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The purpose of this paper is to unveil any underlying relationships between contractor inputs and performance outputs. The outcome of the reported study is intended to help identify the inputs, which have more significant impacts on contractor performance outputs and therefore, help formulate more reliable “upfront” (ex ante) performance assessment criteria, hence improving approaches to the contractor‐selection process.

A case study was conducted on the Performance Assessment Scoring System (PASS) of a large public client in Hong Kong to determine the Pearson product‐moment correlation between the scores of various input assessments and output assessments.

The findings revealed relationships between some of the input assessment scores and the output results. Emerging as positive, all the discerned relationships confirmed that better outputs did in fact relate well to better inputs.

The PASS system is designed to be very objective, hence the criteria and assessment of inputs may be restricted to easily measurable items. The sample size obtainable was small, but still considered to be adequate for this initial study.

Construction clients could choose to improve their contractor selection processes by identifying and incorporating contractor input factors that are seen to influence performance outputs. Contractors can also improve their outputs by focusing on the identified critical inputs.

Few studies have sought to discern relationships between contractor inputs and their performance outputs through a quantitative approach. This case study provided a methodology, incorporating a statistics‐based approach along with examples and explanations of how inputs can influence contractor outputs.

The purpose of this paper is: to track the methods by which farmers access groundwater for irrigation in the North China Plain (NCP); to explore whether climate factors influence farmers’ decisions on the methods of groundwater access for irrigation; and to examine whether the amount of groundwater use for irrigation and crop yield systematically differ across groups of farmers using various methods of groundwater access, and how climate factors affect them.

Descriptive statistical analysis and econometric models are used on household survey data collected over several years and county-level climate data.

Over the past few decades, a significant share of farmers have switched the methods of groundwater access from collective tubewells to own tubewells or groundwater markets. Farmers who bought water from groundwater markets applied less water to wheat plots than those who had their own tubewells. However, wheat yield was not negatively affected. Both average climate conditions and long-term variations were found to be related to farmers’ choice of methods of groundwater access for irrigation. More frequent droughts and increasingly volatile temperatures both increased the likelihood of farmers gaining groundwater irrigation from markets.

The analysis results suggest farmers are using groundwater markets to help them adapt to climate change. Applying empirical analysis to identify the impact of the methods by which farmers access groundwater for irrigation on the amount of groundwater use and crop yield will help policy makers design reasonable adaptation policies for the NCP.

Energy consumption is a fundamental concern in wireless multimedia sensor networks, even more than that in traditional wireless sensor networks. In fact, sensors are battery‐constrained devices, while multimedia applications, which require higher transmission rates and more extensive processing capacity, produce large quantities of data. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method which could save multimedia nodes' energy during their sleeping and transmitting phases and effectively bring down energy consumption.

Based on the location and direction angle of nodes, areas of the overlapping sensing region between adjacent nodes could be calculated and a sleeping strategy is carried out to reduce energy consumption of inactive nodes. Moreover, an improved image comparison and block transmission methods by utilizing the sequence similar detection arithmetic theory is brought up as well to further save the node's energy.

With the help of the mobile nodes and by dividing the network into grids, sensing direction of multimedia node as well as the area of the overlapping sensing region could be obtained which provide a basis for the sleeping strategy. Furthermore, energy consumption on transmission is also reduced by only transmitting the unmatched blocks. Simulation results show that this method obtains satisfactory performance on prolonging the networks' lifetime.

This paper is of value in presenting an effective energy‐saving strategy for wireless multimedia sensor networks.

The present experimental study aims to investigate when a food safety incident occurs, how country image influences consumers' trust and purchase intention, as well as the relationship between trust and purchase intention.

Participants (N = 1,590) were randomly allocated into one of the eight conditions [(country competence: high vs low) × (country warmth: high vs low) × (clean green image: high vs low)], read the corresponding country image descriptions, and rated measures on trust in food safety and quality, and purchase intention of fruit imported from this exporting country before and after reading a fictional food safety incident scenario.

Results showed that the food safety incident led to a significant decrease in trust and purchase intention across all conditions. However, trust in food safety and quality, and purchase intention were still higher in high competence, warmth or clean green image conditions. The decreased magnitude of trust in food safety was larger when country competence and clean green image was high, and when country warmth was low. Food safety incident caused purchase intention to become more dependent on trust in food safety than food quality.

This study provides a novel insight into the impacts of food safety incidents on consumers' responses in different country image contexts including the human-related and environment-related dimensions.

In crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, governments need to act in time to lead citizens toward rational reactions and disclose information effectively to the public. This paper aims to understand the content published by the government and identify how citizen engagement relates to content type and emotional valence.

The grounded theory approach was adopted and nine types of content posted by the government were observed. The data were obtained from “People's Daily”, an official Sina Weibo account representing the voice of the Chinese government, from January 3 to June 22 in 2020.

The analysis shows that information related to emotional support and social mobilization were the most reposted, while those mentioning immoral and illegal incidents were the most liked and commented. Also, it was found that positive posts tend to attract more likes, yet with fewer reposts than neutral posts.

The authors adopted thematic analysis and focused on the impact of post content and valence on user participation behavior. This study expands the existing literature. The government can improve crises management capability by learning about citizen engagement behaviors on social media.

