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The purpose of this paper is to focus on determining the optimal sales price for non-instantaneous deterioration items according to consideration of freshness and demand.

In this model, the authors have described the demand function which is dependent on price as well time. The products that the deterioration is considered as non-instantaneous have a determinate shelf life, and their demand rate will decrease over time after the beginning of the selling period. This paper depicts that the total profit of non-instantaneous deterioration items using the dynamic pricing strategy is higher than that using fixed pricing strategy.

Finally, to illustrate and validate the model, the authors have used some numerical examples. A new freshness function and the model to study pricing policy are developed as well applied to solve managerial decision problems.

This paper complements the lack of the existing theoretical research of pricing for non-instantaneous deterioration items under an e-commerce environment. A new freshness function and the model to study pricing policy are developed as well applied to solve managerial decision problems.

In the continuous development of high-speed railways, ensuring the safety of the operation control system is crucial. Electromagnetic interference (EMI) faults in signaling equipment may cause transportation interruptions, delays and even threaten the safety of train operations. Exploring the impact of disturbances on signaling equipment and establishing evaluation methods for the correlation between EMI and safety is urgently needed.

This paper elaborates on the necessity and significance of studying the impact of EMI as an unavoidable and widespread risk factor in the external environment of high-speed railway operations and continuous development. The current status of research methods and achievements from the perspectives of standard systems, reliability analysis and safety assessment are examined layer by layer. Additionally, it provides prospects for innovative ideas for exploring the quantitative correlation between EMI and signaling safety.

Despite certain innovative achievements in both domestic and international standard systems and related research for ensuring and evaluating railway signaling safety, there’s a lack of quantitative and strategic research on the degradation of safety performance in signaling equipment due to EMI. A quantitative correlation between EMI and safety has yet to be established. On this basis, this paper proposes considerations for research methods pertaining to the correlation between EMI and safety.

This paper overviews a series of methods and outcomes derived from domestic and international studies regarding railway signaling safety, encompassing standard systems, reliability analysis and safety assessment. Recognizing the necessity for quantitatively describing and predicting the impact of EMI on high-speed railway signaling safety, an innovative approach using risk assessment techniques as a bridge to establish the correlation between EMI and signaling safety is proposed.

Advertisements for dietary supplements (DS) often include misleading claims regarding their health benefits. In this study, the authors designed an online advertisement for plant-based DS featuring misleading claims and investigated its effects on mature Chinese consumers before and after revealing the false claims. A consumer involvement framework was developed to evaluate the mediating effect of advertising involvement (AI) on the correlation between product involvement (PI), situational involvement (SI) and purchase intention (PI).

A total of 467 mature adults aged over 40 years who resided in China's Yangtze River Delta region and had experience in purchasing DS online were recruited. Relevant data were collected through an online survey and analysed through structural equation modelling.

Cognitive PI was positively correlated with both SI and PI and SI was positively correlated with PI. AI negatively moderated the correlation between affective PI and SI. Both cognitive PI and AI were positively correlated with PI and the correlation was mediated through SI.

DS consumption is a rational decision-making process driven by utilitarian motives. Consumers who are aware of the misleading claims adopt a cautious evaluation approach and place themselves in specific purchase situations before making a purchase decision. This study advances the literature by incorporating the consideration of misleading advertisements into the consumer involvement model within the context of online DS consumption. The study's findings provide insights to intensify monitoring of false advertisements in the DS industry and design effective consumer education programmes.

Employees’ perceived inclusion has been shown to have beneficial effects on their effective functioning at work (e.g. engagement, creativity, and task performance); however, workplace inclusion is also believed to have a profound impact on employees’ functioning beyond the work domain, such as on their family domain. The primary goal of our study thus is to explore how perceptions of workplace inclusion influence employees’ family lives.

We tested our hypotheses by surveying 125 employees from a cotton textile manufacturing company in China over 10 consecutive workdays.

Daily perceived leader inclusion was negatively related to employees’ daily resource depletion at work, which in turn was positively related to employees’ daily work-to-family conflict. The direct effect of daily perceived leader inclusion on resource depletion and the indirect effect of daily perceived leader inclusion on work-to-family conflict were stronger for employees with more discrimination experience in their lives.

Leaders should be aware of their unique roles they play in shaping individual inclusion perceptions and should enact actions that satisfy employees’ desires for both belongingness and uniqueness. Moreover, leaders should also be attentive to those who are susceptible to discrimination when promoting inclusion initiatives.

Our study proposes an important facet of workplace inclusion—perceived leader inclusion—and offers a resource perspective to understand how leader inclusion may impact employees’ functioning beyond the work domain to affect their family lives.

Effectively engaging patients is critical for the sustainable development of online health communities (OHCs). Although physicians’ general knowledge-sharing, which is free to the public, represents essential resources of OHCs that have been shown to promote patient engagement, little is known about whether such knowledge-sharing can backfire when superfluous knowledge-sharing is perceived as overwhelming and anxiety-provoking. Thus, this study aims to gain a comprehensive understanding of the role of general knowledge-sharing in OHCs by exploring the spillover effects of the depth and breadth of general knowledge-sharing on patient engagement.

The research model is established based on a knowledge-based view and the literature on knowledge-sharing in OHCs. Then the authors test the research model and associated hypotheses with objective data from a leading OHC.

Although counterintuitive, the findings revealed an inverted U-shape relationship between general knowledge-sharing (depth and breadth of knowledge-sharing) and patient engagement that is positively associated with physicians’ number of patients. Specifically, the positive effects of depth and breadth of general knowledge-sharing increase and then decrease as the quantity of general knowledge-sharing grows. In addition, physicians’ offline and online professional status negatively moderated these curvilinear relationships.

