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The purpose of this study is to investigate how compensation committee structure or characteristic impacts say on pay (SOP) voting dissent and the impact of SOP dissent on chief executive officer (CEO) turnover.

The authors use corporate governance and SOP data to test the relationships amongst variables. Additional analysis is performed using one-to-one propensity-score matched samples.

The authors find that firm-years with at least a female member present on the compensation committee are associated with lower SOP dissent. The authors find mixed results of the impact of SOP dissent on CEO turnover.

This paper suggests that diversity on the compensation committee, particularly the presence of at least a female member on the committee, serves as an important determinant of SOP voting outcome in the USA. The paper provides policymakers and practitioners with insights into factors influencing SOP voting outcomes and implications of SOP dissent for firms.

The findings of this paper contribute to the corporate governance literature by enhancing the understanding of the role of the compensation committee as it relates to SOP dissent and effect of SOP dissent on CEO turnover.

Orientation determination is an essential planning task in additive manufacturing (AM) because it directly affects the part quality, build time, geometric tolerance, fabrication cost, etc. This paper aims to propose a negative feedback decision-making (NFDM) model to realize the personalized design of part orientation in AM process.

NFDM model is constructed by integrating two sub-models: proportional–integral–derivative (PID) negative feedback control model and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) decision-making model. With NFDM model, a desired target is first specified by the user. Then, the TOPSIS decision model calculates the “score” for the current part orientation. TOPSIS decision model is modified for ease of control. Finally, the PID controller automatically rotates the part based on the error between the user-specified target and the calculated “score”. Part orientation adjustment is completed when the error is eliminated. Five factors are considered in NFDM model, namely, surface roughness, support structure volume, geometric tolerance, build time and fabrication cost.

The case studies of turbine fan and dragon head indicate that the TOPSIS model can be perfectly integrated with the PID controller. This work extends the proposed model to different AM processes and investigates the feasibility of combining different decision-making models with PID controller and the effects of including various evaluation criteria in the integrated model.

The proposed model innovatively takes the TOPSIS decision-making model and the PID control model as a whole. In this way, the uncontrollable TOPSIS model becomes controllable, so the proposed model can control the TOPSIS model to achieve the user-specified targets.

The purpose of this study is to examine the association between audit committee expertise and asymmetric information in the US equity market.

The authors use measures of information asymmetry for 705 US firms (5,260 firm-year observations) over the period from 2007 to 2018, and use the theory of expertise (Ericsson and Smith, 1991) to examine the association between audit committee financial expertise and information asymmetry. The authors use multiple econometric approaches such as firm fixed-effect regression and two-stage ordinary least squares regression to control for possible endogeneity and reverse causality and find that the results remain the same.

The authors find that the existence of an audit committee with financial expertise is negatively and significantly associated with information asymmetry. The authors further provide empirical evidence through which audit committee financial expertise affects the firm’s informational environment. Additional analysis supports the argument that the audit committee’s financial expertise enhances the firm’s informational environment by increasing (decreasing) analyst following (dispersion).

One limitation to consider, like most studies on audit committees, is that the authors do not examine the actual role performed by the audit committee. The authors focus on the characteristics stipulated by the Sarbanes–Oxley Act 2002 and stock exchange rules regarding the financial expertise of audit committee members only.

This study is useful to policy makers, standard setters, investors, activists, managers, lenders and various stakeholders who rely on the financial statements of firms with an expert audit committee on board. The outcome of this study promotes recruiting audit committees with financial expertise due to the assumed benefits of this trait to the US firm.

The results of this study are not event-dependent and therefore have persistent effects, which is important to the evaluation of the usefulness of a regulation. This study promotes recruiting audit committees with financial expertise on boards because of the assumed benefits to the firm and investors.

This study is the first to document that financial expertise of audit committee characteristics is not only negatively related to the magnitude of information asymmetry but also driven by the financial expertise of audit committee members rather than chairs.

In 2009, Newsweek published a report in which they ranked the 500 largest US companies and the 100 largest global companies based on its environmental performance measures (http://greenrankings2009.newsweek.com/). This ranking is referred to as Newsweek’s Green Ranking. Included in this ranking is information about water and air pollution, solid waste disposal, toxic wastes, carbon emissions, and enforcement actions. The question we are addressing in this study is how well it measures pollution performance? The question is relevant to environmental accounting/reporting since it is part of a dilemma yet to be answered: Aggregated environmental indices/scores are easy for average information users to percept, while specific information may not be preserved when it is aggregated into the overall score(s).