The paper aims to study cut resistant property of basic weft plain-knitted fabric for protective clothing.

Effects of fiber materials, fabric direction and knitting technology (sinking-depth) were explored, respectively. Cut process of fabric was tracked and the theoretical analysis was provided to evaluate energy transferring of cutting. Fiber-based cut behavior was observed by SEM images. Deformation energy stored in the loop due to yarn bending was regard as initial elastic potential energy of the fabric, which was related to loop structure.

Cut resistance of the fiber material was the dominant factor for cut resistance of weft plain-knitted fabric, while unit loop structure played a critical role in improving cut resistance.

Cut resistance of the fiber material was the dominant factor for cut resistance of weft plain-knitted fabric, while the unit loop structure played a critical role in improving cut resistance.

The paper provides theoretical support of developing flexible protective clothing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate service quality of e-commerce Websites in online platform and their contribution on e-business promotion.

The online survey was performed on a survey portal provided by Nepal Telecom in Nepal.

The findings of this study suggest that information quality and online service quality were the key determinants for user satisfaction and sustainability of e-commerce technology.

Research opportunities of web services and e-commerce area are fruitful and important for both academics and practitioners.

The findings on online service quality of e-commerce technology will be useful for current management practice such as making business policies and strategies and sharing information to managers and organization leaders. This study can be used for e-commerce Website operators wishing to enhance the competitiveness of their Websites in the highly competitive online market.

E-commerce is considered an excellent alternative for individuals and companies to reach new customers. Service quality delivery through Internet is an essential strategy to success, more important than price and web presence. The e-commerce Website has been identified as having a significant impact on business activities in solving the geographical problem. A number of performance problems have been observed for e-commerce Websites, and much work has gone into characterizing the performance of web-servers and Internet applications.

Expert Cloud as a new class of Cloud computing systems enables its users to request the skill, knowledge and expertise of people by employing internet infrastructures and Cloud computing concepts without any information of their location. Job scheduling is one of the most important issue in Expert Cloud and impacts on its efficiency and customer satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to propose an applicable method based on genetic algorithm for job scheduling in Expert Cloud.

Because of the nature of the scheduling issue as a NP-Hard problem and the success of genetic algorithm in optimization and NP-Hard problems, the authors used a genetic algorithm to schedule the jobs on human resources in Expert Cloud. In this method, chromosome or candidate solutions are represented by a vector; fitness function is calculated based on response time; one point crossover and swap mutation are also used.

The results indicate that the proposed method can schedule the received jobs in appropriate time with high accuracy in comparison to common methods (First Come First Served, Shortest Process Next and Highest Response Ratio Next). Also the proposed method has better performance in term of total execution time, service+wait time, failure rate and Human Resource utilization rate in comparison to common methods.

In this paper the job scheduling issue in Expert Cloud is pointed out and the approach to resolve the problem is applied into a practical example.

The theoretical understanding of online shopping behaviour has received much attention. Less focus has been given to online retailing ethics. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a comprehensive model of online retailing ethics.

The study used a survey amongst a sample representative of universities across Egypt. In total, 310 questionnaire were collected and analysed using structure equation modelling using WarpPLS.

The results indicate that the consumer perceptions of online retailing ethics (CPORE) as a second-order construct is composed of five constructs (security, privacy, non-deception, fulfilment/reliability, and service recovery) and strongly predictive of online consumer satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors find a significant mediating effect of trust, and commitment on the relationship between CPORE and customer satisfaction. The results also show that individualism had moderate effects on the relationship between CPORE and customer satisfaction. Contrary to expectations, power distance had no significant effect.

Despite the contributions of this study some research limitations need acknowledgment. First, this study employed a convenience sample. The authors encourage future studies to use random sampling of general consumers. The ethics literature identifies some factors which influence ethical judgments of consumers (e.g. sex, age, and education). Such research could identify how each variable, individually and cooperatively, impacts consumer ethical evaluations of online retailing. The authors did not collect data from non-internet shoppers because the focus of this study was online consumers referring to their latest purchase online. It may be an interesting extension, however, to test this conceptual model for other populations like non-online consumers.

This study developed and empirically tested a comprehensive model of CPORE with its multidimensional constructs and evaluated its impact on both consumer satisfaction and repurchase intention via trust and commitment.

Expert systems are computer-based systems that mimic the logical processes of human experts or organizations to give advice in a specific domain of knowledge. Fuzzy expert systems use fuzzy logic to handle uncertainties generated by imprecise, incomplete and/or vague information. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the methods and applications in fuzzy expert systems.

The authors have carefully reviewed 281 journal publications and 149 conference proceedings published over the past 37 years since 1982. The authors grouped the journal publications and conference proceedings separately accordingly to the methods, application domains, tools and inference systems.

The authors have synthesized the findings and proposed useful suggestions for future research directions. The authors show that the most common use of fuzzy expert systems is in the medical field.

Fuzzy logic can be used to manage uncertainty in expert systems and solve problems that cannot be solved effectively with conventional methods. In this study, the authors present a comprehensive review of the methods and applications in fuzzy expert systems which could be useful for practicing managers developing expert systems under uncertainty.