This study further enriches the literature on knowledge-sharing and the operations of OHCs from a novel perspective while also offering significant specific implications for OHCs practitioners.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is experiencing growth and prosperity worldwide because of its convenience and other benefits. However, AI faces challenges related to consumer resistance. Thus, drawing on the user resistance theory, this study explores factors that influence consumers’ resistance to AI and suggests ways to mitigate this negative influence.

This study tested four hypotheses across four studies by conducting lab experiments. Study 1 used a questionnaire to verify the hypothesis that AI’s “substitute” image leads to consumer resistance to AI; Study 2 focused on the role of perceived threat as an underlying driver of resistance to AI. Studies 3–4 provided process evidence by the way of a measured moderator, testing whether AI with servant communication style and literal language style is resisted less.

This study showed that AI’s “substitute” image increased users' resistance to AI. This occurs because the substitute image increases consumers’ perceived threat. The study also found that using servant communication and literal language styles in the interaction between AI and consumers can mitigate the negative effects of AI-substituted images.

This study reveals the mechanism of action between AI image and consumers’ resistance and sheds light on how to choose appropriate image and expression styles for AI products, which is important for lowering consumer resistance to AI.

With growing evidence of financial misconduct spreading through director networks, research on financial fraud contagion has garnered significant attention. This study incorporates the regulatory enforcement perspective into existing literature to examine how regulatory penalties mitigate financial fraud contagion within director networks.

This study uses a panel dataset of A-share listed Chinese firms covering 2007–2022. Based on the nature of the dataset, we construct ordinary least squares regression models with firm- and year-fixed effects. Data are collected from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research, Wind Information Co., Ltd and China Research Data Services. We use Python to scrape the coordinates of regulators and firms and retrieve travel distances from the Baidu Maps API.

This study verifies the existence of financial fraud contagion in director networks. Our findings indicate that regulatory penalties can mitigate the contagion between director-interlocked firms, improving accounting quality. Moreover, the mitigation effects are mediated by independent directors’ dissent and auditors’ efforts at director-interlocked firms and are more pronounced when these firms have superior network centrality and internal control quality.

This study enriches the literature on financial fraud contagion by examining director networks and regulatory penalties. We propose mediating effects of auditor effort and director dissents on the relationship between regulatory penalties and financial fraud contagion. Our findings provide insights for regulators to alleviate pressures and highlight the importance for directors to consider financial risks within their networks.

This study aims to investigate account managers’ dual embeddedness (customer and internal embeddedness) in solution co-creation. The authors examine the mediating role of two-way matching between suppliers and customers and the moderating role of customer requirement complexity.

The authors use a questionnaire to collect data from 566 account managers of supplier companies in China and conduct hypothesis testing through multiple linear regression analysis and bootstrapping.

The findings demonstrate that customer and internal embeddedness are distinct with different dimensions and are positively related to solution co-creation performance. Customer and internal embeddedness affect solution co-creation performance through two-way matching in the customer requirement definition and solution integration phases, respectively. The interaction term of customer and internal embeddedness indirectly affect solution co-creation performance through two-way matching, and customer requirement complexity strengthens this main effect.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine dual embeddedness at the individual level and distinguish between the customer and internal embeddedness of account managers by different dimensional classifications. The authors clarify the difference and relationship between customer and internal embeddedness in solution co-creation and investigate the mediating and moderating roles of two-way matching and customer requirement complexity, respectively. This study expands the theoretical research on social embeddedness theory and business-to-business solutions and provides useful insights into the solution co-creation practice for account managers and suppliers.

Accurate glide path tracking is vital to the automatic carrier landing task of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The purpose of this paper is to develop a reliable flight controller that can simultaneously deal with external disturbance, structure fault and actuator fault.

The automatic carrier landing task is resolved into the glide path tracking problem and attitude tracking problem. The disturbance observer-based adaptive sliding mode control scheme is proposed for system stabilization, disturbance rejection and fault tolerance.

Both the Lyapunov method and exemplary simulations can prove that the disturbance estimation error and the attitude tracking error converge in finite time in the presence of external disturbances and various faults.

The presented algorithm is testified by a UAV automatic carrier landing simulation, which shows the potential of practical usage.

The barrier function is introduced to adaptively update both the sliding mode observer gain and sliding mode controller gain, so that the sliding mode surface could converge to a predefined region without overestimation. The proposed flight controller ensures a secure carrier landing task.

This study presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of the interdisciplinary literature on drones in last-mile delivery (LMD) to extrapolate pertinent insights from and into the logistics management field.

Rooting their analytical categories in the LMD literature, the authors performed a deductive, theory refinement SLR on 307 interdisciplinary journal articles published during 2015–2022 to integrate this emergent phenomenon into the field.

The authors derived the potentials, challenges and solutions of drone deliveries in relation to 12 LMD criteria dispersed across four stakeholder groups: senders, receivers, regulators and societies. Relationships between these criteria were also identified.

This review contributes to logistics management by offering a current, nuanced and multifaceted discussion of drones' potential to improve the LMD process together with the challenges and solutions involved.

The authors provide logistics managers with a holistic roadmap to help them make informed decisions about adopting drones in their delivery systems. Regulators and society members also gain insights into the prospects, requirements and repercussions of drone deliveries.

This is one of the first SLRs on drone applications in LMD from a logistics management perspective.