Specifically, we examine whether Newsweek’s Green Ranking is correlated with pollution measures based on Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) in order to determine how valid or reliable Newsweek’s Green Ranking is – in other words, how much Newsweek’s Green Ranking can explain the pollution by the toxic releases. We find that there is no significant correlation between Newsweek’s Green Ranking and the TRI measures except for the firms in the utilities industry. Concluding that on one measure, which we consider a very important one, there is no justification for the overall Green Ranking Score presented by Newsweek. However, in Newsweek’s three-part score the element that is termed the Environmental Impact Score captures pollution performance measured based on TRI. The contrast between the overall ranking and performance ranking indicates that a composite index that incorporates hard performance and soft measures can dilute the information carried by performance data.

The purpose of this paper is to build a seven‐degrees of freedom (DOF) parallel‐serial robot system which has the advantage of mechanical novelty and simplicity compared with the existing platforms, and to share the experience of converting a popular motion base to an industrial robot for use in full‐mission tank training processes of three armored arms.

By studying the concept of the robot system, a novel parallel‐serial robot with seven DOF driven by electrical servo motors is built. And the transmission modules and Hooke joints are explored and designed in detail. Then the inverse kinematics based on coupling compensation and time‐jerk synthetic optimization methods for trajectory planning of the simulator are presented and further discussed in order to satisfy the requirements of high stability and perfect performance. In advance, the feasibility and applicability of this triune parallel‐serial robot system are verified.

A prototyped test shows that the performance of the system is of a satisfaction with real‐time tracking any trajectories given by the visual system smoothly. Finally, the characteristics of the robot system are realized and verified by experiments and an industrial application.

The triune full‐mission tank training simulator developed in this paper has been used in the military industry and it has a great potential application.

This successful usage of the novel and simple parallel robot system in the military industry expands the range of its applications in real‐life task more operators training. And the proposal methods of inverse kinematics based on coupling compensation and trajectory planning enhanced the theoretical research of the parallel robot.

Collaboratively annotating digital texts allow users to add valued information, share ideas and create knowledge. Most importantly, annotated content can help users obtain a deeper and broader understanding of a text compared to digital content without annotations. This work proposes a novel collaborative annotation system (CAS) with four types of multimedia annotations including text annotation, picture annotation, voice annotation and video annotation which can embedded into any HTML Web pages to enable users to collaboratively add and manage annotations on these pages and provide a shared mechanism for discussing shared annotations among multiple users. By applying the CAS in a mashup on static HTML Web pages, this study aims to discuss the applications of CAS in digital curation, crowdsourcing and digital humanities to encourage existing strong relations among them.

This work adopted asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and a model-view-controller framework to implement a CAS with reading annotation tools for knowledge creating, archiving and sharing services, as well as applying the implemented CAS to support digital curation, crowdsourcing and digital humanities. A questionnaire survey method was used to investigate the ideas and satisfaction of visitors who attended a digital curation with CAS support in the item dimensions of the interactivity with displayed products, the attraction and the content absorption effect. Also, to collect qualitative data that may not be revealed by the questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviews were performed at the end of the digital curation exhibition activity. Additionally, the effects of the crowdsourcing and digital humanities with CAS support on collecting and organizing ideas and opinions for historical events and promoting humanity research outcomes were considered as future works because they all need to take a long time to investigate.

Based on the questionnaire survey, this work found that the digital curation with CAS support revealed the highest rating score in terms of the item dimension of attraction effect. The result shows applying CAS to support digital curation is practicable, novel and interesting to visitors. Additionally, this work also successfully applied the developed CAS to crowdsourcing and digital humanities so that the two research fields may be brought into a new ground.

Based on the CAS, this work developed a novel digital curation approach which has a high degree of satisfaction on attraction effect to visitors, an innovative crowdsourcing platform that combined with a digital archive system to efficiently gather collective intelligence to solve the difficult problems of identifying digital archive contents and a high potential digital humanity research mode that can assist humanities scholars to annotate the texts with distinct interpretation and viewpoints on an ancient map, as well as discuss with other humanities scholars to stimulate discussion on more issues.

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect and mechanism of the digital economy’s influence on the binary margin of agricultural exports.

Based on the theoretical analysis of the mechanism of the digital economy’s influence on the binary margin of agricultural exports, this study empirically examines the effect and mechanism of the digital economy’s influence on the binary margin of agricultural exports based on China’s customs export data from 2011 to 2016.

The relevant findings are threefold. (1) The digital economy significantly improves the binary margin of agricultural exports, and its effect on the intensive margin is stronger than that on the expansive margin. After the expansive margin is subdivided, the effects on the three sub-variables of the expansive margin are in the following order: old products exported to new markets > new products exported to old markets > new products exported to new markets. (2) The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the digital economy has a stronger role in promoting the binary margin of exports for enterprises in the eastern region, high-income countries as the destination of exports and state-owned enterprises. (3) Mechanism analysis shows that the digital economy promotes the binary margin of agricultural exports by reducing trade costs and intensifying market competition.

