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This study, anchored in Self-Determination Theory, explores the paradoxical effects of gamification on digital health promotion, focusing on user engagement, physical activity adherence, stress levels and social dynamics.

In a preregistered experimental design, participants interacted with one of three fitness apps: a non-gamified control app, a competition-based gamified app (GameFit) or a self-exploration-based gamified app (ExploreFit). Quantitative data were collected through scales measuring key variables, and qualitative insights were gathered from structured diaries.

Gamification significantly enhanced user engagement and physical activity adherence. However, competition-based gamification also increased stress and negative social dynamics, with gender-specific effects: females experienced higher stress and males encountered more negative social dynamics. These adverse effects were mitigated in the ExploreFit group, suggesting that self-exploration elements in gamification can reduce negative outcomes.

This research offers a comprehensive analysis of the complex interplay between gamification, competition, self-exploration and health outcomes. It provides valuable insights for the design of persuasive technologies, highlighting the need for a balanced approach to gamification that considers both its benefits and potential pitfalls.

The paper examines integrated reporting (IR) practices of two Japanese universities and three South African universities by evaluating and comparing their 2019 integrated reports.

A multiple case study research method is used in this study.

The paper reveals that IR is in its infancy at the sample universities. Some universities have initiated disclosing information to their stakeholders on how they create value. However, the universities lack a comprehensive approach to integrating financial and non-financial information, thereby affecting the IR disclosure quality. The findings indicate that informal coercive pressure of South African universities is a primary driving factor that enables the universities to achieve a higher IR disclosure quality than their Japanese counterparts.

This paper argues that institutional theory is relevant for explaining the differences in IR practices of the universities in the two different jurisdictional settings.

The research will be of interest to university administrators, policymakers, regulators and other stakeholder groups of universities. The assessment of integrated reports serves as a first step to help the universities improve IR practices as well as to facilitate the diffusion of IR in higher education institutions (HEIs) globally. There is also a need for universities to pay more attention to the storytelling of their value creation in future IR disclosures.

It is the first to assess the IR quality of the Japanese sample universities as well as the first to conduct a comparative analysis for IR practices of universities in two different jurisdictional settings that have adopted IR. The findings of this study add to the current scholarly debate on universities' ability to tell their stories on their value creation to stakeholders via integrated reports.

The intersection of digital twins and ecological diversity offers a new and complex landscape that requires interdisciplinary investigation. Recognizing the urgent need for a nuanced approach to the ethical, technological and practical challenges in this area, this paper presents a conceptual framework that serves as a roadmap for future research and policymaking.

This study employs a conceptual methodology deeply rooted in interdisciplinary perspectives. A systematic literature review was conducted using the Scopus database to identify relevant articles. The selected articles were rigorously analyzed to derive key dimensions, which were then validated through expert panel reviews and a pilot study.

Our framework identifies seven critical dimensions: Data Acquisition and Simulation, Impact Assessment, Ecological Protection and Management, Ethical and Legal Considerations, Social and Cultural Impacts, Technological Feasibility and Limitations and Policies and Regulations. These dimensions provide a comprehensive structure for understanding and addressing the intersection of digital twins and biodiversity conservation.

This study contributes a foundational guide for sustainable and ethical engagement between digital twins and biodiversity conservation. It offers a novel, interdisciplinary framework that integrates diverse perspectives and provides practical insights for scholars, policymakers and practitioners in this emerging field.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of the regional business environment on local firm innovation, considering various dimensions such as administrative, financial and legal environments.

Multiple regression analysis is employed to analyze archival data for firms listed on Chinese stock markets.

We find that the optimizations of the administrative and financial environments positively affect firm innovation, whereas the legal environment does not exert a similar impact. Our analysis also reveals that the business environment’s optimization significantly influences innovation in firms that are small, non-state-owned and operating in high-tech industries. Furthermore, the business environment acts as a moderating variable in the relationship between firm innovation and firm value.

This study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of institutional-level determinants of firm innovation, highlighting the nuances of the legal environment and the importance of context-specific analysis, especially in emerging markets like China.

Developing countries can significantly enhance firm innovation by improving the business environment, including the optimization of administrative and financial systems, reducing transaction costs and ensuring capital supply. Tailored legal frameworks and alternative institutional strategies may also be explored.

