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The purpose of this paper is to make a theoretical comprehensive efficiency evaluation of a nonlinear analysis method based on the Woodbury formula from the efficiency of the solution of linear equations in each incremental step and the selected iterative algorithms.

First, this study employs the time complexity theory to quantitatively compare the efficiency of the Woodbury formula and the LDLT factorization method which is a commonly used method to solve linear equations. Moreover, the performance of iterative algorithms also significantly effects the efficiency of the analysis. Thus, the three-point method with a convergence order of eight is employed to solve the equilibrium equations of the nonlinear analysis method based on the Woodbury formula, aiming to improve the iterative performance of the Newton–Raphson (N–R) method.

First, the result shows that the asymptotic time complexity of the Woodbury formula is much lower than that of the LDLT factorization method when the number of inelastic degrees of freedom (IDOFs) is much less than that of DOFs, indicating that the Woodbury formula is more efficient for local nonlinear problems. Moreover, the time complexity comparison of the N–R method and the three-point method indicates that the three-point method is more efficient than the N–R method for local nonlinear problems with large-scale structures or a larger ratio of IDOFs number to the DOFs number.

This study theoretically evaluates the efficiency of nonlinear analysis method based on the Woodbury formula, and quantitatively shows the application condition of the comparative methods. The comparison result provides a theoretical basis for the selection of algorithms for different nonlinear problems.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the concentration of a specific customer type – governmental customer, affects the pricing of audit services in the USA.

This paper applies a standard audit pricing model by regressing audit fees on governmental customer concentration and other common determinants of audit fees. This paper also adopts an instrumental variable approach and performs propensity-score matched sample analyzes to mitigate the potential endogeneity problem.

Using data from major customer disclosures of US publicly listed firms from 2000 to 2014, this paper finds that governmental customer concentration is positively associated with audit fees, suggesting that a higher level of governmental customer concentration increases a firm’s audit risks and audit effort. In addition, this paper performs cross-sectional analyzes and show that the association between governmental customer concentration and audit fees is more pronounced for firms with weak internal governance, weak external monitoring and high financial risks.

This paper furthers the understanding of the interactive relationships in supply chain systems and adds new evidence to the literature on customer concentration. Prior studies on customer concentration typically treat all customer types in a uniform manner. To the knowledge, this is the first study that separates governmental customers from other types of customers in an audit pricing setting. The findings highlight the importance of examining governmental customer concentration when assessing a firm’s audit risks and audit fees.

The authors examine the role of CEO political ideology in the credit rating process.

This study adopts a quantitative method with panel data regressions using a sample of 5,211 observations from S&P 500 firms from 2001 to 2012.

The authors find that firms run by Republican-leaning CEOs, who tend to have conservative political ideologies, enjoy more favorable credit ratings than firms run by Democratic-leaning CEOs. In addition, the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings is more pronounced for firms with high operating uncertainty, low capital intensity, high growth potential, weak corporate governance and low financial reporting quality. Finally, the authors find that CEO political ideology affects a firm's cost of debt incremental to credit ratings, consistent with debt investors incorporating CEO political ideology in their pricing decisions.

Leveraging CEO political ideology, the authors document that credit rating agencies incorporate managerial conservatism in their credit rating decisions. This finding suggests that CEO political ideology serves as a meaningful signal for managerial conservatism.

The study suggests that credit rating agencies incorporate CEO political ideology in their credit rating process. Other capital market participants such as auditors and retail investors can also use CEO political ideology as a proxy for managerial conservatism when evaluating firms.

The paper carries practical implications for practitioners, firm executives and regulators. The results on the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings suggest that other financial institutions could also incorporate CEO political ideology in their evaluation in their evaluation of firms. For example, when evaluating audit risk and determining audit pricing, auditors may add CEO political ideology as a risk factor. For firms, especially those that have Democratic-leaning CEOs, the authors suggest that they could reduce the unfavorable effect of CEO political ideology on credit ratings by improving their corporate governance and financial reporting quality, as demonstrated in the cross-sectional analyses. Finally, this study shows that CEO political ideology, as measured by CEOs' political contributions, is closely related to a firm's credit ratings. This finding may inform regulators that greater transparency for CEOs' political contributions is needed as information on contributions could help capital market participants perform risk analyses for firms.

Credit rating agencies release their research methodologies for determining corporate credit ratings and identify managerial conservatism as an important factor that affects their risk assessments. The extant literature, however, has not empirically investigated the relation between credit ratings and managerial conservatism, which, according to behavioral consistency theory, can be proxied by CEO political ideology. This study provides novel empirical evidence that identifies CEO political ideology as an important input factor in the credit rating process.

The house money effect is proposed to describe that people appear to consider large or unexpected wealth gains to be distinct from the rest of their wealth, and are thus more willing to gamble with such gains than they ordinarily would be. On the other hand, the availability heuristic describes that people tend to have a cognitive and systematic bias due to their reliance on easily available or associational information. The purpose of this paper is to employ these behavioral perspectives in an empirical model regarding the January anomaly to explore investor behavior in Taiwanese stock market with bonus culture and well-known electronics industry.

