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This study aims to enhance the lubrication performance of thrust bearings. The influence of columnar convex–concave compound microtexture on bearing performance is investigated

Based on the compound microtexture model of thrust bearings, considering surface roughness and turbulent effect, the variation of lubrication characteristics with the change in the compound microtexture parameters is studied.

The results indicate that, compared with circular microtexture, the maximum pressure of compound microtexture of thrust bearings increases by 7.42%. Optimal bearing performance is achieved when the internal microtexture depth is 0.02 mm. Turbulent flow states and surface roughness lead to a reduction in the optimal depth. The maximum pressure and load-carrying capacity of the bearing decrease as the initial angle increases, whereas the friction coefficient increases with the increase in the initial angle. The lubrication performance is best for bearings with a circumferential parallel arrangement of microtexture.

The novel composite microtexture with columnar convex-concave is proposed, and the computational model of thrust bearings is set. The influence of surface roughness and turbulent flow on the bearing performance should be considered for better conforming with engineering practice. The effect of microtexture depth, arrangement method and distribution position on the lubrication performance of the compound microtexture thrust bearing is investigated, which is of great significance for improving tribology, thrust bearings and surface microtexture theory.

Because online shopping is risky, there is a strong need to develop better presentation of online reviews, which may reduce the perceived risk and create more pleasurable shopping experiences. To test the impact of online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation, the purpose of this paper is to adopt a scenario experiment to study consumers’ decision-making process under the two scenarios of mixed presentation and classified presentation of online reviews collected from Jingdong.com in China: focusing on the comparative analysis on the differences of the consumers’ perceived risk, purchase intention and purchase delay, and further studying the interaction effect of involvement and online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation.

This paper employed a 2×2 factorial experiment to test the hypothesis. The experimental design is divided into four groups: 2 (online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation: mixed presentation vs classified presentation) × 2 (involvement: low vs high), each of which contains 90 samples. Through the data analysis, the main effect, mediation effect and moderating effect were examined.

The results show that compared with mixed presentation, classified presentation can reduce purchase intention and increase purchase delay due to the existence of loss aversion and availability heuristic. Furthermore, the paper also confirms that there is a significant interaction effect between involvement and online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation.

The existing research pays less attention to the impact of online reviews presentation on consumers’ decision making, especially the lack of discussion on the interaction effect between involvement and online reviews presentation. For this reason, this paper proposes a problem, which concerns whether mixed presentation and classified presentation of online reviews will affect consumers’ decision making differently.

This paper explores how the blockchain food traceability system (BFTS) affects consumers' affective brand commitment and subsequent willingness to pay premium prices.

From February 11 to May 23, 2023, this study collected data from 236 Chinese customers, who had purchased blockchain-traced food in Jingdong Mall within the past three months. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

The main findings were as follows: (1) BFTS information transparency, information immutability and product diagnosticity are significant predictors of consumer-perceived trustworthiness; BFTS information transparency, product diagnosticity and product safety are significant predictors of consumer-perceived informativeness, (2) Perceived trustworthiness and perceived informativeness build consumers' affective brand commitment, (3) Affective brand commitment affects willingness to pay premiums and (4) Health consciousness positively moderates the relationship between consumers' affective brand commitment and willingness to pay premiums.

This paper complements the research on consumer behaviour in the BFTS, and the research results provide important enlightenment for guiding food enterprises to formulate reasonable and perfect marketing strategies of blockchain-traced food.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test a research model that incorporated antecedents of praise feedback behaviour (fear of confrontation and incentive for reducing nuisance costs), praise feedback behaviour (deliberatively praise feedback, casual praise feedback, and true compliment feedback) and consequences (trust and repurchase intention).

A structural equation model was employed to test the relationships of the research model using survey data collected from 398 Taobao consumers.