First, in terms of research perspective, although there are some studies on the impact of the digital economy on export trade in existing literature, the research objects mainly focus on manufacturing enterprises. In fact, agricultural trade is susceptible to natural conditions and seasonal factors, and countries may impose more SPS measures and TBT measures on agricultural trade due to risk considerations. The relationship between the digital economy and agricultural trade also has its own characteristics, but there are few research studies in this area. At present, only Liu and Gao (2022), based on the data of total imports and exports of different agricultural products from 2004 to 2018, have established a vector auto-regressive model to empirically analyse the heterogeneous dynamic impact of the digital economy on the trade volume of agricultural products. In addition, Ma and Guo (2023) conducted an empirical test on the total effect, regional heterogeneity and threshold effect of the digital economy on agricultural export trade based on China’s provincial panel data from 2011 to 2020. Therefore, under the new circumstances of continuous integration of digital technology and agriculture, this study interprets the impact effect and mechanism of the digital economy on the binary margin of agricultural exports from the perspective of the digital economy, providing new research perspectives and approaches for promoting the growth of agricultural exports. Second, in terms of theoretical analysis, the above studies have not been fully analysed in terms of the specific mechanism of the impact of the digital economy on agricultural exports. Based on the positive and negative characteristics of agricultural trade, this study introduces two kinds of roles into the theoretical analysis framework to comprehensively determine the trade impact effect of the digital economy. Third, in terms of research design, this study empirically examines the impact of the digital economy on the binary margin of agricultural products, passing a series of robustness tests and investigating the mediating roles of trade cost and market competition effects, producing an empirical basis for China to leverage the digital economy to promote the binary margin of agricultural exports.

Using the theoretical frameworks of public diplomacy and public relations, we mapped how the Chinese government has used panda imagery to build its national brand on Twitter and how this ‘panda diplomacy’ has facilitated its para-diplomatic actions. Our findings uncover new attempts by the Chinese government to engage in digital diplomacy. Mobilizing panda imagery on Twitter enhanced friendly relations with foreign political leaders and people and established a friendly and peaceful image of China on Twitter.

Driven by the dual-carbon target and the widespread digital transformation, leveraging digital technology (DT) to facilitate sustainable, green and high-quality development in heavy-polluting industries has emerged as a pivotal and timely research focus. However, existing studies diverge in their perspectives on whether DT’s impact on green innovation is synergistic or leads to a crowding-out effect. In pursuit of optimizing the synergy between DT and green innovation, this paper aims to investigate the mechanisms that can be harnessed to render DT a more constructive force in advancing green innovation.

Drawing from the theoretical framework of resource orchestration, the authors offer a comprehensive elucidation of how DT intricately influences the green innovation efficiency of enterprises. Given the intricate interplay within the synergistic relationship between DT and green innovation, the authors use the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis method to explore diverse configurations of antecedent conditions leading to optimal solutions. This approach transcends conventional linear thinking to provide a more nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics involved.

The findings reveal that antecedent configurations fostering high green innovation efficiency actually differ across various stages. First, there are three distinct configuration patterns that can enhance the green technology research and development (R&D) efficiency of enterprises, namely, digitally driven resource integration (RI), digitally driven resource synergy (RSy) and high resource orchestration capability. Then, the authors also identify three configuration patterns that can bolster the high green achievement transfer efficiency of enterprises, including a digitally optimized resource portfolio, digitally driven RSy and efficient RI. The findings not only contribute to advancing the resource orchestration theory in the digital ecosystem but also provide empirical evidence and practical insights to support the sustainable development of green innovation.

The findings can offer valuable insights for enterprise managers, providing decision-making guidance on effectively harnessing the innovation-driven value of internal and external resources through resource restructuring, bundling and leveraging, whether with or without the support of DT.

The research findings contribute to heavy-polluting enterprises addressing the paradoxical tensions between digital transformation and resource constraints under environmental regulatory pressures. It aims to facilitate the simultaneous achievement of environmental and commercial success by enhancing their green innovation capabilities, ultimately leading to sustainability across profit and the environment.

Compared with previous literature, this research introduces a distinctive theoretical perspective, the resource orchestration view, to shed light on the paradoxical relationship on resource-occupancy between DT application and green innovation. It unveils the “black box” of how digitalization impacts green innovation efficiency from a more dynamic resource-based perspective. While most studies regard green innovation activities as a whole, this study delves into the impact of digitalization on green innovation within the distinct realms of green technology R&D and green achievement transfer, taking into account a two-stage value chain perspective. Finally, in contrast to previous literature that predominantly analyzes influence mechanisms through linear impact, the authors use configuration analysis to intricately unravel the complex influences arising from various combinatorial relationships of digitalization and resource orchestration behaviors on green innovation efficiency.