Search results

This paper aims to contemplate the past development of backpacker tourism research and assess the future development of backpacker tourism research.

The authors evaluate the research on backpacker tourism in the past in the following three aspects, namely, research themes, research methods and geographical and cultural contexts of research.

Backpackers and backpacker tourism have been evolving in the past 75 years, just as other groups of travelers and forms of travel have. With the rapid pace of globalization in our time, backpacker tourism and its kinship forms will remain an important international tourism phenomenon, with root reasons in different types of economies and societies. As such, it will remain to be a significant research subject for tourism researchers in the future.

This paper contemplates the past development and assesses the future development of backpacker tourism research.

The finite-time visual servoing control problem is considered for dynamic wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) with unknown control direction and external disturbance.

By using finite-time control method and switching design technique.

First, the visual servoing kinematic WMR model is developed, which can be converted to the dynamic chained-form systems by using a state and input feedback transformation. Then, for two decoupled subsystems of the chained-form systems, according to the finite-time stability control theory, a discontinuous three-step switching control strategy is proposed in the presence of uncertain control coefficients and external disturbance.

A class of discontinuous anti-interference control method has been presented for the dynamic nonholonomic systems.

The crowdfunding market has experienced rapid growth in recent years. However, not all projects are successfully financed because of information asymmetries between the founder and the providers of external finance. This shortfall in funding has made factors that lead to successful fundraising, a great interest to researchers. This study draws on the social capital theory, human capital theory and level of processing (LOP) theory to predict the success of crowdfunding projects.

A feature set is extracted and correlations between project success and features are utilized to order the features. The artificial neural network (ANN) is popularly applied to analyze the dependencies of the input variables to improve the accuracy of prediction. However, the problem of overfitting may exist in such neural networks. This study proposes a neural network method based on ensemble machine learning and dropout methods to generate several neural networks for preventing the problem of overfitting. Four machine learning techniques are applied and compared for prediction performance.

This study shows that the success of crowdfunding projects can be predicted by measuring and analyzing big data of social media activity, human capital of funders and online project presentation. The ensemble neural network method achieves highest accuracy. The investments rose from early projects and another platform by the funder serve as credible indicators for later investors.

The managerial implication of this study is that the project founders and investors can apply the proposed model to predict the success of crowdfunding projects. This study also identifies the most influential features that affect fundraising outcomes. The project funders can use these features to increase the successful opportunities of crowdfunding project.

This study contributes to apply a new machine learning modeling method to extract features from activity data of crowdfunding platforms and predict crowdfunding project success. In addition, it contributes to the research on the deployment of social capital, human capital and online presentation strategies in a crowdfunding context as well as offers practical implications for project funders and investors.

The purpose of this study is to explore the antecedents of consumers’ online review intention in e-commerce platforms from a unique perspective of consumer commitment and platform design. Meanwhile, for the dual-platform strategy, i.e. providing both the web and mobile platforms simultaneously, which is widely adopted in the industry but lacks theoretical concerns, this study aims to examine the differences that platform design influences consumer commitment, consequently contributing to online review intention, between the web and mobile contexts.

A cross-sectional online survey is employed, and a structural equation model-based approach is utilized to analyze the data collected from both the website-preferred consumers (N = 167) and the mobile app-preferred consumers (N = 247).

The results indicate that instrumental support design factors and socio-emotional support factors positively influence consumer commitment, which further affect online review intention positively. Furthermore, design factors in different use contexts generate different impacts, and consumer commitment generates a greater effect on online review intention in the mobile than in the web context. Empathy is found to be an important motivator of consumer commitment in both contexts.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, as one of the first attempts to capture the differences in the relationship between platform design on consumer commitment and online review intention in different use contexts within the dual-platform e-commerce, this study provides insights for e-commerce platform managers and designers to promote consumer commitment and online review engagement by prioritizing the platform design.

This paper aims to explore how consumer's purchase intentions and word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions of local tea are influenced by the signal effects of geographical indication labelling (GIL) on the basis of theory of reasoned action and social identity theory.

This study has developed a structural equation model (SEM) to explain the effects of consumer's attitudes, social norms and social identities on behavioural intentions, considering purchase of foods with geographical indication labels. This study collected responses from 318 consumers of tea in Taiwan.

Three main results are reported: (1) the prevention-focused benefit, which is a risk-aversion consideration, and the promotion-focused benefit, which is a taste and joy of quality, have higher influence compared to perceived concerns (price) on attitude towards GIL produce. (2) Compared to subjective norms, consumer attitude affects purchase intention more, yet the effects are opposite when they influence the WOM intentions. (3) Global identity impacts purchase intentions but not WOM intentions, whereas local identity influences both intentions.

Findings indicate attitude, social influence and social identity play critical roles in affecting consumer behavioural intentions. Global identity and local identity play different roles in purchase intention and WOM intentions.

Numerical literature shows that agricultural insurance can affect pesticide investments, but few of them are devoted to explain how agricultural insurance affects farmers’ selection on green or traditional pesticides. This paper aims to develop a theoretical model about how agricultural insurance influences on green pesticides selections and tests our conclusions by using the data from China land economic survey (CLES) from 2020 to 2021.

We employ probit model to capture the effects of agricultural insurance on green pesticides adoption.

We indicate that green pesticides have a stronger effect on stabilizing yield and increasing income than traditional pesticides, but there are still risks disturbing farmers’ decisions on green pesticides usage. By providing premium subsidies after the farmers are affected by natural risk, agricultural insurance improves the farmers’ expected income and encourages farmers to use green pesticides. Further, we further confirm these conclusions by considering different scenarios such as climate risks, farmers’ entrepreneurship and credit constraints. We find that the effects are more salient if croplands are under higher natural risks and, farmers are equipped with entrepreneurship and formal credit. This paper implies that the agricultural insurance decoupled with green technologies also have salient positive effects on agricultural pollution control.