This study explicitly emphasizes the governmental role in promoting firm innovation, shedding light on policy formulation and strategic alignment with local administrative policies.

To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to explore the relationship between the business environment and firm innovation using World Bank indicators in an emerging market context, providing novel insights into the unique dynamics of legal, financial and administrative sub-environments.

The purpose of this study is to address a significant gap in the understanding of entrepreneurship at the microfoundation level. It focuses on how individual entrepreneurs, specifically Hongbang entrepreneurs in China from 1896 to 1949, shape and transform their contexts. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that facilitate entrepreneurial success.

The study adopts a microhistorical approach, investigating the case of Hongbang entrepreneurs in China during 1896-1949. It involves an in-depth examination of historical records to explore the strategic interactions between these entrepreneurs and core stakeholders such as consumers, financial intermediaries, government regulators, and human resources. The research methodology emphasizes a process-oriented view, examining the evolution of personalized networks into extensive connections.

The research reveals that Hongbang entrepreneurs successfully reshaped their unfavorable embedded contexts by strategically collaborating with key stakeholders. They influenced consumer tastes, allied with financial intermediaries, negotiated with governments on regulation policies, and developed human resource stocks. The transformation was facilitated by the evolution of their networks from personalized to extensive connections. These findings highlight the localized strategies such as cronyism in resource acquisition within China’s private property development industry.

This study contributes to the field by offering insights into entrepreneurial contextualization and networking. It sheds light on the complex interplay between entrepreneurs and their contexts, providing a nuanced understanding of localized strategies in the Chinese context. The findings add value to the discourse on entrepreneurship by elucidating the strategic and processual acts through which entrepreneurs engage with stakeholders and reshape their environments.

This study aims to examine the complex effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on China’s agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) from 2005 to 2020. It also explores the role of absorptive capacity as a moderating factor during this period.

Employing provincial panel data from China, this research measures agricultural TFP using the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA)-Malmquist method. The impact of FDI on agricultural productivity is further analyzed using a nondynamic panel threshold model.

The results highlight technological progress as the main driver of agricultural TFP growth in China. Agricultural FDI (AFDI) seems to impede TFP development, whereas nonagricultural FDI (NAFDI) shows a distinct positive spillover effect. The study reveals a threshold in absorptive capacity that affects both the direct and spillover impacts of FDI. Provinces with higher absorptive capacity are less negatively impacted by AFDI and more likely to benefit from FDI spillovers (FDISs).

This study provides new insights into the intricate relationship between FDI, absorptive capacity and agricultural productivity. It underscores the importance of optimizing technological progress and research and development (R&D) to enhance agricultural productivity in China.

This study examined the influence of corporate governance (CG) in relation to venture capital (VC) investment on invested firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in the Chinese context. More specifically, this paper examined the mediation of the proportion of independent directors (INDD), management shareholding (MSH) and executives' political connections (POLC) in the above-mentioned relationship.

This empirical study performed multiple mediation testing and bootstrap mediation robustness test on data from Chinese A-class shares IPO companies between 2010 and 2018.

The results of direct relationship analysis showed that VC support is detrimental to firm' CSR performance, consistent with previous research studies. The indirect effect analysis showed that VC reduced firm' CSR through reduction of INDD on board and increased MSH. Conversely, VC contributed to firm's CSR through higher POLC, which confirmed the significance of the joint mediation model.

This study offers stakeholders the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the role of VC institutions, independent directors and executives, in terms of firm's CSR, as well as provides insights on control rights allocation and policy drafting on independent directors when considering accessing VC support.

By analyzing the mediation model of the VC–CSR relationship, this paper provides evidence to enrich the debate on the role of CG in the relation between VC and firm's CSR.

This study aims to explore the biodiversity reporting by the largest dairy company in China (the Yili Group). The authors use signalling theory, legitimacy theory, institutional theory and stakeholder theory to understand the Yili Group’s motivations to report biodiversity disclosures.

This study uses content analysis, guided by a biodiversity disclosure index, to explore and investigate the disclosure themes and tone for the stand-alone Yili Group biodiversity reports for the period 2017–2019. The content analysis is supplemented by a selection of interviews used to obtain additional insights into the Yili Group’s biodiversity reporting.

