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The floating ring generates elastic deformation as the film pressure for high-speed floating ring bearings (FRBs). The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of ring elastic deformation on the performance of a hydrodynamic/hydrostatic FRB, including floating ring equilibrium and minimum film thickness.

The finite element method and finite difference method are used to solve thermohydrodynamic (THD) lubrication models, including the Reynolds equation, energy equation and temperature–viscosity equation. The deformation matrix method is applied to solve the elastic deformation equation, and then the deformation distribution, floating ring equilibrium and minimum film thickness are investigated. The maximum pressure is compared with the published article to verify the mathematical models.

The deformation value increases with the growth of shaft speed; owing to elastic deformation on the film reaction force and friction moment, the ring achieves equilibrium at a new position, and the inner eccentricity increases while the ring-shaft speed ratio declines. The minimum film thickness declines with the growth of inlet temperature, and the outer film tends to rupture considering elastic deformation at a higher temperature.

The floating ring elastic deformation is coupled with the THD lubrication equations to study ring deformation on the hydrodynamic/hydrostatic FRB lubrication mechanism. The elastic deformation of floating ring should be considered to improve analysis accuracy for FRBs.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-05-2023-0139/

Prior investigations concerning misalignment resulting from journal deformation typically relied on predefined misaligned angles. Nevertheless, scant attention has been devoted to the determination of these misaligned angles. Furthermore, existing studies commonly treat the journal as rigid under such circumstances. Therefore, the present study aims to introduce a framework for determining misaligned angles and to compare outcomes between rigid and flexible journal configurations.

The bearing forces are considered as an external load leading to journal deformation. This deformation is calculated using the finite element method. The pressure distribution producing the bearing force is solved using the finite difference method. The mesh grids in the finite element and finite difference methods are matched for coupling calculation. By iteration, the pressure distribution of the lubricant film at the equilibrium position is determined.

Results show that the deformation-induced misalignment has a significant influence on the performance of the bearing when the journal flexibility is taken into account. The parametric study reveals that the misalignment relies on system parameters such as bearing length-diameter ratio and static load.

The investigation of this work provides a quantification method of misalignment of hydrodynamic bearings considering the elastic deformation of the journal, which assists in the design of bearing in a rotor-bearing system.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-10-2023-0337/

This study aims to examine if the participation of live-stream influencers (LSIs) affects tipping frequency on live streaming platforms, and further investigate the mediating and moderating mechanisms.

Quasi-experiment and difference-in-differences models are used for data analysis. Propensity score matching is used to address potential unobservable endogeneity.

Real-time live streaming data reveal that LSIs’ participation significantly improves tipping frequency in live streaming rooms. Also, more users are attracted to the live streaming rooms and more users become active in participation. Additionally, the positive impact of LSIs’ participation is enhanced in the live streaming rooms with a greater number of relationship links between users.

The findings clarify the new role of influencers and reveal the mechanisms on how LSIs benefit the platforms.

The findings offer novel insights into implementing influencer marketing to interactive social media platforms, by encouraging influencer participation, user relationship building and influencer network growth.

This study highlights the value of LSIs for interactive social media platforms in terms of organic growth, revenue generation and cost reduction.

Many researchers and analysts are interested in evaluating the performance of a system with a network structure as a decision-making unit. In this regard, fuzzy network data envelopment analysis (FNDEA) is a noticeable and worthy method for evaluating the efficiency of a system with fuzzy data. Based on the structure of a fuzzy network system, which consists of at least two serial stages, an intermediate factor has an output nature for the first stage and an input nature for the second stage. Hence, it is inappropriate to allocate the same weight for each stage using this factor. Unfortunately, contrary to real-world conditions, all previous conventional FNDEA studies have considered the same role for intermediate factors to linearize or simplify models. For the first time, this study attempts to determine the upper and lower bounds of the overall efficiencies of a fuzzy two-stage series system and its subprocesses with unequal intermediate product weights.

The proposed model remains in its original nature as a complex combinatorial problem in the nonlinear programming category of NP-hard problems. A genetic algorithm (GA) is utilized as a metaheuristic algorithm, and a novel hybrid GA-FNDEA algorithm is presented to solve the problem.

The findings of the study outlined several theoretical contributions and practical implications, including as compensatory property of DEA, determining upper and lower bounds, improving efficiency in nonlinear systems, reducing computational burden, enhancing evolutionary algorithms and retaining real-world conditions.

Contrary to real-world conditions, all previous conventional FNDEA studies have considered the same role for intermediate factors to linearize or simplify models. For the first time, this study attempts to determine the upper and lower bounds of the overall efficiencies of a fuzzy two-stage series system and its subprocesses with unequal intermediate product weights.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made contactless services such as those provided by robots increasingly pervasive. Some stores are gradually adopting service robots to sell products, which has not been explored in previous research. This study aims to explore how appearance personification of service robots affects customer decision-making in the product recommendation context.

Based on authentic in-store product recommendation service interactions, an experiment for three simulated scenarios was conducted and data was collected from 338 valid samples.

The results show appearance personification has a positive impact on customer purchase behavior while it has negative impacts on customer decision time and degree of hesitation.

This study not only enriches the literature on application scenarios of service robots but also supplements the literature on various customer decision-making variables in the field of service robots. It provides important practical guidance for designing robots to optimize their impact on customer decision-making.

This paper examines the in-depth relationship between religious beliefs and individual social class mobility expectations in China.

The data used in this article are mainly from the China Comprehensive Social Survey in 2010 (CGSS2010). Compared with other years' CGSS data, CGSS2010 includes a module on religious topics, and the questionnaire information related to religion is more comprehensive and suitable for in-depth analysis.

