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Although the prior literature has identified the relevance of dealer participation for multinational enterprises (MNEs), it is unclear whether such participation could also be an important means for local dealers to learn from MNEs. By adopting local firms’ viewpoint, our study draws on organizational learning theory to examine how local dealers benefit from their participation with foreign suppliers in Africa.

The empirical setting is a combinative dataset of secondary data and primary survey of 164 small- and medium-sized local dealers with nine subsidiaries of a Chinese motorcycle company in six countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.

This research shows that dealer participation is positively associated with dealer performance, and this positive effect is stronger when local dealers operate in regions with low government corruption and high government support. However, the positive relationship is weaker when local dealers use the local tongue extensively but becomes stronger when their foreign suppliers have a high dealer coverage.

By taking a local-participant perspective, our study extends the participation literature to show how firms from a resource-constrained region may benefit from their proactive participation with foreign counterparts. Additionally, we identify the boundary conditions of institutional factors and strategic choices of local dealers and foreign suppliers, providing a nuanced understanding of firm behaviors in complex and uncertain markets.

Contracts and trust are two prominent governance mechanisms in buyer–supplier exchanges, yet controversy persists regarding the interplay between contracts and trust. This study aims to provide a new perspective to understand the debate by differentiating between- from within-dyad effects of contracts–trust relationships.

Based on survey data of 250 Chinese buyer–supplier relationships collected over two time periods, this study used two-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) with repeated measures to test the influence of contracts (trust) on trust (contracts) over time.

The authors find that for major buyer–supplier exchanges, contracts and trust tend to complement each other when comparing across dyads, but they likely substitute for each other in within-dyad settings.

First, to illustrate the dynamic interactions between contracts and trust, this study collected data at two time periods and assumed continuous linear relationships of time with both contracts and trust. Further research should collect multiple waves of data to explore the complex, varying changes that arise over time. Second, this study’s findings are based on buyer–supplier relationships in China, whose unique cultural features may limit the generalizability of the results to other settings.

Channel managers can structure exchanges by devising detailed contracts that align incentives and demonstrate commitment, which helps build trust in a relationship. Channel managers should also pay special attention to the contingency effects of their transactional and relational features.

This study offers the first explicit test of the dynamic contracts–trust relationship, thereby establishing a more refined understanding of interplay between contracts and trust.

Given the pivotal influence of institutional forces, an important yet underexplored question in supply chain management literature is how contractual and relational governance jointly affect supplier performance under weak legislative environments. This study tends to solve the debate by distinguishing contractual definability from contractual enforceability and by considering the contingent role of legal development in China.

Using a combined dataset of secondary data and a survey of 224 buyer–supplier dyads in China, this study examines how contractual definability and contractual enforceability interact with relational governance differently in driving supplier performance, and assesses the contingent role of legal development.

This study finds that contractual definability complements yet contractual enforceability substitutes relational governance in affecting supplier performance. Moreover, legal development weakens the complementary effect but strengthens the substitutive effect.

The study firstly enriches supply chain management literature by classifying the roles of contracts into contractual definability and contractual enforceability and showing their differential interplay with relational governance. Second, the study contributes to the complements–substitutes debate by revealing the shifting role of legal development. Third, the research enriches the understanding of supply chain management in the Chinese market.

This paper examines the relationship between transport connectivity and regional economic development in China. It develops measurements appropriate for transport connectivity based on a set of evaluation models. This model is used to analyze the logistic connectivity of China’s 31 provinces by focusing on 11 variables, including some new factors (Density of road network, Density of railway network, Number of Internet Users) not used in previous studies, over the 13-year period from 2002 to 2014. Using panel data regression analysis, the empirical results show a statistically significant and positive impact of transport connectivity (factors like Density of road network, Density of railway network and Number of Internet Users) on economic development in China. In particular, the Number of internet users is a key factor reflecting information connectivity in all the variables. Comparative analysis regarding economic development is conducted to benchmark between coastal provinces and interior provinces. Like most previous research, this study yields the same finding of higher impact of transport connectivity on economic development in eastern provinces than in western provinces. This study suggests that decentralized decision-making will be significantly more efficient for analyzing regional infrastructure development. It also shows that the influence of transport connectivity on economic development is dependent on a certain developmental stage. This suggests that an economic region should adopt different development strategies for transport connectivity during different stages of development.

The purpose of this study is to verify whether the trading strategy can beat the “buy-and-hold” strategy for the securitized real estate indices of six Asian economies: Hong Kong, China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia.

This paper constructs a trading strategy from the Shiryaev-Zhou index and tests the strategy on the securitized real estate indices of six emerging Asian economies: Hong Kong, China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia. The authors compare the resulting profits from using the trading strategy with the resulting profits from using the “buy-and-hold” strategy. The authors consider three cases: no transaction costs, 0.1 percent transaction costs, and 0.2 percent transaction costs.

The results show that the trading strategy the authors constructed generally outperforms the “buy-and-hold” strategy even in the presence of transaction costs. In particular, the authors have a new finding as follows: Thailand and Malaysia's securitized real estate indices fell drastically during the period of observation. However, applying the trading strategy to these two securitized real estate indices can still earn a profit.

The trading strategy is particularly useful in protecting investors from huge loss in adverse market conditions. The results can be applied to the field of finance/investment that investors can construct a trading strategy similar to the authors to earn more profits.

