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Drawing on the principal-agent theoretical perspective, we assert that sellers’ opportunism is acknowledged as an essential component that could determine the quality of the relationship between buyers (principals) and sellers (agents). The primary aim of this research is to investigate the influence of seller behavior vs outcome-based reputation and seller’s perceived freedom on opportunistic behavior in the Chinese e-commerce platform context.

The data collected from 436 e-commerce platform sellers were analyzed and interpreted using structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that both behavior-based and outcome-based reputations positively impact sellers’ perceived freedom but negatively impact their opportunism. Additionally, while perceived freedom of objectives reduces opportunism, freedom of action increases it. The study also highlights the significant moderating roles of prevention mechanisms and ethical ideology.

This study extends the principal-agent perspective by integrating the seller’s reputation as a potential source of preventing sellers from behaving opportunistically on e-commerce platforms.

Waiting time, as an important predictor of queue abandonment and patient satisfaction, is important for resource utilization and patient experience management. Medical institutions have given top priority to reforming the appointment system for many years; however, whether the increased information transparency brought about by the appointment scheduling mechanism could improve patient waiting time is not well understood. In this study, the authors examine the effects of information transparency in reducing patient waiting time from an uncertainty perspective.

Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment in a tertiary academic hospital, the authors analyze over one million observational patient visit records and design the propensity score matching plus the difference in difference (PSM-DID) model and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to address this issue.

The authors confirm that, on average, improved information transparency significantly reduces the waiting time for patients by approximately 6.43 min, a 4.90% reduction. The authors identify three types of uncertainties (resource, process and outcome uncertainty) in the patient visit process that affect patients' waiting time. Moreover, information transparency moderates the relationship between three sources of uncertainties and waiting time.

The authors’ work not only provides important theoretical explanations for the patient-level factors of in-clinic waiting time and the reasons for information technology (IT)-enabled appointment scheduling by time slot (ITASS) to shorten patient waiting time and improve patient experience but also provides potential solutions for further exploration of measures to reduce patient waiting time.

This paper aims to investigate volatility causality and return contagion on nine international securitized real estate markets by appealing to Markov-switching (MS) regime approach, from July 1992 to June 2014.

An MS causality interaction model (Psaradakis et al., 2005), an MS vector auto-regression mode (Krolzig, 1997) and a multivariate return contagion model (Dungey et al., 2005) were used to implement the empirical investigations.

There exist regime shifts in the volatility causality pattern, with the volatility causality effects more pronounced during high volatility periods. During high volatility period, real estate markets’ causality interactions and inter-linkages contribute to strong spillover effect that leads to extreme volatility. However, there is relatively limited return contagion evidence in the securitized real estate markets examined. As such, the US financial crisis might probably be due to cross-market interdependence rather than contagion.

Because international investors incorporate into their portfolio allocation not only the long-run price relationship but also the short-run market volatility connectedness and return correlation structure, the results of this MS causality and contagion study have provided valuable information on the evaluation of regime-dependent securitized real estate market risk, as well as useful guidance on asset allocation and portfolio management decisions for institutional investors.

Financial crisis is one of the key determinants of cross-market volatility interactions. Portfolio managers should be alerted of the observation that the US and the other developed securitized real estate markets are increasingly sharing “common market cycles” in recent years, thereby diminishing the diversification benefits. For policymakers, this research indicates that the volatilities of the US securitized real estate market could be helpful to predict those of other developed markets. It is also important for them to pay attention to those potential risk factors behind the amplified causality, contagion and volatility spillover at times of crisis. Finally, a wider implication for policymakers is to manage the transmission channels through which global stock market return and volatility shocks can affect the local economies and domestic financial markets, including securitized real estate markets.

Real estate investments have emerged to show low correlation with stocks and bonds and contributed to portfolio optimization. With real estate that can serve as a type of consumption commodity and an investment tool, the risk-return profile of real estate is different from that of the underlying stock markets. Therefore, the performance and investment dynamics and real estate-stock link are not theoretically expected to be similar, that requires separate empirical investigations. This paper aims to stand out from the many papers on the same or similar topics in the application of the three MS methodologies to regime-dependent real estate market integration.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how postpartum mothers conduct self-disclosure on social media may obtain social support and therefore improve their depressive mood.

The authors extract variables of self-disclosure by manual coding postpartum mothers' 835 posts from a parenting social media in China. The ordinary least squares model and the binary logistic regression model are used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The study suggests that both mothers' superficial level disclosure and personal level disclosure positively affect online social support received, and the effect of personal level disclosure on social support is much greater than that of superficial level disclosure. Online social support received is related to the content of the post and reduces mothers' depressive mood. The authors further find that the association between personal level disclosure and depressive mood is fully mediated by social support.

The data are collected from a parenting social network. Although it is the major parenting social media with the most users in China, the generalizability of this model and the findings to other social media need additional research.

This study offers implications for researchers and practitioners with regard to social media uses and impacts, which also has important implications for policy and interventions for the mental health of mothers.

This paper makes theoretical contributions to the literature of social penetration theory and social support by (1) dividing self-disclosure into superficial level disclosure and personal level disclosure according to the intimacy of self-disclosure; (2) empirically investigating the direct effect of online self-disclosure on social support and the mediating effect of social support between online self-disclosure and mothers' depressive mood.

