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The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of Zr content on immersion and electrochemical corrosion behavior of Zr-containing Ti-based (TiZr) alloys.

The phase analysis of as-cast TχZAB alloys was carried out using X-ray diffraction. The microstructure of corrosion surfaces of the samples was observed using optical metallographic microscopy and scanning electron microscopy, equipped with energy dispersive spectroscopy.

The immersion test reveals that the corrosion is alleviated in the presence of a high amount of Zr, whereas pitting corrosion occurs when the Zr content is up to 40 Wt.%. Furthermore, the electrochemical analysis demonstrates that the corrosion resistance TiZr alloys is improved with increasing Zr content.

The TiZr alloys are promising candidates for high-end applications because of their excellent comprehensive properties. These alloys are usually used in marine or other harsh corrosive environments; therefore, it is essential to study their corrosion behavior.

Comfort foods consumption and linkages to stress coping strategies have received little attention in the business research on food products and services. This paper aims to explore comfort foods consumption among older Americans and how stress-coping strategies are related to their consumption frequency and variety of comfort foods.

Older Americans aged 50–99 years (N = 1,428) in the Health and Retirement Study were surveyed on their frequency and variety of comfort foods consumption and their consumption coping strategies. Data were analyzed and regression models were estimated.

Demographically, baby boomer, male, and non-Hispanic whites reported higher frequency and variety of comfort foods consumption. Comfort foods consumption in frequency and variety was significantly higher (lower) when “eat more” (“use alcohol”) was the endorsed coping strategy.

Research findings furthered research on the consumption of comfort foods among older American adults and added new insights into their coping behavior, both of which may help businesses be more targeted in serving comfort foods to the mature market and the public sector to tailor their services to older adults.

This paper aims to study a dominant e-retailer operating its own e-marketplace (B2C) to host peer competitor as well as acting as a traditional retailer (“dual-format” retailing as in Mantin and Krishnan 2014). The dominant retailer offers a two-part tariff charging scheme to a third-party seller. The seller decides whether to join the e-marketplace. The present paper is interested in addressing the following questions: What is the pricing equilibrium before/after the formation of the e-marketplace? What will be the “optimal” charging scheme? What is the impact on the e-marketplace operator if the third-party seller has the option to become “featured”.

This paper adopts a stylized model to capture the competition between the two retailers and applies game theory to solve the pricing equilibrium. The authors model the dual-format retailing in a two-stage decision: Stage 1, the e-marketplace operator offers a two-part tariff; Stage 2, if the other retailer is participating, they engage in a pricing competition. They assume that the e-marketplace operator is a profit maximizer by choosing its charging scheme subject to the condition that the participating retailer is no worse off.

The authors find that the e-retailer and the third-party seller in the e-marketplace are not always hurt by intensified price competition. They identify conditions under which higher expected prices are charged as a result of agglomeration effect. The authors’ model also provides theoretical evidence on this popular charging scheme, and shows the feasible region in which the e-marketplace operator could allocate the surplus resulted from the formation of the e-marketplace between itself and the participating retailer. Finally, the authors demonstrate that if the third-party seller has the option to become a “featured” retailer (He and Chen, 2006), it can be detrimental to the e-marketplace operator.

This work is different in three ways: First, the authors model an e-marketplace adopting a “dual-format” retailing, facing the trade-off between its direct retailing revenue and the rents collected from the member store, while the literature mainly focuses on e-marketplaces playing the intermediary role. Second, they explicitly model the “market expansion effect” caused by the agglomeration after the formation of the e-marketplace. The present study complements this stream of research by investigating and providing theoretical evidence on the charging scheme popularly adopted by the e-marketplaces and proposes ways to share the surplus to the participating store.

This paper aims to survey the current landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in higher education institutions (HEIs) and recommend future directions.

This paper reviews the recent trends, showcases the applications and provides future directions through a review of current uses of AI in HEIs.

The results of this study highlight successful applications of AI technologies in three main areas of college operation: student learning experience; student support; and enrollment management.

This review has important implications for early adopters of AI by HEIs in providing a competitive advantage. The limitation lies in the scope of the review. It is not comprehensive and does not cover other areas of college operations.

This is the first review about AI in higher education. It is of value in building future research and serving as a framework for AI applications in HEI.