This study will consider cases where both buying and selling costs exist, so the scenario is more like stock transactions in real-life equity markets. Furthermore, in this paper, for each securitized real estate index, the authors plot a graph to show the holding and non-holding periods under the trading strategy. This would help the authors explain the resulting profit under the trading strategy. This kind of graphical analysis was neglected by Hui and Yam.

New generation of construction workers (NGCWs) who were born in the 1980s and later have gradually become the main workforce of Chinese construction industry. They may behave differently when dealing with knowledge-related activities due to divergent characteristics caused by generational discrepancy. To provide a theoretical foundation for construction companies and safety managers to improve safety management, this research explores the factors and paths impacting the NGCWs' ability to share their safety knowledge.

Based on literature review, main factors that influence the safety knowledge sharing of the NGCWs were identified. Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory and Interpretive Structural Modeling were applied to identify the hierarchical and contextual relations among the factors influencing the safety knowledge sharing of the NGCWs.

The results showed that sharing atmosphere ranked first in centrality and had a high degree of influence and being influenced, indicating itself an extremely important influencing factor of safety knowledge sharing of NGCWs. Six root influencing factors were identified, including individual characteristics, work pressure, sharing platform, incentive mechanism, leadership support and safety management system.

The number of influencing factors of safety knowledge sharing of the NGCWs identified in this study is limited, and the data obtained by the expert scoring method is subjective. In future studies, the model should be further developed and validated by incorporating experts from different fields to improve its integrity and applicability.

The influencing factors identified in this paper can provide a basis for construction companies and safety managers to improve productivity and safety management by taking relevant measures to promote safety knowledge sharing. The research contributes to the understanding knowledge management in the context of the emerging market. It helps to answer the question of how the market can maintain the economic growth success through effective knowledge management.

This paper investigates the influencing factors of NGCWs' safety knowledge sharing from the perspective of intergenerational differences, and the 13 influencing factor index system established expands the scope of research on factors influencing safety knowledge sharing among construction workers and fills the gap in safety knowledge sharing research on young construction workers. Furthermore, this paper establishes a multi-layer recursive structure model to clarify the influence path of the influencing factors and contributes to the understanding of safety knowledge sharing mechanism.

A number of studies in the marketing and strategy literature show that a firm's resource endowment is a major driver in the formation of advantage-generating capabilities. Some researchers have suggested, however, that capabilities are path dependent and that a firm's behavioral predispositions and proclivities should be viewed as antecedents to capability formation. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a firm's behavioral tendencies, along with its existing business resources, contribute to the formation of new product development (NPD) capability.

Hypotheses are tested by using survey data from more than 150 US-based firms. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the proposed model and analyze hypothesized relationships.

Results of the paper suggest that a firm's competency in marketing intelligence and its tendency to engage in partner-style relationships have both direct and interactive effects on NPD capability. This capability is further shown to positively relate to organizational performance, and this relationship is moderated by technological uncertainty.

The paper underscores that certain proclivities provide access to resources that reside outside a firm's boundaries and highlight the importance of considering firm proclivities in capabilities-based research.

To date, little research has examined how NPD capability is influenced by a firm's internal marketing intelligence capability along with its tendency to seek external market knowledge. The examination of the direct and interactive effects of these constructs on NPD capability is novel and the findings highlight implications for scholars and practitioners alike.

This study aims to explore the combined strategies leading to successful repair of two types of trust in Chinese construction projects and provide an effective guidance and control trust repair in construction projects. During the research period, the author interviewed 150 managers from 50 Chinese construction projects and collected details of 125 violations. The research examines the effect of combined strategy of trust repair in Chinese management scenario.

This study adopted a mixed, quantitative, qualitative and exploratory approach. The author first extracted six strategies, namely, apology, denial, penance, communication, promise and compensation, from the literature review and generalization. Then, the author conducted an interview with 150 managers from 50 China construction projects. And the author analyzed the data through qualitative comparative analysis (QCA).

When competence-based trust is broken, violators should adopt communication and promise, demonstrate their competence and qualification, and change the attributions of competence from the trustor. When integrity-based trust is broken, violators should apologize, actively admit the mistake, show a positive attitude and seek the forgiveness from the trustor. After reconstructing trustors' perceptions of competence or integrity, violators should also make a promise to trustors for the future. The result of this research not only illustrates the sufficiency and necessity of a single strategy for trust repair but also explores the combination of trust repair strategies that rebuild the trust.

This study is limited to 50 construction projects in the Chinese construction context, so conclusions are limited in application. Data used in this research did not provide an in-depth analysis of trust repair failures. Thus, additional research is needed to explore why trust was not repaired. The study is also limited to examining the Chinese construction project organizations only, and future studies should incorporate organizations in other nations and regions.

Compared with using a single strategy, a combined strategy provides a contribution to the future practice of repair broken relationship between construction project organizations. This research helps to organize decisions and benefits managers, from Chinese owners and contractors, in choosing which of these strategies repair trust. The author also provides a specific combination of strategies to repair relationships for international companies that have conflicts with Chinese construction companies.

This research is among the early studies in China that preliminary examines the combined strategy of trust repair between Chinese owners and contractors by using causal attribution theory and QCA. This study makes a valuable contribution toward combined strategy in construction project and the knowledge system of trust repair. Future studies could build on the findings from the current study to develop a cross-cultural research on trust repair.