The results showed that fear of confrontation and incentive for reducing nuisance costs had a significant positive influence on deliberatively praise feedback and true compliment feedback, respectively, and both antecedents had a significant positive influence on casual praise feedback of consumers. It also showed that trust was influenced negatively by deliberatively praise feedback, and positively by casual praise feedback and true compliment feedback. Meanwhile, deliberatively praise feedback and true compliment feedback were found to have negative and positive influences on repurchase intention, respectively.

This research was a pilot study to identify a three-dimension conceptualization of praise feedback behaviour from the perspective of customer satisfaction, and to understand positive review bias from the perspective of input processes.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel recommendation method using online reviews with emotional preferences for facilitating online purchase decisions. This leads to better use of information-rich online reviews for providing users with personalized recommendations.

A novel method is developed for producing personalized recommendations in online purchase decision-making. Such a method fuses the belief structure and the Shapley function together to effectively deal with the emotional preferences in online reviews and adequately tackle the interaction existent between product criteria with the use of a modified combination rule for making better online recommendations for making online purchase decisions.

An example is presented for demonstrating the applicability of the method for facilitating online purchase. The results show that the recommendation using the proposed method can effectively improve customer satisfaction with better purchase decisions.

The proposed method can better utilize online reviews for satisfying personalized needs of consumers. The use of such a method can optimize interface design, refine customer needs, reduce recommendation errors and provide personalized recommendations.

The proposed method adequately considers the characteristics of online reviews and the personalized needs of customers for providing customers with appropriate recommendations. It can help businesses better manage online reviews for improving customer satisfaction and create greater value for both businesses and customers.

This study explores the role of digitalization, especially mobile apps, in expatriate cross-cultural adjustment. The role of digitalization is under-researched and under-recognized in the current literature on global mobility, but is becoming a significant factor in expatriate cross-cultural adjustment.

As the research is exploratory, it uses qualitative methods, specifically in-depth interviews and rigorous thematic analysis. It is based on 31 respondents from 16 higher education organizations across 10 cities in five provinces/municipalities in China, a country with one of the highest levels of digitalization in daily life.

The most significant finding is that mobile apps are central to expatriate cross-cultural adjustment in China. Such apps both enable adjustment if used actively and hinder adjustment significantly if resisted or not used effectively. However high motivation is required to cope with the incompatibility between the infrastructure of mobile apps in China and expatriates’ previous experiences.

This study is based on expatriate academics in China, where digitalization is widespread and local apps rather than international apps are predominant. Hence expatriates may feel a greater impact of digitalization on daily life and work than in less digitalized societies. A major implication is that digitalization should be considered as a potentially significant factor in expatriate cross-cultural adjustment.

Host country governments, employers, app developers and expatriates, all need to consider the use of mobile apps in cross-cultural adjustment and retention of expatriates.

This study identifies the role of digitalization, especially mobile apps, in expatriate cross-cultural adjustment in a highly digitalized environment, which has not been recognized in previous research. It proposes the concept of “digital distance” that should be considered alongside “cultural distance” in the context of expatriate cross-cultural adjustment.

This study aims to explore the interdependent impacts of online word-of-mouth (WOM) and online ads on digital product adoptions, as well as their dynamic changes throughout the product life cycle.

This study adopted an empirical approach by using a unique data set of five mobile games launched between 2012 and 2014 provided by Renren Games Ltd. in China.

The results indicated that advertising generally has a positive impact on WOM. During the product life cycle, the influence on volume and variance gradually decreases, whereas the impact on valence increases over time. WOM (including WOM volume and WOM valence) and advertising both have positive impacts on game adoptions. They complement each other to shape adoptions throughout the product life cycle: advertising is more effective in encouraging adoptions in the early and later stages of the demand evolution process, whereas WOM has a greater impact on adoptions in the mid-stage.

This study provided detailed managerial recommendations on how to effectively integrate different types of marketing communication and optimize the investment strategy of online ads and online WOM in different stages of the product life cycle.