This study uses the conventional and standard dummy variable regression model, as employed in prior studies, and further includes some control variables for firm, industry and macro-economic level factors. Moreover, 19 industrial indices for Taiwanese stock market over the period January 1990 to December 2014 are included in this study to examine the hypotheses, except for the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the global financial crisis period of 2007-2009 to avoid the potential effect. On the other hand, the authors also use the entire sample period of 1990-2014 for understanding whether the magnitude of January effect is different.

The empirical results indicate that Chinese bonus payments in January induce a strong January effect in the Taiwanese stock market, especially when most listed firms have positive earnings growth in the preceding year, suggesting a house money effect. Moreover, this study further provides some preliminary evidence that the higher January returns due to bonus culture are apparent only in the electronics industry when both Chinese New Year and bonus payments are in January, implying the role of availability heuristic based on the electronics stocks in investor behavior before the impending stock exchange holidays. Some robust tests show qualitative support.

The major contribution of this study is to extend the existing research by incorporating cultural and industrial factors with behavioral finance, thus enriching the literature on the causes of seasonality for Asian stock markets.

This study also has behavioral implications of investments for investors in the Taiwanese stock market, especially for foreign institutional investors which pay close attention to this market.

This study first applies and examines the culture bonus hypothesis with regard to how employees who receive culture bonuses in January can change their attitudes toward risk and induce the January effect from the concept of mental accounting. Moreover, this study further proposes and examines the extended culture bonus hypothesis related to how the January effect due to culture bonus is different for the electronics and non-electronics industries when taking into account the stock market holidays from the concept of availability heuristic.

The selection of purchasing channels by wine consumers indirectly affects buying experience and satisfaction, therefore, it is of great practical significance to study consumers' preference on channel selection. The purpose of this study is to investigate the current state of consumer selection for purchasing channel and the corresponding influencing factors.

A total of 2,976 valid questionnaires were collected by convenience sampling from 34 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions of China in 2020 via the Internet, yielding a response rate of 82.2%. A categorical statistical approach was used to understand consumer's selection for each channel. Besides, binary logistic regression model was used to analyze the factors affecting consumers' channel selection.

The results show that Chinese wine consumers' main purchasing channels are as follows: supermarket/mall, wine specialty stores, comprehensive e-business flagship stores, comprehensive e-business individual stores, restaurants and short video and live streaming platforms. Estimation results showed that among the 12 influencing factors in 4 categories, consumers' education and some other factors significantly influenced consumers' decision on wine purchasing channels.

Limited by time and experimental conditions, this study did not analyze the trend of wine consumers' purchasing channel selection. Future work would concentrate on multi-year data and conduct longitudinal comparative analysis.

This study innovatively subdivides the currently popular wine sales channels in Chinese market and conducts research related to consumer channel selection. The results of the study can provide reference for wine producers and distributors to update their strategic layout and also help various channels to understand the characteristics of their customer groups for targeted marketing.

Although China can be considered an early adopter of the circular economy, there are few studies of remanufacturing business models (BMs) in the context of the Chinese automobile industry. The purpose of this paper is to investigate viable BMs, summarizes current obstacles and anticipates future development opportunities and directions.

The cross-case analysis considers the roles of value networks and of customer value proposition and interface in circular business models (CBMs) by examining the strategies and tactical measures of two leading remanufacturers. The data are collected from semi-structured interviews, documents, etc.

The analysis identifies the following components of viable BMs of remanufacturers: reclaiming raw material, managing used components, producing new products and marketing. Several current obstacles are summarized from four perspectives: policy barriers and insufficient government support; consumer awareness; related product quality; and technology. The study also identifies future directions and opportunities for the automobile parts remanufacturing industry.

This study contributes to the CBM literature by mapping the barriers and opportunities in remanufacturing. The results have shed some light into the field of sustainability in manufacturing firms by empirically testing the theoretical model. The results will help managers to design viable CBMs in different contexts.

Innovation resilience, which refers to firms’ ability to consistently innovate and recover from disruptions, has recently gained increasing attention. Digital transformation plays a crucial role in the innovation of manufacturing firms. This paper aims to investigate the impact mechanisms of manufacturing firms’ innovation resilience in the context of digital transformation.

Using panel data from Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms spanning from 2017 to 2022 as an example, this research examines the impact of digital transformation on innovation resilience. It also tests the moderating effect of innovation network embeddedness and the mediation effect of absorptive capacity.

It is found that digital transformation can enhance the innovation resilience of manufacturing firms. Furthermore, the structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness of manufacturing firms within innovation networks moderate the relationship between digital transformation and innovation resilience. The absorptive capacity of manufacturing firms acts as a mediator in the relationship between digital transformation and innovation resilience.

This paper is one of the first studies that investigates the impact mechanisms of digital transformation on the innovation resilience of manufacturing firms based on network embeddedness theory and dynamic capability theory.

