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Extant literature indicates that increased product market diversification generates both positive and negative impact on firm performance. This inconclusive pattern hinders the decision-making of deploying a firm’s resources across different markets. This research aims to embed diversification into a moderation-based framework and demonstrates the conditions under which increased diversification produces either beneficial or harmful effects on firm outcomes. The authors introduce another market configuration dimension, viz., market emphasis, and reveal how changes in diversification and in emphasis yield interactive effects on an important firm performance indicator, idiosyncratic risk. An additional moderator, market turbulence, is also incorporated to further enrich the model in a three-way interaction. Results show that when market turbulence is high, and a firm highly skews its resources to some of its markets, diversifying into more market domains will increase firm idiosyncratic risk. A better choice during increased diversification is to evenly emphasize each of its markets. However, in a market displaying low turbulence, the high diversification-high emphasis pattern may be preferred because of lower firm risk.

To test the hypotheses, the authors collected a comprehensive archival data that contained a large group of public traded US-based manufacturing companies from three different resources. These were the Compustat Annual Database, the Center for Research in Security Prices database and Compustat Business Segment Database. These databases and the combinatorial approach are widely adopted in marketing and management research involving firm strategies and financial outcomes.

When market turbulence is high, simultaneously increasing market diversification and emphasis will more strongly raise firm idiosyncratic risk. However, polarizing into either diversification or emphasis reduces firm risk. When in a low turbulence market, expanding to more product markets and simultaneously emphasizing key markets will decrease idiosyncratic risk. One noticeable fact is that irrespective of whether a firm is in high or low turbulence conditions, choosing a diversification strategy always decreases firm risk when market emphasis is low. However, the impact of this effect however is higher when turbulence is greater. The authors also present the boundary conditions under which the three-way interaction holds.

First, the extension to the utilization of idiosyncratic risk stretches the understanding of effective ways of reducing firm risks from an angle of marketing management. This view of firm risk also contributes to further analysis of shareholder value. Classic corporate asset valuation focuses more on the financial performance indicators as well as the firm’s strategic domains. This research thus provides a unique and meaningful guideline for the corporate valuation approach from the angle of analyzing the firm’s business segment scope and emphasis in the context of the environment.

The idea about how many product markets a firm should enter is always one of the primary decisions that contain significant trade-offs. This makes the managers choice difficult during the decision-making processes. The authors suggest that managers should not only consider the scope of product markets but also think carefully about the resources allocated toward each segment. A matrix with dimensions of diversification and emphasis can be explicitly studied during the strategy formulation. The individual blocks within this matrix may have significant outcome differences.

Previous research focuses on either a firm’s internal assets or external competitive situations when researchers seek the drivers of risk-reduction. This research extends this horizon by adding the interplay between a set of fundamental firm decision areas, diversification and emphasis and the external conditions facing a firm (turbulence).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between service quality and firms’ global competitiveness in the service industry. A set of moderating effects is formulated to further reveal how the relationship varies under different situations.

This paper tests the model with data collected from multiple sources such as World’s Most Admired Companies and COMPUSTAT. Two types of robust regressions for panel data are employed in the empirical model estimation.

Service quality is found to significantly drive global competitiveness. Specifically, its impact is stronger for large service firms and when the global environment is characterized as low munificence, high dynamism, or high complexity.

The paper provides a set of implications for managers of service firms regarding global expansion and quality management. It generates useful guidelines of maximizing the power of service quality when a firm’s global competitive advantage is considered.

This paper takes the first attempt to formulate service quality’s influence on firm’s global competitiveness with a consideration of specific situational factors.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility and customer satisfaction and evaluate the impact of this relationship on firm performance, specifically the moderating impact of environmental uncertainty on the corporate social responsibility to customer satisfaction relationship.

The authors constructed a panel data set by collecting data from Fortune Magazine’s World’s Most Admired Companies and Compustat. The authors used two methods, Newey–West and White–Cluster robust regressions, to estimate the empirical models.

The results from this moderating analysis of environmental uncertainty are largely consistent with this study's hypotheses. In particular, the authors find that corporate social responsibility contributes to increased customer satisfaction for large firms, in highly competitive environments and in highly dynamic industries. This paper also finds that in high growth environments, corporate social responsibility can result in decreased customer satisfaction.