First, the study enriched the theory of digital marketing communication by studying the relationship between mass media (online ads), interpersonal media (online WOM) and product adoptions in the network context. Second, it provided an empirical basis for the inference of the dynamic development of media effect in the new product diffusion theory. Third, the results will be helpful to end the debate in current theoretical literature on whether there is a complementary or alternative relationship between the two effects. Last but not least, it enriched research on the antecedents and dynamic effects of online WOM.

In an online shopping environment, individual reviews and aggregated ratings are important anchors for consumers’ purchasing decisions. However, few studies have considered the influence of aggregated ratings on consumer decision-making, especially at the neural level. This study aims to bridge this gap by investigating the consumer decision-making mechanism based on aggregated ratings to uncover the underlying neural basis and psychological processing.

An event-related potential experiment was designed to acquire consumers’ electrophysiological records and behavioral data during their decision-making processes based on aggregated ratings. The authors speculate that during this process, review valence categorization (RVC) processing occurs, which is indicated by late positive potential (LPP) components.

Results show that LPP components were elicited successfully, and perceptual review valence can modulate its amplitudes (one-star [negative] and five-star [positive] ratings evoke larger LPP amplitudes than three-star [neutral] ratings). The electroencephalogram data indicate that consumer decision-making processes based on aggregated ratings include an RVC process, and behavioral data show that easier review valence perception makes the purchase decision-making easier.

This study enriches the extant literature on the impact of aggregated ratings on consumer decision-making. It helps understand how aggregated ratings affect consumers’ online shopping decisions, having significant management implications. Moreover, it shows that LPP components can be potentially used by researchers and companies to evaluate and analyze consumer emotion and categorization processing, serving as an important objective physiological indicator of consumer behavior.

How to support the rapid internationalization of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is a hot topic in academia and industry. The main purpose of this work is to study the role of relational assets (R-assets) in promoting the speed of internationalization of MNEs, and to explore the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty (institutional environment and industry environment) on the relationship between R-assets and internationalization speed of MNEs.

This study uses the outward foreign investment data of China’s A-share listed enterprises from 2009 to 2021, and employs the Cox proportional hazards model to empirically test the research hypothesis.

The empirical results revealed that R-assets can promote enterprise internationalization speed. In addition, the study also finds that the institutional uncertainty of host countries weakens the promotion effect of R-assets on internationalization speed of MNEs, while the industry uncertainty strengthens the promotion effect of those. Heterogeneity analysis illustrates that, compared with state-owned enterprises, non-state-owned enterprises have a more significant effect on the above conclusions.

This study enriches the literature on internationalization speed of MNEs by focusing on the determinants of internationalization speed through R-assets. From the perspective of knowledge, the work also provides a theoretical reference whereby MNEs can use host country R-assets to accelerate knowledge acquisition and then internationalization practice. In conclusion, this study provides valuable insights for managers aiming to develop effective strategies through R-assets to achieve rapid internationalization, contributing to an emerging literature stream on catch-up for emerging-market MNEs.

Through the case analysis of China’s digital library, the purpose of this paper is to make readers understand the development status, achievements and problems of China’s digital library. At the same time, it also enables readers to understand the common application forms of these modern information technologies in digital libraries, so as to provide a reference basis for the application of new technologies in other countries’ digital libraries.

On the basis of literature review, the authors have analyzed a conspicuous collection of related papers in order to make a comprehensive summary and elaboration on the present situation of modern information technology application in Chinese digital libraries.

This paper defines and analyses the concepts, contents and relationships of the three most important modern Big Data information technologies, and then completes the analysis of the current situation of the application of information technology in Chinese digital libraries. The block chain can achieve more accurate information collection, more secure information storage and more effective information dissemination. Artificial intelligence can improve the existing digital library service level in three aspects: resource construction, information organization and information service. Internet plus will help transform the traditional digital library business mode in order to adapt to the change of user-centered service.

This is among the first structured attempts of comprehensively and generally summarizing the application of modern information technology in Chinese digital libraries. It also contains an original exploration of the relationship between the main kinds of modern information technology. Based on this, a relatively complete application scenario and possible vision of modern information technology in digital library can be built.