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The emergence and rapid expansion of social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of consumer–brand communication. While consumer–brand relationship is driven on marketing campaigns in regular manner, social media (e.g. WeChat groups) creates boundaryless connections between external forces (e.g. customer community engagement) and internal resources (e.g. sales force). Therefore, this paper aims to provide a firm–customer synergistic perspective to explain service performance (SP) through service customization, which is significantly contributing to the research of consumer–brand relationship field in the current era.

A survey including two sets of questionnaires are employed for data collection, with one completed by frontline salesperson of Casarte and the other by their customers. A total of 242 dyadic-level data are adopted to test the hypothesis.

The findings shed light on the mechanism that drive SP by firm–customer interactions. These insights hold distinct managerial implications for firms seeking to leverage digital tools to efficiently meet customer demands.

This study contributes to understanding consumer–brand relationship within social media environment. It offers a synergistic perspective combined both outside-in and inside-out thinking, and explains how consumer–brand relationship can be fostered from both customers and salespeople. It highlights the significance of customer community engagement and salespeople dynamic learning capability as crucial factors in building strong consumer–brand relationship.

As a potentially disruptive technology, blockchain technology ensures that all the data cannot be merely tampered with once they are recorded on-chain. However, the fake source information may be input into the blockchain, which is mistaken for truthful data and results in a trust divide between the on-chain and the actual world. One missing perspective from previous studies is information manipulation at the source still exists under the blockchain mode. The authors’ goal was to analyze how blockchain technology affects the information deception of the agricultural product supply chain (APSC) under this premise. Also, the authors further analyzed some factors that influence the effectiveness of blockchain technology.

The authors build an APSC game model consisting of a farmer and an agricultural product broker, which employs the principal–agent game model to explore the conditions for achieving the mutual trust equilibrium between the two parts. Then, through numerical simulation, the authors further analyze how the quality of on-chain information and the numbers of on-chain firms affect blockchain’s effect on deception in APSC and examine the circumstances in which blockchain technology is more suitable.

The authors demonstrate that only by meeting the threshold of high-quality on-chain information and having a sufficient number of on-chain firms, can the blockchain-based supply chain initiate a better information ecosystem, which helps eradicate deception in the APSC.

This paper provides valuable insights for participants in supply chains as well as is probably generalizable to other industrial products that require similar services in the early stage of blockchain.

In the era of the service economy, the personalized needs of customers are increasing rapidly. It often occurs that front-line employees bend organizational rules to help customers. The study sought to explore the influence mechanism of servant leadership on specific dimensions of customer-oriented deviance from the manager’s perspective, examine the mediating role of psychological security, and the moderating role of error management climate in the process.

We conducted an online survey study in China from April 10 to 29, 2023. We use online survey questionnaire technique and random sampling method for data collection. The authors collected 385 questionnaires from China and tested the model by SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0.

The results show that servant leadership significantly promotes employees' deviant customer-oriented behaviors, psychological security plays a mediating role between servant leadership and deviant customer-oriented behaviors, and error management climate has a positive moderating effect between servant leadership and deviant customer-oriented behaviors.

This study explores the influence mechanism of servant leadership on deviant customer-oriented behaviors. The results of this study not only enrich the theoretical research on the formation mechanism of deviant customer-oriented behaviors but also provide a reference for leaders to correctly view and effectively manage employees' deviant customer-oriented behaviors.

Electricity demand forecasting has always been a key issue, and inaccurate forecasts may mislead policymakers. To accurately predict China’s electricity demand up to 2030, this paper aims to establish a cross-validation-based linear model selection system, which can consider many factors to avoid missing useful information and select the best model according to estimated out-of-sample forecast performances.

With the nine identified influencing factors of electricity demand, this system first determines the parameters in four alternative fitting procedures, where for each procedure a lot of cross-validation is performed and the most frequently selected value is determined. Then, through comparing the out-of-sample performances of the traditional multiple linear regression and the four selected alternative fitting procedures, the best model is selected in view of forecast accuracy and stability and used for forecasting under four scenarios. Besides the baseline scenario, this paper investigates lower and higher economic growth and higher consumption share.

The results show the following: China will consume 7,120.49 TWh, 9,080.38 TWh and 11,649.73 TWh of electricity in 2020, 2025 and 2030, respectively; there is hardly any possibility of decoupling between economic development level and electricity demand; and shifting China from an investment-driven economy to a consumption-driven economy is greatly beneficial to save electricity.

Following insights are obtained: reasonable infrastructure construction plans should be made for increasing electricity demand; increasing electricity demand further challenges China’s greenhouse gas reduction target; and the fact of increasing electricity demand should be taken into account for China’s prompting electrification policies.

Drawing on identity theory and the symbolic interactionism perspective of identity theory, this study aims to construct a moderated mediation framework to test the effects of perceived overqualification (POQ) on knowledge sharing (KS) through professional identity threat (PIT) and the moderating role of coworkers' help-seeking behavior (CHSB).

This paper uses a quantitative multistudy research design with a combination of a scenario experiment (Study 1) and a two-wave field study among 220 supervisor-subordinate dyads at a power company in China. Using analysis of variance, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and bootstrapping method, the authors validated the research hypothesis.

In the scenario experiment study (study 1), the authors find that POQ is positively related to PIT and that CHSB negatively moderates the positive impact of POQ on PIT. The field study (study 2) replicated the above findings and found that PIT mediates the negative effect of POQ on KS. In addition, CHSB negatively moderates the mediating role of PIT between POQ and KS.