The study is limited to environmental factors in the examination boundary conditions. Researchers should broaden the moderators to include criteria such as market orientation, marketing and/or operations capability.

The empirical results provide practitioners with insight to better translate corporate social responsibility into higher levels of customer satisfaction.

The empirical results support corporate social responsibility as a viable and productive means of increasing customer satisfaction.

This study is the first that builds upon the work of Luo and Bhattacharya (2006) and Saeidi et al. (2015) by examining environmental factors that influence the relationship between corporate social responsibility and customer satisfaction. This research provides useful implications for marketing theories as well as business practice.

Service quality is a critical factor leading to firm returns. However, its benefit on the firm risk side metric is not clear. The purpose of this paper is to link firm service quality and firm cash flow volatility (CFV) and further investigates this relationship by incorporating the moderating effects from three environmental variables: munificence, dynamism, and complexity.

This study is based on a secondary data approach. The data are collected from multiple sources such as AMAC and COMPUSTAT. Robust regressions with a panel data approach are adopted to analyze the data.

Corporate service quality level has a strong effect in reducing firm CFV. Its impact is found to have a varied strength when the relationship is moderated by the environmental factors. In particular, it functions more strongly in high dynamism and high complexity environments.

Service quality has effects beyond the previous thinking that is mainly concentrated on firm profits. Managers now should know that it is also effective in smoothing cash flow and thus yields benefits for future corporate planning. This is particularly meaningful for companies that operate in a turbulent industry as well as in a highly competitive market.

This study is the first attempt that links firm service quality and firm risk factor represented by the volatility of income flow. It extends the role of service quality to an area that is increasingly emphasized by marketing researchers, e.g. the risk aspect of firm market-based assets.

Literature proposes that implementing supplier assessment and supplier collaboration simultaneously may lead to better sustainable performance. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the proposition by considering the contingent effects of two contextual factors, the environmental dynamism and the stakeholder pressure on sustainability.

Four configurations of governance mechanisms are identified according to the different levels of implementing supplier assessment and supplier collaboration. The performances of the four configurations are compared against the levels of environmental dynamism and stakeholder pressure. The empirical data from the sixth round of International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) are used.

This paper found that the governance configuration with the highest level of implementing both governance mechanisms leads to the best performance. The synergistic effect that supplier assessment and collaboration complement each other to achieve better performance is verified. However, the synergistic effect holds robust only when the environmental dynamism and stakeholder pressure are high. The synergistic effect vanishes in the social and environmental performance when the environmental dynamism is low. The effect also vanishes in the environmental performance when the stakeholder pressure is low. No synergistic effect was found in business performance.

This paper reveals the complementarity between supplier assessment and supplier collaboration when they are implemented at a reasonably high level. It also reveals the importance of the fit of governance mechanisms under different external contexts. The results contribute to reconciling the disputes about the effectiveness of governing supplier relationship to achieve the sustainability along a supply chain.

This study aims to examine the trustworthiness of internet-based quality signals (specifically webpages and before-sale services) from the perspective of interactivity by evaluating the associations between on-line signals of product quality and the off-line perceived quality of actual products.

Empirical data are collected from 261 Chinese female university students. Partial least squares structural equation modelling is used to test the conceptual model.

Both webpages and before-sale services are positively associated with off-line perceived quality, but only the quality of before-sale service has a direct association with customer satisfaction. Webpages and before-sale services are both trustworthy signals for indicating the quality of physical products; however, these signals provide different levels of trustworthiness.

The interactivity perspective supplements information-economics theory in examining the trustworthiness of internet-based signals. A signal is a trustworthy indicator only if customers perceive a close relationship between the quality of the signal and the actual product quality.

On-line sellers should improve the reciprocity and controllability of communications from a buyer’s perspective and should pay more attention to the strategic role of on-line communication for improving customer service.

Researchers have evaluated the trustworthiness of on-line quality signals from an information-economics perspective. This study extends these previous studies by addressing the perspective of interactivity. Two types of product-quality signals, including webpages and before-sale services, are assessed in terms of their trustworthiness by examining how these signals relate to off-line perceived quality and customer satisfaction.

The importance of supplier integration (SI) in improving firms’ performance has been previously identified but the effects of SI are complicated, as the relationship between supplier and buyer is full of uncertainty. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the effects of SI on operations performance from a relational view.

