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Previous studies have mainly focused on the negative impact of illegitimate tasks on recipients but ignored its impact on observers. Drawing on deservingness theory, this research developed a moderated serial mediation model to examine the underlying mechanism in the relationship between observed illegitimate tasks and observers’ helping behaviour.

This research tested the model using a sample of 218 employees in China through a two-wave field study. A path analysis was conducted with the bootstrapping procedure to test the hypothesized model.

The results showed that the effect of observing illegitimate tasks was contingent upon the degree of the observer’s interpersonal liking towards the recipient. Specifically, when the observer had a high level of interpersonal liking for a coworker, the observer may perceive that the coworker was undeserving of being assigned illegitimate tasks, which increased sympathetic emotion and the sequent helping behaviour.

This study shifted the perspective of the illegitimate task literature from the recipient to the third parties. Additionally, it provided a finer-grained understanding of the mechanism between observed workplace disrespectful treatment and the observer’s helping behaviour.

Studies of the antecedents of daily abusive supervision have mainly focused on work stressors and family stressors, ignoring the potential importance of commuting stressors that are encountered enroute to work. Based in affective events theory, the authors propose a daily, within-person model to examine how the commuting stressors faced by supervisors affect their propensity to engage in abusive supervision behavior and the mechanisms underlying this effect.

Using experience-sampling methodology, the authors collected data from 49 supervisors in China who responded to two daily surveys for 10 working days.

The authors found that daily morning commuting anger mediates the link between daily morning commuting stressors and subsequent abusive supervision. The authors also found that trait-displaced aggression moderates this relationship, such that the mediating effect occurs only when supervisors' trait-displaced aggression is high rather than low.

This study enriches the antecedents of daily abusive supervision and extends the commuting literature to the leadership context.

Tourists’ destination image is crucial for visiting intentions. An ancient capital with diverse characteristics is an important component of China’s urban tourism. The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: what are the differences and commonalities of the perceived destination image of ancient capitals? What makes the difference of the perceived destination image in these cities? Aside from the exterior factors, are there internal factors of cities that influence tourists’ cognition and perception of destination image?

The comment text data of Baidu tourism website were used to determine the differences in the destination images of China’s four great ancient capitals: Beijing, Xi’an, Nanjing and Luoyang. ROST content mining and semantic network analysis were for differences and commonalities of the perceived destination image, and correlation analysis was used to explore the internal factors of cities that influence tourists’ cognition and perception of destination image.

Though the same as ancient capital, the four ancient capitals’ images are far apart; historical interests are the core of tourism experience in ancient capital city; image perception is from physical carrier, history and culture, and human cognition; tourist’ destination affect of ancient capital is most from its history and culture; protecting identity and maintaining daily life are crucial for ancient city tourism.

Previous studies on ancient capitals have focused on the invariable identity of ancient capitals’ destination images, and left a gap on determining from where the invariable identity comes in general and how much it influences destination image. This gap was addressed in this study, by analyzing the destination images of four ancient capitals in China as cases. In this way, this study provided reference to the other ancient cities worldwide.

The study aims to design the limited number of random working cycle as a warranty term and propose two types of warranties, which can help manufacturers to ensure the product reliability during the warranty period. By extending the proposed warranty to the consumer's post-warranty maintenance model, besides the authors investigate two kinds of random maintenance policies to sustain the post-warranty reliability, i.e. random replacement first and random replacement last. By integrating depreciation expense depending on working time, the cost rate is constructed for each random maintenance policy and some special cases are provided by discussing parameters in cost rates. Finally, sensitivities on both the proposed warranty and random maintenance policies are analyzed in numerical experiments.

The working cycle of products can be monitored by advanced sensors and measuring technologies. By monitoring the working cycle, manufacturers can design warranty policies to ensure product reliability performance and consumers can model the post-warranty maintenance to sustain the post-warranty reliability. In this article, the authors design a limited number of random working cycles as a warranty term and propose two types of warranties, which can help manufacturers to ensure the product reliability performance during the warranty period. By extending a proposed warranty to the consumer's post-warranty maintenance model, the authors investigate two kinds of random replacement policies to sustain the post-warranty reliability, i.e. random replacement first and random replacement last. By integrating a depreciation expense depending on working time, the cost rate is constructed for each random replacement and some special cases are provided by discussing parameters in the cost rate. Finally, sensitivities to both the proposed warranties and random replacements are analyzed in numerical experiments.