A gradual improvement is noted in the Yili Group’s biodiversity reporting over time, while the need for improvement remains as the Yili Group matures in its reporting. The company tends to report symbolic disclosures rather than substantive ones and is motivated more by external pressures and/or incentives than by morality and/or stakeholder accountability: this pushes the company towards more dominant symbolic biodiversity disclosure practices.

Findings are particularly relevant to the management of Chinese companies planning to publish biodiversity reports or enhance biodiversity disclosure practices as they draw attention to specific aspects of biodiversity reporting which require improvement. Improvements in biodiversity reporting provide a signal that such reporting is maturing and that organizations are recognizing the need for managing their biodiversity impact.

Given that the Yili Group is a pioneer among Chinese firms in publishing biodiversity reports, this paper suggests other companies’ imitation of the Yili Group and helps promote the diffusion of biodiversity reporting in China. In addition, this paper provides a basis for a call for Chinese companies to strengthen their awareness and accountability regarding biodiversity and the conservation thereof.

This study is among the first to explore biodiversity reporting and disclosure in a China-based organization. While the study deals with one company, the findings are broadly applicable for other organizations seeking to undertake biodiversity accounting and reporting. Considering that biodiversity accounting is a research area which is still under-investigated, this paper aims to respond to the call of Jones and Solomon (2013) for pushing the boundaries in biodiversity accounting.

In autonomous driving, the inherent sparsity of point clouds often limits the performance of object detection, while existing multimodal architectures struggle to meet the real-time requirements for 3D object detection. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to significantly enhance the detection performance of objects, especially the recognition capability for small-sized objects and to address the issue of slow inference speed. This will improve the safety of autonomous driving systems and provide feasibility for devices with limited computing power to achieve autonomous driving.

BRTPillar first adopts an element-based method to fuse image and point cloud features. Secondly, a local-global feature interaction method based on an efficient additive attention mechanism was designed to extract multi-scale contextual information. Finally, an enhanced multi-scale feature fusion method was proposed by introducing adaptive spatial and channel interaction attention mechanisms, thereby improving the learning of fine-grained features.

Extensive experiments were conducted on the KITTI dataset. The results showed that compared with the benchmark model, the accuracy of cars, pedestrians and cyclists on the 3D object box improved by 3.05, 9.01 and 22.65%, respectively; the accuracy in the bird’s-eye view has increased by 2.98, 10.77 and 21.14%, respectively. Meanwhile, the running speed of BRTPillar can reach 40.27 Hz, meeting the real-time detection needs of autonomous driving.

This paper proposes a boosting multimodal real-time 3D object detection method called BRTPillar, which achieves accurate location in many scenarios, especially for complex scenes with many small objects, while also achieving real-time inference speed.

As an important engine of economic growth, the digital economy is bringing new opportunities for the promotion of entrepreneurship. However, key questions regarding the extent of the effect of the digital economy on entrepreneurship remain unanswered. This study examines how the digital economy influences entrepreneurship in China using provincial data from 2011–2020, applying convergence tests and spatial econometric models.

Based on theoretical analysis and using macro provincial data covering the period of 2011–2020, we adopt a diversified empirical analytical method and apply a combination of the convergence trend test, spatial auto correlation test, and spatial Durbin model to test the research hypotheses.

First, there is spatial correlation between the digital economy and entrepreneurship. Second, the overall trend of China’s digital economy shows s convergence, with the whole country and the eastern region showing absolute β convergence and the whole country as well as the central and western regions showing β conditional convergence. Third, the digital economy can significantly promote entrepreneurship and has spatial spillover effects. Moreover, higher education has a negative moderating effect on the process of digital economy empowering entrepreneurship.

Studying the spatially correlated impacts of the digital economy on entrepreneurship enhances our understanding of its contribution to economic growth. Policy-makers can use these findings to develop targeted digital infrastructure investments in lagging provinces, guide entrepreneurs to better grasp the opportunities of the digital economy, and provide support for innovation and entrepreneurship. The findings also could offer Chinese experience that can be used to guide developing countries in utilizing the digital economy to enable entrepreneurship.

This paper expands and enriches the analytical focus on digital economy-empowered entrepreneurship and complements the current theoretical research on the moderating effect of the digital economy in empowering entrepreneurship.