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This study highlights the impact of mental accounts on a user's decision-making regarding payment schemes and aims to determine the pricing strategy for the first-enjoy-after-pay service offered by the two-sided media platforms.

This study establishes a game-theoretic model and utilizes backward induction to derive the equilibrium price by maximizing the monopolist's profit.

The findings indicate that the conditions for a two-sided media platform to offer the first-enjoy-after-pay service depend on the trade-off between pleasure attenuation and pain buffering and the effect of time discounts. Moreover, the authors found that the time discount is a critical factor in determining pricing strategies under various payment schemes offered by the platform.

This work adopts a uniform pricing strategy for users who opt for either immediate or post-payment schemes. Nevertheless, it is important to note that this approach has limitations in terms of offering discriminatory pricing for those who choose both payment schemes.

This analytical work provides valuable insights for two-sided media platforms to optimize their payment scheme strategies and pricing considering the influence of a user's mental account.

In a two-sided media platform, the authors provide applicable conditions for the platform to offer first-enjoy-after-pay service considering the effect of mental accounts. Further, the authors show the optimal pricing strategy under different payment schemes provided by the platform.

This study highlights the effect of an inductee's altruism on referral reward programs (RRPs) on an online shopping guide platform to determine the optimal RRP and referral reward allocation under a Cashback and Referral RRP.

The authors consider a Stackelberg game with a platform, seller, inductor and inductee, where the inductee's altruism plays a vital role in determining the optimal RRP in equilibrium.

The authors show that the conditions under which it is optimal to reward the inductor only or reward both inductor and inductee are equal or unequal depending on the degree of the inductee's altruism. Suppose the platform is unable to dynamically decide the commission fee. In that case, the platform may not always be involved in RRPs and will gradually reduce the rewards for inductees as the altruism increases.

This study focuses on a free-to-consumers model where sellers pay membership fees. Thus, this study has limitations regarding other pricing schemes such as a model in which consumers pay a fee while sellers do not or a model in which both types of users pay fees.

This analytical work can help platforms optimize referral reward strategies and referral reward allocation considering the influence of an inductee's altruism.

In a Cashback and Referral RRP on a shopping guide platform, the authors provide applicable conditions for the platform to involve in the RRPs when rewarding an equal bonus for the inductor and inductee first. Further, the authors show the optimal referral reward strategy and referral reward allocation when giving the different bonuses to the inductor and inductee.

This paper presents a micrograting‐based force sensor integrated with a surface micromachined silicon‐nitride probe suitable for characterizing microsurgery force on a single cell or embryo. The probe is supported by springs of a known spring constant, and the surgical penetration force is determined from displacement measurements. The optical‐encoder force sensor exhibits configurable sensitivity and dynamic range, allowing monitoring over a wide range of forces. The periodicity of the encoder response can be used for calibration of the injector displacement and to obtain information about the localized elastic properties of the target. We used a force sensor with a measured spring constant of 1.85 N/m for penetration force measurements on Drosophila embryos, and found a penetration force of 52.5 μN (±13.2 percent) and a membrane displacement of 58 μm (±5.2 percent).

With China’s economic growth slowing down and the growth rate of fiscal revenue decreasing, the pressure on local government debts is further increasing. Under this background, it is of great significance to clarify the relation between local government debts and China’s economic growth in order to give full play to the positive role of local debts in stabling growth. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Therefore, this paper explores the impact of Chinese local government debt on economic growth from theoretical and empirical aspects, respectively, and compares the regional differences between different debts and economic growth dynamics.

In the theoretical model part, this paper constructs a three-sector dynamic game model, under the two circumstances of whether local government is subject to debt constraints, and examines the relation between local government debt and economic growth and other variables through numerical simulation. Research shows that when the government is not constrained by debt, there is an inverted “U” relation between government debt and economic growth. When the government is constrained by debt, the economic growth rate gradually decreases as the government debt increases.

In the theoretical analysis part, this paper tries to estimate the amount of local debts under different calibers and examines the impact of different types of local government debts on China’s economic growth and their regional differences. The results show that excessive accumulation of government hidden debts in the eastern region is not conducive to economic growth, while explicit debts in the central and western regions significantly contribute to local economic growth. The results of empirical analysis are basically consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model.

The paper aims at analyzing the co-movements between stock returns and oil prices (West Texas Intermediate, Brent) controlling or not for COVID-19.

It uses continuous wavelet transforms and wavelet coherence over the period July 19, 2019 to August 16, 2021 based on daily data. Continuous wavelet transforms provide an over complete representation of stock returns signals by letting the translation and scale parameters of the wavelets vary continuously.

There are not significant evidence supporting the fact that the COVID-19 has altered the relationship between stock returns and oil prices except perhaps in the case of South Africa. In fact, Southern African Development Community stock markets react more to oil prices than to health shock such as the COVID-19.

The findings of the study are original and have not been published anywhere prior.

Student participation has been an important issue for information literacy (IL) teachings. The purpose of this paper is to promote active student participation in IL courses with Rain Classroom, an intelligent teaching tool.

Using mixed method research, the paper presents a practical case study of the author’s experiences with Rain Classroom to improve teaching and learning of IL.

The study shows that Rain Classroom helps implement problem-based learning, promote student participation in class interaction and optimize learning experience, which facilitates a shift of the IL course from passive to active learning.

It is known that university public courses have large class sizes (more than 50 students per class), and, therefore, class interaction is difficult to organize. So this is a big issue for the researchers to study.

