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Ethical decision making, business ethics.

This case is applicable to MBA, EDP and EMBA courses.

TOREAD, a professional provider of outdoor equipment in China, started in business by producing and selling tents. To meet market demand, TOREAD expanded its product line which ranges from outdoor durable tent products to “pan-outdoor” products including footwear and clothing. During the critical expansion phase, TOREAD was challenged by a quality problem in a batch of outsourced sandals that had been manufactured by a contracted supplier. By researching different options and going through an ethical decision making process, TOREAD made the choice of destroying all “problem sandals”. Since then, TOREAD has focused development on product quality improvement and product innovation to establish a sustainable brand image and generate social benefits. TOREAD's decision making in the critical development phase helped it to become the leader in the outdoor product industry in China.

This case may be used for courses such as business ethics and strategy. By learning this case, students can understand the process of making ethical decisions when facing moral dilemmas among corporate decision makers, employees and relevant interested parties, and learn how to make strategic decisions to balance company profit growth and social benefits in critical development phases.

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Green innovation in human-centric smart manufacturing (HSM-GI) has emerged as a new paradigm in innovation management for Industry 5.0. The evaluation analysis method is crucial for measuring the development progress and guiding continual improvements of HSM-GI. Since this process of HSM-GI can be regarded as complex and interactive, a holistic picture is often required to describe the interrelations of its antecedents and consequences. In this respect, this study aims to construct a causality network indicator system and proposes a synergy evaluation method for HSM-GI.

Firstly, based on the Driver force-State-Response (DSR) causal-effect framework, this study constructs a holistic indicator system to analyze the interactions between environmental and human concerns of HSM-GI. Secondly, owing to the imprecision of human cognition and synergy interaction in the evaluation process, a flexible hesitant fuzzy (HF) superiority-inferiority synergetic evaluation method is presented. This method quantifies the strengths of causal relationships and expresses the incentives and constraints attitudes of humans. Finally, the proposed framework is applied to six HSMs in the electronic technology industry.

The driving force and state of the HSM-GI system exhibit an upward trend, while the response continues to decline due to changing market demands. The order and synergy degree have shown an increasing trend during 2021–2023, particularly significant for BOE and Haier Smart Home. HSM-GI systems with higher scores mostly have functional coordination and a coherent synergy structure.

This study demonstrates the proposed approach’s applicability and assists policymakers in formulating targeted strategies for green innovation systems.

Given the recent rapid economic development, the processes of industrialization and urbanization are accelerating. At the same time, the contradiction between environmental quality and economic development has become increasingly prominent and is likely to restrict the normal pace of China’s economic development and environmental protection. As such, the purpose of this paper is to incorporate the urbanization factor into an analytic framework to discuss the relationship among urbanization, economic development, and environmental pollution.

A panel data of 31 Chinese provinces from 2004 to 2015 is selected for this research. A spatial correlation test is first conducted on the environmental pollution status, then the spatial Durbin model is used to carry out spatial econometric testing of the relationship among the above three factors.

Interprovincial environmental pollution in China has significant positive spatial correlation, environmental pollution discharge in most provinces is significantly stable, discharge of environmental pollutants is transitioning from coastal to inland provinces, and urbanization and economic growth can both aggravate environmental pollution, but economic growth can relieve environmental pollution in neighboring provinces.

The relationship between economic growth, urbanization, and environmental quality has always been an important issue for sustainable development. As such, China’s urbanization leads to economic development, while rapid economic growth and environmental pollution are coordinated. This paper focuses on the specific relationship between them. To this end, local governments make concerted efforts to formulate sound environmental regulation policies based on local environmental conditions, where economic development is an effective means of alleviating the contradictory relationship between economic development and environmental protection.

The purpose of this study is to solve the problem of longer dead-time in the rear bridge leg switches and lower efficiency in the Four-Switch Buck-Boost LLC Resonant Converter.

The paper adopts time-domain analysis to derive the time-domain expression for optimal dead time, analyzing the conditions for achieving soft switching of the transistors. It further explores the relationship between the dead time of the bridge arm switching transistors and the input/output of the converter under different operating conditions. Specifically, the dead time of the upper bridge arm transistors increases with the converter input voltage and decreases with the output current. In contrast, the dead time of the lower bridge arm transistors is independent of the converter output current and decreases with increasing converter input voltage.

By simulating and constructing a 500 W experimental prototype, experimental results indicate that designing the dead time of the switch according to the optimal dead time proposed in this paper significantly improves efficiency when the converter operates from heavy load to full load. When the transformer takes minimum input, maximum input and intermediate bus voltage inputs respectively, its peak efficiency is increased by 0.6%, 1.7% and 1.1%, respectively, compared to the traditional four-switch Buck–Boost LLC resonant converter.

Experimental validation confirms the correctness of the optimal dead time design and analyzes the impact of different operating conditions of the converter on the dead time. This is of significant importance for the rational design of switch dead times and the enhancement of converter efficiency.

The establishment of free trade zones (FTZs) is an important experiment as part of the reform and opening up policy. This paper aims to focus on the issue of production efficiency of environmental protection enterprises in FTZs. Changes in the external and internal environments of enterprises can easily lead to changes in the production efficiencies of enterprises. The establishment of FTZs can change the external environment of enterprises. Knowledge accumulation changes the internal environment of enterprises. However, traditional efficiency analysis has usually ignored the internal and external heterogeneity of decision-making units, resulting in the distortion of the evaluation results.