It is shown that the manufacturer can control the warranty cost by limiting number of random working cycle. For the consumer, when the number of random working cycle is designed as a greater warranty limit, the cost rate can be reduced while the post-warranty period can't be lengthened.

The contribution of this article can be highlighted in two key aspects: (1) the authors investigate early warranties to ensure reliability performance of the product which executes successively projects at random working cycles; (2) by integrating random working cycles into the post-warranty period, the authors is the first to investigate random maintenance policy to sustain the post-warranty reliability from the consumer's perspective, which seldom appears in the existing literature.

The debate surrounding the influence of parental nutritional knowledge on offspring’s susceptibility to overweight/obesity persists, with a dearth of research elucidating the mechanisms involved. This study aims to explore if and how parental nutrition knowledge affects adolescents' overweight and obesity, by highlighting the mediating effect of parental perceived severity of obesity.

A questionnaire was conducted in Zhejiang Province, China, with a sample of 2,298 students as well as their parents during November–December 2022. Logistic regression and propensity score matching methods was used to validate the relationship between parental nutrition knowledge and adolescents' overweight/obesity, while the multiplication coefficient method was used to test the mediation effect.

Parental nutrition knowledge significantly reduces the odds ratio for adolescent obesity, without affecting the likelihood of overweight. The perceived severity of obesity fully mediates the relationship between parental nutrition knowledge and adolescents' overweight and obesity.

By exploring mediating factors, the analysis offers an innovative explanation of the process by which nutritional knowledge influences health behaviors. Lack of relevant motivation or beliefs is an important reason for the failure of nutritional knowledge. If parents do not have sufficient awareness of the dangers of overweight or obesity, they will have inadequate motivation to apply nutritional knowledge in guiding dietary or exercise decisions. We also supplement the literature by demonstrating the health belief model in highlighting the mediating mechanism of perceived severity in the relationship between parental nutrition knowledge and adolescents' obesity.

Extending the research focus on subjective beliefs and cognitive motivation bears important policy implications for designing education campaigns to effectively restrain the obesity rate. Considering that many Chinese parents have insufficient awareness of the dangers of childhood overweight and obesity, even considering “chubby children” as symbols of “cuteness” and “health”. This can largely undermine their motivation to apply nutritional knowledge to restrain adolescents' overweight and obesity. Consequently, education campaigns, public health professionals and government agencies can be developed aiming to increase parental nutrition knowledge, especially on the hazards of obesity.

With the prevalence of overweight and obesity among adolescents, it is critical to control students' weight and health. Families, especially parents, are vital to the physical and mental health of adolescents. This research confirmed that improving parental nutrition knowledge is necessary for maintaining a healthy weight for adolescents. Results also emphasized that the association between parental nutritional knowledge and adolescents' overweight or obesity was mediated by parental perceived severity. This indicates that interventions designed to enhance parental nutritional knowledge should pay more attention to strengthening parental cognition of and beliefs in obesity.

This paper added to the debate on the impact of parental nutritional knowledge on adolescent’s overweight and obesity. Based on the health belief model, it also identified a novel pathway and mechanism by highlighting the importance of subjective motivations and beliefs such as the perceived severity of obesity in influencing overweight/obesity. Conclusions bear important policy implications for designing education campaigns to effectively restrain the obesity rate.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the effective measures for heterogeneity and to uncover the relationship between investor heterogeneity and stock returns.

The paper employs dispersion in analysts’ earnings forecasts and unexpected trading volume as proxies of heterogeneity. Portfolio strategies and Fama-Macbeth regression are used to uncover the relationship between the two proxies and stock returns in the Chinese A-share market.

The result indicates that stock returns are significantly related to unexpected trading volume, i.e., higher unexpected trading volume implies higher stock returns now but lower future stock returns. In contrast, there is no statistically significant relationship between analysts’ forecast dispersion and stock returns.

The findings suggest that unexplained trading volume is an effective measure for investor heterogeneity in the Chinese A-share market.