The proposed Rain Classroom is a free teaching tool and can be used in other academic libraries to enhance active student participation in IL lessons.

The paper includes implications for improving interaction in large-size conference or trainings using Rain Classroom.

The existing literature has not traced the reports on using the Rain Classroom to enhance student participation in IL courses in academic libraries. This paper intends to fill this gap and share practical methods and experiences, deepening the application research of Rain Classroom.

This paper aims to present a broad review of near-a titanium alloys for high-temperature applications.

Following a brief introduction of titanium (Ti) alloys, this paper considers the near-α group of Ti alloys, which are the most popular high-temperature Ti alloys developed for a high-temperature application, particularly in compressor disc and blades in aero-engines. The paper is relied on literature within the past decade to discuss phase stability and microstructural effect of alloying elements, plastic deformation and reinforcements used in the development of these alloys.

The near-a Ti alloys show high potential for high-temperature applications, and many researchers have explored the incorporation of TiC, TiB SiC, Y₂O₃, La₂O₃ and Al₂O₃ reinforcements for improved mechanical properties. Rolling, extrusion, forging and some severe plastic deformation (SPD) techniques, as well as heat treatment methods, have also been explored extensively. There is, however, a paucity of information on SiC, Y₂O₃ and carbon nanotube reinforcements and their combinations for improved mechanical properties. Information on some SPD techniques such as cyclic extrusion compression, multiaxial compression/forging and repeated corrugation and straightening for this class of alloys is also limited.

This paper provides a topical, technical insight into developments in near-a Ti alloys using literature from within the past decade. It also outlines the future developments of this class of Ti alloys.

This paper aims to propose novel flexible structure-supported tilting-pad aerostatic bearings and to improve operational stability and vibration reduction of aerostatic bearings.

The authors established an aerostatic bearing-rotor test rig and designed two aerostatic tilting-pad bearings with different flexible support structure and an ordinary aerostatic tilting-pad bearing and then examined their effects in dynamic performance to assess the vibration reduction performance of different flexible structures. Furthermore, the authors proposed three gas supply methods and conducted experiments to study the influence of gas supply methods in the performance of bearings.

The experimental results show that among the three structures, the double-layer flexible structure-supported tilting-pad bearing demonstrates outstanding vibration damping performance and it significantly enhances the operational stability of the bearing-rotor system. Furthermore, the experimental results indicate that the gas supply method has a significant impact on the performance of the aerostatic bearing. There is a certain pressure difference between the gas supply pressure for the loading pads and that for the nonloading pads, which is advantageous for increasing the operational stability and reducing system vibration.

The authors designed novel flexible aerostatic tilting-pad journal bearing structures, which can enhance the operational stability and reduce vibrations of the bearing. Additionally, this article proposes an air supply method advantageous for increasing the stability of the bearing and reducing system vibrations.

A series of environmental pollution issues and economic improvement go hand in hand. Since financial listed companies contribute significantly to the national economic development, China has been paying increasing attention to the development of the financial industry. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship among the development level of the financial industry, over-investment of the listed companies and environmental pollution through a macro-level and micro-level mechanism.

In this study, we adopt the 2011–2017 panel data of listed companies in the manufacturing industry to study the impacts of the financial industry on environmental pollution. Meanwhile, the paper uses a mediator model, and over-investment is introduced to the econometric model as a mediator to explore whether the development of the financial industry can affect the environmental pollution through over-investment.

A U-shaped relationship between financial industry development and environmental pollution was observed through a macro-perspective; additionally, over-investment of the listed companies significantly increased environmental pollution, along with a significant mediator effect of over-investment. A significant positive correlation was observed between financial industry development and environmental pollution in the East region of China, while the correlation was negative in the Central and West regions. The mitigation effect of financial industry development on environmental pollution was more significant in the low-end manufacturing industry, compared with basic and high-end manufacturing industries.

Strengthening the incentives and supervision toward company managers, reducing over-investment behaviors, encouraging suitable financial industry development to reduce financial risks, improving environmental conservation laws and regulations, and implementing stringent penalty mechanisms for environmental conservation are necessary.

This paper aims to investigate the problem of vision based autonomous laparoscope control, which can serve as the primary function for semi-autonomous minimally invasive surgical robot system. Providing the surgical gesture recognition information is a fundamental key component for enabling intelligent context-aware assistance in autonomous laparoscope control task. While significant advances have been made in recent years, how to effectively carry out the efficient integration of surgical gesture recognition and autonomous laparoscope control algorithms for robotic assisted minimally invasive surgical robot system is still an open and challenging topic.

The authors demonstrate a novel surgeon in-loop semi-autonomous robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery framework by integrating the surgical gesture recognition and autonomous laparoscope control tasks. Specifically, they explore using a transformer-based deep convolutional neural network to effectively recognize the current surgical gesture. Next, they propose an autonomous laparoscope control model to provide optimal field of view which is in line with surgeon intra-operation preferences.

The effectiveness of this surgical gesture recognition methodology is demonstrated on the public JIGSAWS and Cholec80 data sets, outperforming the comparable state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the authors have validated the effectiveness of the proposed semi-autonomous framework on the developed HUAQUE surgical robot platforms.

This study demonstrates the feasibility to perform cognitive assistant human–robot shared control for semi-autonomous robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery, contributing to the reference for further surgical intelligence in computer-assisted intervention systems.