This paper examines the relationship between knowledge accumulation and development potential based on financial data of environmental protection enterprises that were listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen A stocks, from 2009 to 2016. Then, through data envelopment analysis cross-efficiency analysis of the listed environmental protection enterprises from external heterogeneity, BP neural network model is set up.

The results show that the model set up in this paper is stable and reliable. The paper makes policy suggestions such as stimulating trade inside industry, quickening technological progress and enhancing environmental protection.

This paper analyzes the economy, environmental protection, science and technology and education to simulate the external environment of enterprises. Based on the experience data from the completion of Shanghai FTZ, this paper predicts the future development potential of Hainan FTZ enterprises.

Coil shape quality is the external representation of strip product quality, and it is also a direct reflection of strip production process level. This paper aims to predict the coil shape results in advance based on the real-time data through the designed algorithm.

Aiming at the strip production scale and coil shape application requirements, this paper proposes a strip coil shape defects prediction algorithm based on Siamese semi-supervised denoising auto-encoder (DAE)-convolutional neural networks. The prediction algorithm first reconstructs the information eigenvectors using DAE, then combines the convolutional neural networks and skip connection to further process the eigenvectors and finally compares the eigenvectors with the full connect neural network and predicts the strip coil shape condition.

The performance of the model is further verified by using the coil shape data of a steel mill, and the results show that the overall prediction accuracy, recall rate and F-measure of the model are significantly better than other commonly used classification models, with each index exceeding 88%. In addition, the prediction results of the model for different steel grades strip coil shape are also very stable, and the model has strong generalization ability.

This research provides technical support for the adjustment and optimization of strip coil shape process based on the data-driven level, which helps to improve the production quality and intelligence level of hot strip continuous rolling.

The study aims to explore the effects of photograph quality on visual appeal, perceived usefulness and viewers' travel intentions from rational and irrational perspectives while simultaneously providing some references for the management and marketing of tourism destinations.

The study comprises four experiments combined with structural equation modeling to explore the influence mechanism of photograph quality on travel intentions.

(1) Higher-quality photographs offer greater visual appeal and perceived usefulness to viewers, and these relationships are moderated by the photograph source. Specifically, high-quality photographs generated by other tourists have more visual appeal and perceived usefulness to viewers. However, there are no significant differences in the impact of low-quality photographs generated by other tourists and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) on visual appeal and perceived usefulness. (2) Visual appeal and perceived usefulness significantly affect viewers' travel intentions, and visual appeal positively affects perceived usefulness. (3) Travel experience positively moderates the effects of visual appeal and perceived usefulness on viewers' travel intentions.

The study explores the effects of the visual appeal (irrational factor) and perceived usefulness (rational factor) associated with photograph quality on viewers' travel intentions. Photograph source and travel experiences have moderating effects on this influence mechanism.

The authors investigated the impacts of differentiated transformational leadership (TFL), including team-focused TFL and individual-focused TFL, on team creativity through the mediating effect of team conflict, consisting of task conflict and relationship conflict.

The authors designed and conducted a close-to-reality experiment, enrolling 180 students and six professors from a large Chinese university. Student participants worked on a real marketing project and professor participants imitated the behaviors of transformational leaders. Using the computed values of team-focused TFL, individual-focused TFL, team creativity, task conflict and relationship conflict, the authors assessed the relationship among differentiated TFL, team creativity and team conflict.

Team-focused TFL has a significantly positive impact on team creativity through the mediating effect of task conflict, whereas individual-focused TFL has a significantly negative impact on team creativity through the mediating effect of relationship conflict.

From a new perspective of team conflict, the authors revealed the “black box” of the differentiated TFL–team creativity relationship. Moreover, other determinants were well controlled in the experiment, and thus, the authors effectively clarified the intervening mechanism of differentiated TFL on team creativity through the mediating effect of team conflict.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the content characteristics of destination online reviews and travel intention under three individual circumstances: temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance.

Based on construal-level theory (CLT), this study divides online travel reviews into concrete and abstract reviews. Three experiments were conducted to test the moderating effects of temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance on the influence of review content characteristics on tourists' travel intentions.

The results show that abstract reviews would lead to higher travel intentions than concrete reviews. Furthermore, tourists' travel intentions differed depending on social distance and were significantly affected by reviews posted by reviewers similar to review recipients. In addition, the study contributes by discovering that the moderating effects of temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance were not significant, which differs from most of the previous research conclusions.

This study focused on review content characteristics, which provided a novel perspective for constructing online travel reviews. Furthermore, this research defined the concept of experiential distance in the context of online travel and expanded the research on psychological distance.

COVID-19 has aggregated the need for a non-contact medical logistic system. A non-contact robot with self-navigation ability has greatly enhanced the efficiency of the medical logistic system. This paper aims to design a new medical logistics robot system for the complex environment of hospitals with dynamic obstacles.

Targeting a medical logistics robot system for a large-scale hospital environment, this study proposed a dynamic obstacle avoidance system to reduce the robot’s delay time as well as frequent route switching. In the algorithm, this study proposed a new loop closure detection with an artificial correction factor. Moreover, this study presented enhanced 3D object detection, improving detection accuracy in hospital environments.

Experimental results confirm that the robot can move along its global path and reach its destination without colliding with stationary or moving obstacles.

The medical logistics robot system has safe and stable performance in real hospital scenarios. The implementation verifies that the robot has effectiveness and reliability in both hardware and software design.