 3 was seriously affected by oil spill pollution and nutrients pollution, and the group 2 reflected relatively strong water self-purification ability.

The world currency is endowed with two inherent contradictions, namely, the general contradiction of all currencies and the special contradiction between the quality and quantity of the world currency. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In the wake of the Second World War, the USA, with its strong economic and military strength, established an international monetary system centered on the US dollar (USD). This gave USD the status of “world currency” and bounded it to the US imperialist hegemony with mutual integration and interaction, making it possible for USD capital to conduct international exploitation and wealth plundering extensively around the world.

The contradiction between the capital logic and the power logic, which is inherent in capital accumulation models of the new imperialism, also indicates the inevitable decline of USD.

This constitutes an important feature of the new imperialism. However, as a sovereign currency, USD has inextricable and inherent contradictions while exercising its function as the world currency.

Motivated by the need for research on the relationship between health app usage and health-related outcomes in the form of health status and life satisfaction, this study builds on self-regulation theory to construct a research model for elucidating how health app quality affects health information literacy, health app usage and physical activity.

To empirically validate the proposed research model, a large-scale questionnaire survey on health app usage was administered on a sample of 6,948 respondents recruited from a university in China. Structural equation modeling was employed for data analysis.

Empirical findings demonstrate that health app quality positively affects self-regulation with respect to health app usage, health information literacy and physical activity. Taken together, these self-regulated behaviors drive health-related outcomes for health status and life satisfaction.

This study advances extant literature on health app usage through the application of self-regulation theory to investigate the effects of technological interventions in healthcare. Findings offer practical implications for how health apps can be leveraged to realize positive health-related outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the roles that service employees’ responses to high job demands play in service innovation, by examining the effects that service employees’ motivational orientation in self-regulation (regulatory focus) and their emotional labour strategy have on their creativity.

By integrating regulatory focus theory and emotion regulation theory, the authors developed a theoretical model to propose the links between promotion and prevention regulatory foci, different emotional labour strategies and frontline employee creativity. The research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear model based on data collected from 304 frontline employees and 72 supervisors in 51 restaurants.

The results showed that promotion focus was positively related to frontline employee creativity while prevention focus was negatively related to it. In addition, both emotional labour strategies (deep acting and surface acting) mediated the effect of promotion focus on frontline employee creativity. Surface acting mediated the effect of prevention focus on frontline employee creativity.

This is the first research conducted to explain, from a self-regulatory perspective, the influence that is exerted on service employees’ service innovation by their responses to high job demands. The findings identify the effects that service employees’ promotion focus or prevention focus in self-regulation have on their creativity, and the data unravel the role of emotional labour strategy as the mediating mechanism that explains the influence of regulatory focus on service employee creativity. On the basis of the findings, managerial directions are offered with regard to managing service employees’ regulatory focus and emotional labour, with a view to enhancing the creativity and innovation within a service organisation.

The authors develop a theoretical framework of how foreign competition in a firm's home country jointly interacts with other environmental factors to influence the internationalization pace. This study moves beyond the debate on whether foreign competition promotes or inhibits the internationalization pace by unpacking the nature of pace across strategic and operational dimensions. By differentiating the internationalization paces of market scope and international commitment, the study results show that foreign competition has a positive effect on the former and a negative effect on the latter. This indicates that the determinants of different paces are conditional upon the different knowledge types among foreign competitors.

Using a panel data set of Chinese construction corporations over the period from 2009 to 2015, the authors extend previous research on the effect of home country environment on internationalization behavior in an emerging economy by examining the effects of the interplay between foreign competition in home country and industrial contexts. The authors also explore the moderating effect of subnational institutions on the relationship between foreign competition and internationalization pace. They use a Poisson model and a GEE model to examine the main effects and moderating effects involved.

The results indicate that industry dynamism strengthens the positive effect of foreign competition and the pace of market scope, while industry munificence weakens the negative effect of foreign competition and the pace of international commitment. The authors’ findings support the coexistence of “pushing” and “pulling” effects of environmental factors from a firm's home country. The authors extend the argument of “institutional escapism” by focusing on subnational institutions. They show that firms located in a region with a low level of marketization are more likely to respond by accelerating the pace of their international expansion to escape from their home country.

The authors’ findings have implications for practitioners and policymakers working with emerging market firms (EMFs). The authors suggest that local governments should consider building high-quality institutions that can reduce the possibility of investment opportunities escaping EMFs. The authors’ findings indicate that international knowledge from foreign competitors may also assist EMFs in understanding more about the cultural environment before entering host countries, although it cannot help them to resolve cultural uncertainty when operating in host countries. Hence, managers should carefully evaluate their competitiveness before they decide to engage in global competition at an accelerated rate.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual model for examining the effects of trust (competence trust, goodwill trust) and cooperation on partner opportunism and for exploring the moderating effects of guanxi on the relationships among trust, cooperation and opportunism in joint ventures.

The sample for this paper comprises 981 manufacturing joint ventures from various industrial sectors. A total of 354 valid questionnaires were collected, representing a 36 per cent response rate. The conceptual model is tested with structural equation modeling adopting AMOS software.

The empirical findings indicate that both competence trust and goodwill trust reduce partner opportunism in a joint venture through fostering cooperation. Competence trust also exerts significant influence on preventing opportunism, whereas opportunistic behavior is not greatly affected by goodwill trust. Additionally, the results reveal that guanxi helps strengthen the negative relationship between cooperation and opportunism.

This paper makes a threefold contribution: First, it investigates empirically the direct influence of two types of trust on partner opportunism. Second, it tests indirect influence of trust on partner opportunism through the path of cooperation. Third, it explores the moderating effects of guanxi in relationships on trust, cooperation and partner opportunism. Implications offers suggestions for management practice to reduce partner opportunism in joint-venture manufacturing.

In the new development stage of comprehensively building a socialist modern state, it is imperative to adhere to the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, comprehensively summarize China's practical experiences in economic development, strengthen research on capital issues, construct theories of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics regarding capital and provide scientific theoretical guidance for further promoting the positive role of various types of capital while preventing and overcoming their negative effects, which is a major theoretical issue and a glorious task for the theoretical and economic circles in China.

From the perspective of Marx's theory on capital and historical development, modern capital represents the organizational mode of socialized mass production and market economy. It serves as both the economic foundation of bourgeois society and a tool for socialist economic development.

The market economy represents an inevitable historical stage and form of socialist economic development, necessitating the adoption of capital as an organizational form within socialist economies.

The utilization of capital to advance a socialist economy is a remarkable achievement by the CPC and Chinese people, representing a significant innovation in both theory and practice. The role of capital is inherently dual under any social condition. In the context of a socialist system, capital can play a positive role effectively, and its behavior can be guided and regulated correctly to curb its negative or even destructive impact.