Two strategies of integrating suppliers are theoretically presented: information sharing and joint decision making. Hypotheses are then developed on when SI influences operations performance, using product complexity and competitive intensity as moderating factors. The hypotheses are tested using a global survey data set, made up of 763 manufacturing firms from 22 countries.

The results indicate a positive relationship between SI and operations performance and that the moderating roles of product complexity and competition intensity are significant, but product complexity does not have significant moderation effects on the relationships between joint decision making and product quality/cost reduction.

The moderators of product complexity and competitive intensity are not comprehensive. Future study into how and under what circumstances SI has the greatest effect will be of benefit.

This study makes theoretical contributions by exploring the strategies of SI through a relational view, and examining the effects of SI through the moderating roles of product complexity and competition intensity.

This paper aims to study the corrosion inhibition behavior of imidazopyridine and its three derivatives on brass.

The authors performed weight loss experiments, electrochemical experiments including the polarization curve and electrochemical impedance spectrum, corrosion morphology observation using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and atomic force microscope (AFM) and surface composition analysis via X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to analyze the corrosion inhibition behavior of imidazopyridine and its three derivatives on brass by using quantum chemical calculation (Gaussian 09), molecular dynamics simulation (M-S) and Langmuir adsorption isotherm.

According to the results, imidazole-pyridine and its derivatives were found to be modest or moderately mixed corrosion inhibitors; moreover, they were spontaneously adsorbed on the metal surface in a single-layer, mixed adsorption mode.

The corrosion inhibition properties of pyrazolo-[1,2-a]pyridine and its derivatives on brass in sulfuric acid solution were analyzed through weight loss and electrochemical experiments. Moreover, SEM and AFM were simultaneously used to observe the corrosion appearance. Furthermore, XPS was used to analyze the surface. Then, Gaussian 09 and M-S were combined along with the Langmuir adsorption isotherm to investigate the corrosion inhibition mechanism of imidazole-[1,2-a]pyridine and its derivatives.

This study aims to realize the constant force grinding of automobile wheel hub.

A force control strategy of backstepping + proportion integration differentiation (PID) is proposed. The grinding end effector is installed on the flange of the robot. The robot controls the position and posture of the grinding end actuator and the grinding end actuator controls the grinding force output. First, the modeling and analysis of the grinding end effector are carried out, and then the backstepping + PID method is adopted to control the grinding end effector to track the expected grinding force. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is verified by simulation and experiment.

The simulation and experimental results show that the backstepping + PID strategy can track the expected force quickly, and improve the dynamic response performance of the system and the quality of grinding and polishing of automobile wheel hub.

The mathematical model is based on the pneumatic system and ideal gas, and ignores the influence of friction in the working process of the cylinder, so the mathematical model proposed in this study has certain limitations. A new control strategy is proposed, which is not only used to control the grinding force of automobile wheels, but also promotes the development of industrial control.

The automatic constant force grinding of automobile wheel hub is realized, and the manpower is liberated.

First, the modeling and analysis of the grinding end effector are carried out, and then the backstepping + PID method is adopted to control the grinding end effector to track the expected grinding force. The nonlinear model of the system is controlled by backstepping method, and in the process, the linear system composed of errors is obtained, and then the linear system is controlled by PID to realize the combination of backstepping and PID control.

The mass transfer of textiles during movement is complicated as the energy consumption (EC) from skin, surface temperature of fabrics together with environment will work synergistically to determine the sensation and comfort of wearer. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the mass transfer in the human-textile-environment dynamic system.

With a simulated hotplate mounted on a rotational testing platform, this paper focuses on the dynamic mass transfer of a fabric so as to simulate the real-time mass transfer of clothing in movements.

It has been found that the EC and surface temperature (T) change against testing time, indicating the convex and concave shapes of the EC–t and T–t curves. The initial moisture regain of the fabric, rotational speed of the platform and the fiber materials of the fabric have shown a great effect on the dynamic mass transfer process.

Understanding the dynamic mass transfer of textiles will benefit the design of clothing with better comfort and will contribute to the well-being of wearers.

This work reveals the dynamic mass transfer of textiles in rotational movements. It contributes a new approach to studying the mass transfer of clothing in real service.