The results show that religious beliefs have a significant positive impact on personal social class mobility expectations. Based on the principle of diminishing marginal returns on capital, the positive impact of religious belief on the expectation of individual social class mobility is more significant in groups with nonagricultural household registration, higher education level, older age and better family background conditions. However, with the further improvement of family background conditions, this positive impact begins to weaken. In addition, possible channels of action include prejudice effects, psychological effects, individual capital effects and social capital effects. The results of other effects are positive except for the prejudice effect. Overall, religious beliefs, as one of the important components of contemporary Chinese culture, have a positive significance for the “Chinese Dream”.

There is also little literature globally that provides an in-depth analysis of the relationship between religion and economic development. Studies have led to an understanding of the relationship between religious beliefs and individual social class mobility expectations. But it is unclear whether theories developed based on Western spiritual experience will be applicable to China or not. The authors have tested for China.

COVID-19 (C19) has been destroying the world's health and emergency response system for almost the past year. Policymakers and health practitioners are trying their best to save the public through various policy development and initiatives in this regard. This study aims to examine the containment measures and their impacts on Australia's C19 situation in Australia's COVIDsafe app background.

This study investigates the role of the Australian Government's (AG) Health Containment (HC) and Stringency response (SR) in combating the C19 situation in Australia. The time horizon has been taken from January to October 2020 and applied Linear Regression with graphical demonstration analysis by STATA-18 version and MS Word chart features.

By applying linear regression and graphical demonstration, statistics revealed that AG made various policy developments during the C19 pandemic. However, due to inconsistent and unsustainable measures, the second C19 wave hit Australia much harder than the first wave. COVIDsafe app has been a vital AG in this regard; however, it did not show its progress during the second wave due to privacy issues. After the more focused and aggressive research and development measures, AG overcame the App drawbacks and controlled the situation, demonstrating 92% recovered statistics from C19.

The study concludes that AG should enforce many prudent policy measures and distinct E-government features in the COVIDsafe app and make it secure so people will use it in probable forthcoming C19 waves.

This study has examined the Government of Australia's containment measures in the background discussion of the COVIDsafe app.

Consumers have pervasively relied on mobile reviews in digital economy. However, little knowledge exists regarding how customers adopt several mobile reviews to make purchasing decisions. With the assistance of reader-response theory, this study investigates how the consistency of product reviews, in terms of their adherence to both other reviews and the prior experience of the customer, affect perceived quality, confirmation of the customer's expectations, the customer's level of trust in the seller and the consequent purchase intention.

Based on a scenario simulation and an online experiment to collect data, the authors employed AMOS to test the proposed hypotheses using survey data collected from 314 customers in Study 1 and 420 consumers in Study 2.

The results indicate that global consistency positively and significantly contributes to confirmation, perceived quality and trust in sellers while sequential inconsistency positively and significantly influences perceived quality. Meanwhile, purchase intention is positively and significantly promoted by confirmation, perceived quality and trust in sellers, and initial valence has some moderating effects on these relationships.

This study contributes to the understanding of how customers apply product reviews to make purchasing decisions from a new angle. It also elucidates the way in which the perceived consistency of product reviews affects how reviewers are perceived and the consequent effect of these perceptions on a customer's purchase intentions.

The domain of monetary donation is evolving with the combination of professional donation platforms and social network sites (SNSs) in the agency process, potentially enhancing information communication and facilitating money transfers between donors and recipients. However, SNS donation avoidance hinders the leveraging of significant economic and social values. To address the limited understanding of the phenomenon of SNS donation avoidance, this study aims to investigate the influencing factors of people's avoidance behavior in the agency process of SNS donation.

A model was devised containing four process-related factors (requests overload, process ambiguity, channel security concerns and perceived distributive injustice) as antecedents of SNS donation avoidance, with probable mediating paths of negative emotions, altruistic outcome expectation and egoistic outcome expectation. Data were collected through a survey of 398 users of WeChat Moment in China. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the proposed model.

All four process-related factors have positive associations with SNS donation avoidance. Requests overload, channel security concerns and perceived distributive injustice all positively influence people's expectation of negative emotions and lead, in turn, to their SNS donation avoidance. Perceived distributive injustice also leads to SNS donation avoidance via negatively influencing people's expectations of both altruistic and egoistic outcomes.

Theoretically, this empirical study synthetically associates process-related factors to donation avoidance through the paths of emotional responses and rational outcome expectations. Practically, it emphasizes key factors to consider in the process management of SNS donation.

Lightweight apps such as WeChat mini programs (WMPs) are an emerging mobile channel (m-channel) touchpoint that have gained remarkable popularity among consumers. Despite the focus of migration research on traditional m-channel touchpoints (e.g. native apps and mobile websites), but few researchers have examined why consumers switch from native to lightweight apps. Drawing on the push-pull-mooring framework, this study aims to identify the key factors influencing consumers' switching related to lightweight apps.

The data were collected using a questionnaire survey of 416 WMP consumers and the proposed model was analyzed through structural equation modeling.

The results show that the push effect, specifically, high privacy concern, nudges consumers away from native apps, whereas the pull effects, including relative ease of use, convenience of access and exit and socially-oriented interaction, entice consumers to lightweight apps. Further, consumer switching intention is influenced by habit and perceived technology control, both of which reflect the mooring effects. Switching intention also stands as an important precedent of actual behavior.

This study is among the first theoretical explorations of consumer switching across m-channel touchpoints in the context of mobile commerce. For information system practice, these findings provide new insights for both incumbent providers and newcomers on how to retain existing shoppers as well as attract potential shoppers effectively.