This study aims to examine the impacts of restaurant servers’ actions on the customers’ emotional contagion and the impacts of customers’ emotional contagion on their intention to tip and the likelihood of tipping. This study also explores social compliance and examines its impacts on customers’ intentions to tip and the likelihood of tipping.

Taking a restaurant in Taiwan as an example, this study uses questionnaires to investigate five constructs of the research framework, which are restaurant servers’ actions, restaurant customers’ susceptibility to emotional contagion, customers’ intention to tip, customers’ likelihood of tipping and customers’ social compliance. The questionnaires were distributed online using Surveycake website. A total of 310 completed questionnaires were collected.

The results indicate the following: restaurant servers’ actions positively affect customers’ susceptibility to emotional contagion; customers’ emotional contagion positively affects their intention to tip and likelihood of tipping; customers’ social compliance positively affects their intentions to tip and the likelihood of tipping; and customers’ emotional contagion partially mediates the effects of restaurant servers’ actions on customers’ intention to tip and likelihood of tipping.

The hypothesis test results in this article not only successfully integrate or confirm the research findings of past scholars, but also expand the scope of research on related topics. Furthermore, the research findings of this study provide restaurant practitioners with rich marketing implications.

微笑可换来小费吗？餐厅服务员行为会影响顾客的情绪感染和小费行为吗？

摘要

本研究旨在检验餐厅服务员行为对顾客情绪感染的影响, 以及顾客情绪感染对他们给小费意愿和可能性的影响。本研究还探讨了社会合规性, 并检查了其对顾客给小费意愿和给小费可能性的影响。

本研究以台湾一家餐厅为例, 使用问卷调查研究框架的五个结构, 即餐厅服务员行为、餐厅顾客情绪感染、顾客给小费意愿、顾客给小费可能性以及顾客的社会责任。本研究使用了Surveycake线上问卷调查网站, 在线上分发问卷, 并共收集到 310 份已完整问卷。

本研究结果表示：（1）餐厅服务员的行为正向影响顾客情绪感染, （2）顾客的情绪感染正向影响他们给小费的意愿和可能性, （3）顾客的社会责任正向影响他们给小费的意愿和可能性, 以及（4）顾客的情绪感染部分中介了餐厅服务员行为对顾客给小费意愿和小费可能性的影响。

本文的假设检验结果不仅成功地整合或证实了以往学者的研究成果, 而且扩大了相关课题的研究范围。此外, 本研究的研究结果为餐厅从业者提供了丰富的营销意义。

¿Sonriendo por propinas? ¿Afectarán las acciones de los camareros al contagio emocional y a las propinas de los clientes?

Este estudio tiene como objetivo examinar cómo impactan las acciones de los camareros de restaurantes en el contagio emocional de los clientes, y cómo ese contagio emocional influye en su intención de dejar propina y en la probabilidad de hacerlo. Este estudio también explora el cumplimiento social y examina su impacto en la intención de los clientes de dejar propina y la probabilidad de hacerlo.

Tomando un restaurante en Taiwán como ejemplo, este estudio utiliza cuestionarios para investigar cinco constructos del marco de investigación, que son las acciones de los camareros del restaurante, la susceptibilidad de los clientes del restaurante al contagio emocional, la intención de los clientes de dejar propina, la probabilidad de hacerloy el cumplimiento social de los clientes. Los cuestionarios se distribuyeron online a través de la web Surveycake. Se recogieron un total de 310 cuestionarios completados.

Los resultados indican: (1) las acciones de los camareros del restaurante afectan positivamente a la susceptibilidad de los clientes al contagio emocional, (2) el contagio emocional de los clientes afecta positivamente su intención de dejar propina y la probabilidad de hacerlo, (3) el cumplimiento social de los clientes afecta positivamente su intención de dejar propina y la probabilidad de hacerlo, y (4) el contagio emocional de los clientes media parcialmente los efectos de las acciones de los camareros del restaurante sobre la intención de los clientes de dejar propina y la probabilidad de hacerlo.

Los resultados de la prueba de hipótesis en este artículo no solo integran o confirman con éxito los hallazgos de estudios previos, sino que también amplían el alcance de la investigación sobre temas relacionados. Además, los resultados de este estudio proporcionan a los profesionales de la restauración importantes implicaciones de marketing.

Revenue management (RM) is a significant technique to improve revenue with limited resources. With the macro environment of dramatically increasing transit capacity and rapid railway transport development in China, it is necessary to involve the theory of RM into the operation and decision of railway passenger transport.

This paper proposes the theory and framework of generalized RM of railway passenger transport (RMRPT), and the thoughts and methods of the main techniques in RMRPT, involving demand forecasting, line planning, inventory control, pricing strategies and information systems, are all studied and elaborated. The involved methods and techniques provide a sequential process to help with the decision-making for each stage of RMRPT. The corresponding techniques are integrated into the information system to support practical businesses in railway passenger transport.

The combination of the whole techniques devotes to railway benefit improvement and transit resource utilization and has been applied into the practical operation and organization of railway passenger transport.

The development of RMRPT would provide theoretical and technical support for the improvement of service quality as well as railway benefits and efficiency.