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The authors position security measures and payment culture as key determinants of perceived security (PS) and trust. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how PS and trust affect users’ attitude toward mobile payment use and why mobile payment has developed differently in the USA and in China.

Empirical data were collected from a survey conducted both in China and in the USA. The whole sample consists of 186 Chinese and 196 Americans. Partial least squares analysis was conducted to test the proposed relationships and multigroup comparison analysis was performed to examine the differences in the coefficients of those relationships between Chinese and the US model.

The findings show that payment culture (measured by coverage of mobile payment context (CMPC) and uncertainty avoidance (UA)) and security measures (measured by security technology protection (STP), security rules and policies (SRP), and security responsibility commitment (SRC)) have significantly positive impacts on the PS and trust, except that the positive impact of security on trust is not supported. The impacts of CMPC and PS on trust in the USA are significantly smaller than those in China, whereas the impacts of security measures and UA on PS and trust do not show significant differences between the two countries.

Respondents of this study are selected from young educated population, the major users of mobile payment in 2015. However, recently with the increasing penetration of mobile payment, major mobile payment users are not only limited to young educated population, and thus there may be new findings after extending the range of respondents’ age. Since the research subjects in this study are the mobile payment of China and the USA, the authors could also expect different findings when the research subjects are extended or changed to other countries because of different mobile payment cultures across countries.

Findings in this paper will help mobile payment service providers to know the determinants of their users’ behavior intention and to take measures to improve these determinants, and these findings can also provide mobile payment service providers with insights into the differences in mobile payment use between the two countries and suggestions of measures that they can take to increase users’ attitude toward mobile payment use. Furthermore, the findings of this paper also help these providers globalize efficiently by paying more attention to those antecedents.

The findings in this paper show that there is no difference in the impacts of UA and security measures on PS and trust between China and the USA. However, the impacts of PS and CMPC on trust in China are significantly higher than those in the USA. This is because that globalization has made people from different countries hold similar UA, whereas the CMPC, a construct refers to the business environment of mobile payment, is still very different between China and the USA.

This study extends prior studies of attitude toward mobile payment use through proposing that security measures and payment culture are key determinants of PS and trust and examining the role of PS and trust on the attitude. Furthermore, the empirical findings will not only provide mobile payment service providers with important insights into the differences in mobile payment adoption between the two countries, but also help these providers globalize efficiently by paying more attention to those antecedents.

Management response to consumer comments has become a widely adopted marketing strategy to address the undesirable effects caused by negative remarks. Yet, when and what management response is more effective and under what circumstances remains under-researched. This study aims to fill this gap.

In three experiments using five different products, the authors manipulate psychological construal level (psychological distance: distant vs proximal) and management response (response of primary vs secondary features) and thereafter assess their bearings on consumer psychological and behavioral reaction toward products of two distinctive natures (hedonic vs utilitarian).

At a psychological distance, consumers show a preferable reaction to management response of primary over secondary features. In contrast, when the psychological distance is proximal, consumers react more positively to management response of secondary than primary features. In addition, these effects vary as a function of product nature, hedonic vs utilitarian.

The findings of this research bring a significant contribution to marketing communication literature and extend the construal level theory.

A better understanding of the relative effectiveness of distinct types of management response to negative consumer comments is essential for more targeted and effective marketing strategies.

Little research has documented the effects of distinct types of management response. How psychological distance might underpin these effects has not been explored. In addition, whether the interaction effect of management response and psychological distance varies with differences in product nature, namely, hedonic and utilitarian, remains unanswered until this research.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the dyeing effect of fast-growing fir wood dyed with reactive dyes.

In this study, five factors including temperature, the dosage of dye accelerator, dyeing time, the dosage of fixing agent and fixing time were investigated. Then, the color difference and light resistance of the wood surface after dyeing were used as the evaluation indicators; the best dyeing process under the two indicators was obtained through the range analysis. Finally, the two indicators were considered comprehensively, and the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was used to obtain the best dyeing process under the comprehensive indicators.

The results show that when the comprehensive index was used as the evaluation index, the optimal dyeing process for reactive red X-3B dyeing fast-growing fir veneer was that the dyeing temperature was 65°C; the amount of dye accelerator was 25 g L⁻¹; the dyeing time was 2 h; the amount of fixing agent was 15 g L⁻¹; and the fixing time was 35 min.