CIM and BPR are seen as two kinds of means whereby performance can be improved while flexibility is, at the same time, also being enhanced. Highlights similarities as well as differences between BPR and CIM through comparative analysis. Emphasizes that CIM is still an incremental approach to enterprise performance improvement although much information technology is being used, and that radical changes will not be achieved without combining with BPR. Analyzes the effects of BPR on CIM in three aspects: production process, organizational structure and information technology. Proposes that the aims of CIM based on BPR are designing of customer‐oriented production process, creating of teamwork‐centered and flexible organization consisting of some from market‐to‐market process chains and building of distributed, simplified and integrated supporting information system.

Recent trends of outsourcing in global competition make the firms vulnerable to operational risks. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how firms implement supply chain strategies to reduce operational risks, especially risk exposure involving catastrophic events.

Drawn on risk management and supply chain research, the concepts of operational risk and the underlying demand and supply uncertainties are delineated. Then, based on literature review and numerical demonstrations, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of supply chain strategies in reducing operational risks. The paper examines the benefit of these strategies and illustrate how to setup risk pooling and dual sourcing programs.

Employing the strategies of risk pooling and dual sourcing, an agile and diversified supply chain can be built to cope with the demand or supply uncertainties and in turn reduce the operational risks.

Leaders in any organization should consider operational and supply risk critically when planning their competitive strategy. They could foster creative solutions in supply chain strategies and essentially enhance competitiveness.

The paper highlights the tension between outsourcing trend in pursuit of competitive advantage and risk exposure to catastrophic events. This paper fulfils a practical need for better understanding of how supply chain strategies could be implemented to reduce operational risks.

This paper aims to fabricate a FeS/Cu-Bi copper-based lead-free bearing material to maintain good friction-reducing and anti-adhesive properties under boundary lubrication conditions.

The materials were fabricated by mechanical alloying and powder metallurgy and tested under dry friction conditions using HDM-20 wear tester.

The results show that mechanical alloying can improve the antifriction and wear resistance of the materials. The 6 per cent FeS and 6 per cent Bi in the copper-based bearing materials fabricated by mechanical alloying have a better synergism which contributes to the friction and wear properties of copper matrix.

This new approach solves the problems of Bi and FeS mutual segmentation, mutual agglomeration and poor interface bonding.

The purpose of this paper is to predict news intent by exploring contextual and temporal features directly mined from a general search engine query log.

First, a ground-truth data set with correctly marked news and non-news queries was built. Second, a detailed analysis of the search goals and topics distribution of news/non-news queries was conducted. Third, three news features, that is, the relationship between entity and contextual words extended from query sessions, topical similarity among clicked results and temporal burst point were obtained. Finally, to understand the utilities of the new features and prior features, extensive prediction experiments on SogouQ (a Chinese search engine query log) were conducted.

News intent can be predicted with high accuracy by using the proposed contextual and temporal features, and the macro average F1 of classification is around 0.8677. Contextual features are more effective than temporal features. All the three new features are useful and significant in improving the accuracy of news intent prediction.

This paper provides a new and different perspective in recognizing queries with news intent without use of such large corpora as social media (e.g. Wikipedia, Twitter and blogs) and news data sets. The research will be helpful for general-purpose search engines to address search intents for news events. In addition, the authors believe that the approaches described here in this paper are general enough to apply to other verticals with dynamic content and interest, such as blog or financial data.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different tagging behaviours between Chinese and Americans by analysing the movie tags, and explore the feasibility of applying cultural differences to tag recommendations.

This paper introduced hypotheses based on several well-established psychological theories and tested them with social tags for the same movies generated by Chinese and Americans. And to prove the utility of the cultural factor consideration, this paper conducted a cross-cultural tag recommendation experiment.

The results show that compared with Americans, Chinese users tend to add more tags about movies’ background information (e.g. release year) and global contextual characteristics (e.g. genre); they also prefer to add tags about production countries and factual tags, and cultural factors can be applied for recommending more accurate tags.

Other reasons for tagging differences beyond cultural factors have not be explored. Tags for some sample movies in MovieLens might be unstable, as they had been tagged by a small scale of users; as a result, the tags’ type distribution might be influenced.

The results and conclusion of this study will be beneficial for the cross-cultural applications of social tags and mining users’ interests based on tags.

This paper provided a deeper investigation of the cross-cultural effect in people’s social tagging behaviours from cognitive perspective, and an empirical analysis has been performed to explore proper approaches of incorporating cultural differences for tag recommendation.