From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the establishment of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) by the Manchu conquerors, the new rulers designated the late-Ming liberal ideologies as heretics, and they resurrected the most conservative form of Confucianism as the political orthodoxy. Under the principle of filial piety given by this orthodoxy, the whole empire was imagined as a fictitious family with the emperor as the grand patriarch and the civil bureaucrats and subjects as children or grandchildren. Under the highly centralized administrative and communicative apparatus of the Qing state, this ideology of the fictitious patrimonial state penetrated into the lowest level of the society. The subsequent paternalist, authoritarian, and moralizing politics of the Qing state contributed to China’s nontransition to capitalism despite its advanced market economy, and helped explain the peculiar form and trajectory of China’s popular contention in the eighteenth century. I also argue that this tradition of fictitious patrimonial politics continued to shape the state-making processes in twentieth-century China and beyond.

An increasing number of environmental threats towards tourism landmarks have significantly raised public concerns about tourists being environmentally responsible. Negative ecological consequences from tourism-related activities have triggered the growing usage of environmental-focused events such as Earth Hour as a means to promote pro-environmental behaviour. Despite their size, increasing holiday behaviour and their marketplace dominance within the next decade, students’ environmental beliefs and their interest in participating in environmental-focused events such as Earth Hour is relatively unknown. This academic limitation and potential theoretical and practical implications provide the impetus for this study. Based on a sample of 410 students, three environment belief factors of students were determined. Further, students’ concerns for the environment were derived from the environmental vulnerability factor. Students’ beliefs do not directly impact their decision to participate in environmental-focused events or their awareness of the theme of Earth Hour. However, environment vulnerability influenced students’ intention to participate in future Earth Hour events. Recommendations are made, while future research opportunities are also outlined.

This paper analyzes Fang Fang's 2020 Wuhan Diary‐Dispatches from a Quarantined City, to show how the author communicates the coronavirus crisis in Wuhan in a global information ecosystem. The success of the diary showcases how the actual health emergency has been transformed into a communication issue.

This study is exploratory and qualitative in nature. The authors conducted a thematic analysis (TA) of Wuhan Diary, in which we decided to focus on the aspects of sousveillance and solidarity. For the purposes of our paper, we used the English translation of the text by Dr. Michael Berry.

The authors focus on two major themes in their exploration of the corona crisis as a global communication issue: sousveillance and solidarity. The authors argue that the diary's ways of seeing perform a version of “sousveillance” or “undersight” in juxtaposition to surveillance or “oversight” (Mann, 2017). Fang Fang calls for solidarity as an effective measure for individuals, communities and societies to contain the pandemic and a potential misinfodemic.

Since Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wuhan Diary presents an unprecedented narrative account of life under quarantine that could function as a litmus test for other cities and countries. Fang Fang's diary provides a countermeasure to official accounts of the pandemic in Wuhan, which has resonated both with people in China and abroad.

Contact problems are among the most difficult ones in mechanics. Due to its practical importance, the problem has been receiving extensive research work over the years. The finite element method has been widely used to solve contact problems with various grades of complexity. Great progress has been made on both theoretical studies and engineering applications. This paper reviews some of the main developments in contact theories and finite element solution techniques for static contact problems. Classical and variational formulations of the problem are first given and then finite element solution techniques are reviewed. Available constraint methods, friction laws and contact searching algorithms are also briefly described. At the end of the paper, a bibliography is included, listing about seven hundred papers which are related to static contact problems and have been published in various journals and conference proceedings from 1976.

Khalifa University of Science and Technology (KU) is one of the prominent Universities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), of the Government of Abu Dhabi. The new Khalifa University was re-constituted in the year 2017 by merging three higher education institutions in Abu Dhabi, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research and the Petroleum Institute. The objectives of these institutions and their research areas were entirely disparate in the pre-merger era and hence the evaluation of the research performance of its pre-merged entities in the past is vital for Khalifa University to plan for the future course of actions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study analyzes and visualizes scholarly publications of Khalifa University of Science and Technology (KU) using SCOPUS data. There are various qualitative and quantitative methods to measure research performance. This study adopted citation analysis, one of the widely recognized quantitative metrics to measure the citation impact of scholarly publications.

Khalifa University leads in productivity compared to other UAE universities but the citation impact of its publications is less in comparison to United Arab Emirates University and New York University, Abu Dhabi in terms of citations per publication. The majority of KU publications are not highly cited. The majority of the KU publications (80 percent) received fewer citations and few papers (20 percent of the KU publications) attracted 80 percent of the total citations received for KU publications. Analysis results indicate that publishing in top-ranked journals would improve the chance of getting more citations. On average, eight percentage difference is seen in the h-index of KU authors when removing self-citations.

The study considered only publications that are indexed in SCOPUS. It covered a limited set of sources as per the SCOPUS editorial policy. Most of the covered sources are journals and conference proceedings. Books’ data coverage in Citation Index is comparatively low, which may affect results regarding social sciences and humanities publications because book publication is more prominent in these subject areas. Khalifa University is a science and technology university, and the majority of its academic departments fall in science and technology domains. Even though there are few arts and humanities departments in the University, it will not affect the overall findings of the results of the analysis.

This study is original research conducted to study the impact of research publications of Khalifa University using Scopus data.