The technique of wood dyeing is an important method to increase the value of wood products. When using different kinds of dyes or dyeing substrates for wood dyeing, the dyeing process is different. This study determined the best process for reactive dye dyeing of fast-growing fir veneer and provided a solution for improving the value of fast-growing fir wood.

The purpose of this paper is to establish an accurate model to quantify the effect of conductor roughness on insertion loss (IL) and provide improved measurements and suggestions for manufacturing good conductive copper lines of printed circuit board.

To practically investigates the modified model of conductor roughness, three different kinds of alternate oxidation treatments were used to provide transmission lines with different roughness. The IL results were measured by a vector net analyzer for comparisons with the modified model results.

An accurate model, with only a 1.8% deviation on average from the measured values, is established. Compared with other models, the modified model is more reliable in industrial manufacturing.

This paper introduces the influence of tiny roughness structures on IL. Besides, this paper discusses the effect of current distribution on IL.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the tea stem natural dye was extracted from tea stem waste and applied to dyeing silk fiber, after which the properties of dyed samples were tested and analyzed.

The dyeing process was optimized using the response surface methodology (RSM) approach. Dyeing temperature, pH and time were chosen as variables and the color difference value as a response. The properties of dyed samples were tested and analyzed.

The optimized dyeing process was as follows: dyeing temperature 70°C, pH 3.5 and time 110 min. The K/S and color difference value of silk fiber dyed with the optimal process dye enzymatic oxidation with laccase was 1.4 and 27.8, respectively. The silk fiber dyed has excellent color fastness, antioxidant and antibacterial property, which greatly increases the added value of the dyed products. Furthermore, the optimized dyeing process did not significantly affect the strength properties and handle of the silk fiber.

Researchers have not used statistical analysis to optimize the process of dyeing process of silk fiber by tea stem natural dye enzymatic oxidation with laccase using response surface methodology. Additionally, this dyeing process was a low-temperature dyeing process, which not only saves energy consumption and reduces silk fiber damage but also obtains superbly dyeing results and biological functional properties, achieve the effects of waste utilization and clean dyeing.

Research on grey systems is becoming more sophisticated, and grey relational and prediction analyses are receiving close review worldwide. Particularly, the application of grey systems in marine economics is gaining importance. The purpose of this paper is to summarize and review literature on grey models, providing new directions in their application in the marine economy.

This paper organized seminal studies on grey systems published by Chinese core journal database – CNKI, Web of Science and Elsevier from 1982 to 2018. After searching the aforementioned database for the said duration, the authors used the CiteSpace visualization tools to analyze them.

The authors sorted the studies according to their countries/regions, institutions, keywords and categories using the CiteSpace tool; analyzed current research characteristics on grey models; and discussed their possible applications in marine businesses, economy, scientific research and education, marine environment and disasters. Finally, the authors pointed out the development trend of grey models.

Although researches are combining grey theory with fractals, neural networks, fuzzy theory and other methods, the applications, in terms of scope, have still not met the demand. With the increasingly in-depth research in marine economics and management, international marine economic research has entered a new period of development. Grey theory will certainly attract scholars’ attention, and its role in marine economy and management will gain considerable significance.

This study, based on construal level theory, aims to examine the influential mechanism of leader empowerment behaviour on employee creativity. Specifically, it examines the mediating role of cognitive flexibility between leader empowerment behaviour and employee creativity, along with the moderating effect of consideration of future consequences (CFC) on this linkage.

A two time-point survey study (n = 214) was conducted to collect information from leaders and employees in terms of mutual evaluation in several Chinese industries. To effectively avoid common source bias, this survey was conducted through pairing leaders and employees. During the survey, the supervisors and subordinates were double-blinded. Correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were used to test the research hypotheses.

Firstly, leader empowerment behaviour can significantly predict employee creativity. Second, cognitive flexibility plays a partial mediating role in the linkage between leader empowerment behaviour and employee creativity. Thirdly, CFC moderates the relationship between leadership empowerment behaviour and cognitive flexibility. The mediating role of cognitive flexibility underlies the overall moderating effect of CFC on the relationship between leader empowerment behaviour and employee creativity.