First, the current study extended the nomological network of POQ research by examining its influence on employees' KS. Second, this study empirically investigated the mediating role of PIT, which provided a new explanatory mechanism for the influence of POQ. Finally, this study demonstrates the moderating role of CHSB—a situational factor that has been ignored in previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the effectiveness of price limits on stock volatilities in China over a more recent time period spanning from 2007 to 2012. The motivation stems from the fact that very high stock market volatilities are observed in China and we are sceptical of the volatility mitigating effect claimed by advocates of price limits.

The effectiveness of price limits on volatilities is examined using an event study methodology and within an expanded framework of volatility-volume relationships. The sample stocks include the 300 component stocks of the CSI300 Index.

Both event study and regression analysis suggest that price limits exaggerate market volatilities by causing volatility spillovers. The destabilising effect is much more pronounced for small firm stocks and when the market falls. In addition to the informational source of volatilities (represented by volume), price limits create another non-trivial frictional source of volatilities in China’s stock market.

This research is the first to re-examine the price limit effect in China’s stock market in an expanded framework of volatility-volume relationships. It identifies price limits, in addition to information, as another non-trivial frictional source of volatilities. The findings derived from a recent sample period confirm the conventional view of inefficiency of price limits raised by Fama (1989) and provide evidence in support of the pervasive trend of stock market deregulations.

Building on the social capital theory of career success (SCT), this paper aims to explore how and when newcomers’ overqualifications can grant them positions as informal leaders within the workgroup over time.

The model was tested using a social relations modeling analysis conducted using a three-wave survey with 242 newcomers in Macau.

The results support the view that relatively qualified newcomers can enjoy social capital advantages in workgroup networks. Newcomers’ desired qualifications can grant them positions as informal leaders through leader–member exchange and advice network centrality. These relationships are moderated by relational dissimilarity, such that the benefits of being relatively overqualified will be weakened when relational dissimilarity is high (vs. low).

When assisting overqualified newcomers in integrating into their teams, practitioners shall be aware of the time and resources that new hires require for adjustment, especially when significant newcomer–veteran relational dissimilarity exists.

The present paper challenges the overtly detrimental outcomes of overqualification by highlighting the positive relational implications of being relatively overqualified.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the dyeing effect of fast-growing fir wood dyed with reactive dyes.

In this study, five factors including temperature, the dosage of dye accelerator, dyeing time, the dosage of fixing agent and fixing time were investigated. Then, the color difference and light resistance of the wood surface after dyeing were used as the evaluation indicators; the best dyeing process under the two indicators was obtained through the range analysis. Finally, the two indicators were considered comprehensively, and the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was used to obtain the best dyeing process under the comprehensive indicators.

The results show that when the comprehensive index was used as the evaluation index, the optimal dyeing process for reactive red X-3B dyeing fast-growing fir veneer was that the dyeing temperature was 65°C; the amount of dye accelerator was 25 g L⁻¹; the dyeing time was 2 h; the amount of fixing agent was 15 g L⁻¹; and the fixing time was 35 min.

The technique of wood dyeing is an important method to increase the value of wood products. When using different kinds of dyes or dyeing substrates for wood dyeing, the dyeing process is different. This study determined the best process for reactive dye dyeing of fast-growing fir veneer and provided a solution for improving the value of fast-growing fir wood.

As an important form of the e-commerce industry, online group buying is under the spotlight from with two sides: cheaper price but longer waiting time. The purpose of this paper is to adequately investigate the interaction between saving and waiting time of group buying comprehensively.

To fill the research gap, the authors elaborate a dual-channel supply chain (SC) with regular retail (individual buying) and group-buying channel, and formulate the demand based on the consumer utility with the positive effect of saving money and the negative effect of wasting time.

The authors find that power structure only changes the optimal prices, instead of the waiting time. The selling price mainly influences consumer demands, instead of the price discount of group buying. The SC profits are only positive to the channel preference, and it is the decisive parameter of consumers' choice. The price sensitivity lays a more remarkable impact on the SC compared to the time sensitivity. Above all, the price is the main factor of group buying, instead of time.

These results underscore the improvement for the dual-channel SC of group buying, providing managerial insights for the group-buying industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how art production and marketing in China is attempting to move up the value chain as increasing number of Chinese replica-selling galleries seek to break free from the image of Chinese art towns as skilled but imitative centres of art production.

In-depth interviews were conducted among seven gallery owners in Wushipu art village over three weeks to discover how art production in China has evolved and to chart its future growth.

In the Chinese setting with its distinctive cultural patterns, tensions between the emergent national pride in original art and the facile and commercial moneymaking potential of simply selling industrially produced art are revealed.

The changing dynamics of arts markets in China provide marketers and researchers a glimpse into a parallel trend: the gradual but rising shift to innovation, originality and luxury occurring in the China-based manufacturing centres of material goods.

The attempts to break from the imitative mass production of art and strike a balance between creating and meeting the art needs of the Chinese consumer indicate how domestic market priorities and economic growth are likely to serve as the new fuel for contemporary China’s socioeconomic development.

Via an interpretive look at contemporary Chinese modes of arts production and marketing, the paper revisits the antagonism between the creation of original art and the production of industrial art in a context not well-known in the west, the massive art production centres of China.