This study attempts to determine the optimal pricing and warranty strategies for remanufactured products offered by independent remanufacturers (IRs). Specifically, it takes into account price competition and warranty service competition between the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and IR, ultimately providing recommendations on the selection of warranty service modes for IRs.

This study considers two warranty modes for IRs: in-housing and outsourcing. Based on game theory, this study identifies the conditions under which the warranty service for remanufactured product is outsourced to retailers in IR-remanufacturing mode. Furthermore, this study investigates how this strategic decision affects closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) operations by comparing the two modes in terms of profit, consumer surplus (CS), quantity and overall social welfare (SW).

Firstly, the provision strategy for IRs' warranty on remanufactured products depends mainly on the retailer’s warranty cost. If retailers have lower costs for warranties, IR opts to outsource the remanufactured product warranty to the retailer. Second, when retailers offer warranties at a lower cost, IRs prefer outsourcing remanufactured product warranty to retailers. In this way, it will maximize both the remanufacturer’s and retailer’s profits while achieving the optimal total profit for the entire supply chain. However, it’s not beneficial for the OEM. Third, the IR’s preference for warranty service provision strategy is influenced by customers’ acceptance of remanufactured product, customer sensitivity toward remanufactured product warranty and economies of scale in warranty service.

The findings offer operational insights into IR decision-making in selecting warranty service provision strategies for remanufactured products.

This study is among the first to examine warranty provision strategy for IRs in CLSC.

At present, the conventional method of preparing cationic fluorinated acrylic latex is to emulsify copolymerised monomers with cationic surfactants. However, there has been a wide concern about using Gemini surfactants to prepare cationic polymer latex to improve its properties. The purpose of this paper was to focus on the synthesis of novel self-crosslinked cationic fluorinated acrylic latex (SCFAL), during which the copolymerised monomers were initiated with a water soluble azo initiator and emulsified with mixed surfactants of Gemini emulsifier and alkyl polyglycoside (APG).

The novel SCFAL was prepared successfully by the semi-continuous seeded emulsion polymerisation of butyl acrylate, methyl methacrylate, hexafluorobutyl methacrylate (HFMA) and hydroxy propyl methacrylate (HPMA) in aqueous medium.

The conversion is the maximum and the coagulation percentage the minimum when the amounts of emulsifier and initiator are 8 and 0.6 per cent, respectively. The average particle size of the latex is significantly reduced with the increase of the amount of emulsifiers used. However, the average particle size of the latex is increased with the increase of the amount of HPMA. The particle size of the latex is of a unimodal distribution, which means that the particle size was reasonably uniform. Contact angle is increased with the increase of the amount of the HFMA.

The novel SCFAL can be widely used as significant components in the field of coatings, leather, textile, paper, adhesives and so on.

SCFAL, which was emulsified with novel mixed surfactants of Gemini surfactant and APG, has been prepared successfully. Influences of amount of initiator, emulsifier, HPMA and HFMA on emulsion polymerisation and/or properties of novel latex are investigated in detail.

To solve problems of low intelligence and poor robustness of traditional navigation systems, the purpose of this paper is to propose a brain-inspired localization method of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

First, the yaw angle of the UAV is obtained by modeling head direction cells with one-dimension continuous attractor neural network (1 D-CANN) and then inputs into 3D grid cells. After that, the motion information of the UAV is encoded as the firing of 3 D grid cells using 3 D-CANN. Finally, the current position of the UAV can be decoded from the neuron firing through the period-adic method.

Simulation results suggest that continuous yaw and position information can be generated from the conjunctive model of head direction cells and grid cells.

The proposed period-adic cell decoding method can provide a UAV with the 3 D position, which is more intelligent and robust than traditional navigation methods.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the joint effects of lead time, information sharing and the accounts receivable period on reverse factoring (RF) adoption from the suppliers’ perspective.

Supported by one of the largest commercial banks in China, survey data are collected from 424 Chinese manufacturing firms and analyzed using regression methods.

The results suggest that lead time positively affects suppliers’ RF adoption directly and indirectly through the accounts receivable period. Meanwhile, information sharing has a positive, direct and a negative, indirect influence on suppliers’ RF adoption.

The findings give suppliers and financial institutions a better understanding of how to leverage the benefits of RF.