We used construal level theory to explain the influence of the mechanism of leader empowerment behaviour on employee creativity. In this manner, this study bridges the gap between theory and practice, as well as enriching the research on leader empowerment behaviour and employee creativity, especially in the Chinese context. Moreover, our study has several practical managerial implications, based on the importance of employee creativity. It inspires the implementation of leader empowerment behaviour, cultivation of employee creativity and introduction of several procedures.

This paper discusses the influential mechanism of leader empowerment behaviour on employee creativity from a new perspective and explains the process of encouraging employee creativity through information-processing methods. It mainly highlights the application of construal level theory to discuss employee creativity and develops a new research frame for employee creativity. Leaders can raise employee creativity through leader empowerment behaviour.

Recent trends have shown the integration of Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and part-of-speech (POS) tagging to enhance syntactic and semantic parsing. However, the potential utility of hierarchical and structural information in these tasks remains underexplored. This study aims to leverage multiple external knowledge sources (e.g. syntactic and semantic features, lexicons) through various modules for the joint task.

We introduce a novel learning framework for the joint CWS and POS tagging task, utilizing graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to encode syntactic structure and semantic features. The framework also incorporates a pre-defined lexicon through a lexicon attention module. We evaluate our model on a range of public corpora, including CTB5, PKU and UD, the novel ZX dataset and the comprehensive CTB9 dataset.

Experimental results on these benchmark corpora demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in improving the performance of the joint task. Notably, we find that syntax information significantly enhances performance, while lexicon information helps mitigate the issue of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words.

This study introduces a comprehensive approach to the joint CWS and POS tagging task by combining multiple features. Moreover, the proposed framework offers potential adaptability to other sequence labeling tasks, such as named entity recognition (NER).

Accurate prediction of port cargo throughput within Free Trade Zones (FTZs) can optimize resource allocation, reduce environmental pollution, enhance economic benefits and promote sustainable transportation development.

This paper introduces a novel self-adaptive grey multivariate prediction modeling framework (FARDCGM(1,N)) to forecast port cargo throughput in China, addressing the challenges posed by mutations and time lag characteristics of time series data. The model explores policy-driven mechanisms and autoregressive time lag terms, incorporating policy dummy variables to capture deviations in system development trends. The inclusion of autoregressive time lag terms enhances the model’s ability to describe the evolving system complexity. Additionally, the fractional-order accumulative generation operation effectively captures data features, while the Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm determines optimal nonlinear parameters, enhancing the model’s robustness.

Verification using port cargo throughput forecasts for FTZs in Shanghai, Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces demonstrates the FARDCGM(1,N) model’s remarkable accuracy and stability. This innovative model proves to be an excellent forecasting tool for systematically analyzing port cargo throughput under external interventions and time lag effects.

A novel self-adaptive grey multivariate modeling framework, FARDCGM(1,N), is introduced for accurately predicting port cargo throughput, considering policy-driven impacts and autoregressive time-lag effects. The model incorporates the GWO algorithm for optimal parameter selection, enhancing adaptability to sudden changes. It explores the dual role of policy variables in influencing system trends and the impact of time lag on dynamic response rates, improving the model’s complexity handling.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the tannase-assisted extraction of tea stem pigment from waste tea stem, after which the stability of the purified pigment was determined and analyzed.

The extracting process was optimized using the response surface methodology (RSM) approach. Material-liquid ratio, temperature and time were chosen as variables and the absorbance as a response. The stability of the tea stem pigment at the different conditions was tested and analyzed.

The optimized extraction technology was as follows: material-liquid ratio 1:20 g/ml, temperature 50°C and time 60 min. The stability test results showed that tea stem pigment was sensitive to oxidants, but the reducing agents did not affect it. The tea stem pigment was unstable under strong acid and strong alkali and was most stable at pH 6. The light stability was poor. Tea stem pigment would form flocculent precipitation under the action of Fe²⁺ or Fe³⁺ and be relatively stable in Cu²⁺ and Na²⁺ solutions. The tea stem pigment was relatively stable at 60°C and below.

No comprehensive and systematic study reports have been conducted on the extraction of pigment from discarded tea stem, and researchers have not used statistical analysis to optimize the process of tannase-assisted tea stem pigment extraction using RSM. Additionally, there is a lack of special reports on the systematic study of the stability of pigment extracted from tea stem.