The potential contributions of this paper can be outlined in three aspects in detail. Firstly, this paper aims to revel the effects of agricultural insurance on pesticide selection by structuring a general theoretical model. By using the CLES data from 2020 to 2021, we confirm that agricultural insurance increases the probability for adopting green pesticides. Secondly, this paper discusses the effects of farmers’ characteristics on the results and finds that if farmers have entrepreneurship, the effects of agricultural insurance on green pesticide usage will be more salient. Thirdly, it uncovers some practices in China, which will supply experiences for other developing countries. For example, this paper further demonstrates that “insurance + credit” plan the present Chinese government carried out will be an important measure for strengthening effects of agricultural insurance on green pesticides usage. Moreover, it shows that decouple agricultural policies will also guide farmers to use green technologies eventually if the technologies are reliable and farmers can afford.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a framework integrating the technology acceptance model (TAM), individuals’ task–technology fit (TTF) and perceptions toward adopting automobile telematics devices.

This study integrated the TAM with TTF to understand individual perceptions of a technology’s value. In addition, the intrinsic motivational factors toward technology usage, including positive perceptions (perceived enjoyment, personal innovation and perceived uniqueness) and negative perceptions (perceived risk and performance gap), were considered in the model. Furthermore, the moderating effect of driving experience was examined.

The perceived usefulness (PU) of telematics as well as perceived ease of use (PEOU) affected drivers’ adoption intentions. PEOU had a greater effect on adoption intentions than PU, and technology characteristics had a greater effect on TTF than task characteristics. Moreover, individuals’ perceptions of perceived enjoyment and uniqueness affected PU and PEOU. The negative perceptions of perceived risk and performance gap affected PU and PEOU, respectively. Furthermore, driving experience significantly weakened the relationship between PU and intentions.

Telematics is a niche market due to the development of the Internet of Things, but users’ adoption intentions remain unknown. This study constructed a more comprehensive model and tested the impacts of certain variables on telematics adoption, with driving experience as a crucial moderator.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the feature of soot in diesel engine oil and provide a method to stably disperse these soots using effect additives which is benefical for lubricants to pass related engine tests.

This paper designed experiments to investigate the dispersant type, treat level and different dispersant interactions which influence on lubricant soot-related viscosity increase. The research work developed an effective dispersant package which can well solve the soot-related viscosity increase, allowing pass Mack T-11 and Mack T-8 engine tests and demonstrated the helpfulness of using a quickly screening method developed by a steel piston diesel engine CA 6DL2-35.

The effect of dispersant treat level on the viscosity increase of the oil samples was negligible. Dispersant booster can effectively improve the soot handling ability of heavy-duty diesel engine oils (HDDEO), and the appropriate treat level of dispersant booster can help HDDEO pass Mack T-8 and Mack T-11 engine tests.

The test results are useful for formulators to select the appropriate dispersants or dispersant booster to develop the HDDEO packages which can meet the modern diesel engine lubrication requirements.

Most previous studies in this field were carried out on soot formation mechanism and soot-related wear rather than how to solve the soot-related viscosity increasing of HDDEO. This paper describes the soot dispersing requirements of different HDDEO specifications and developed an effective dispersant package which can well deal with Mack T-11 and Mack T-8E standard engine tests soot handling ability requirements.

The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated philosophical foundation for Kaizen.

The study is based on triangulation (and integration) of six philosophies: the Traditional Values, the Process-Oriented Philosophy, Edification, Completeness, Improving Perfection and True-Mindfulness. In addition, the Power of One integrates these philosophies into one solid foundation for Kaizen.

A framework, called The Kaizen Wheel, is created to represent the integrated philosophical foundation for Kaizen. It shows the big picture and the close knit of the six philosophies for facilitating Kaizen. It also suggests that Kaizen can serve as a new philosophical paradigm for the unification of action and knowledge.

Although empirical contents are implicitly embedded in each of the six philosophies, the paper’s main contribution is to provide a conceptual framework for the integration of Kaizen philosophies. Since this is a conceptual paper, further research and more empirical studies will help facilitate the understanding and practices of Kaizen.

The Kaizen Wheel provides a big picture of the Kaizen philosophies. It is a useful mechanism for practitioners to review their own values so as to provide guidelines for not only their thoughts and behaviors regarding Kaizen activities, but also the design and implementation of Kaizen programs.

This is an original paper. It provides a valuable conceptual framework for providing an integrated foundation for Kaizen research and practice.

The present study aims to clarify the following two research objectives: (1) the user behavior of government websites during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) period and (2) how the government improved government's website design during the COVID-19 period.

The authors used website analytics to examine usage patterns and behaviors of the government website via personal computer (PC) and mobile devices during the COVID-19 pandemic. In-depth interviews were conducted to understand the user experience of government website users and to gather users' opinions about how government websites should be redesigned.

With the rising of the COIVID-19 pandemic, most studies expect that the use of government websites through a mobile device will grow astonishingly. The authors uncovered that the COVID-19 pandemic did not increase the use of government websites. Instead, severe declines in website usage were observed for all device users with the declines being more pronounced in mobile device users than in PC users. This is an admonitory caveat that reveals public health and pandemic prevention information announced on government websites cannot be effectively transmitted to the general public through official online platforms.

The study highlights the gap in information behavior and usage patterns between PC and mobile device users when visiting government websites. Although mobile devices brought many new visitors, mobile devices are ineffective in retaining visitors and continuous long-term use. The results of localize experience is helpful in the improvement of government website evaluation worldwide.