Yujie Wei, Blaise Bergiel and Lingfang Song
The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility that individual differences in consumer choice of cognac are at least partially influenced by parental cultural capital…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility that individual differences in consumer choice of cognac are at least partially influenced by parental cultural capital. Also examined are ten value orientations factors (e.g. hedonism and self-direction) and attitudes toward France, cognac’s country-of-origin that may affect the degree of this intergenerational influence.
Design/methodology/approach
The survey research measures parents’ cultural capital, value orientations and attitude toward France and purchase intention using recognized scales. Data were collected from the faculty and students of a major university located in the southeast of the USA. The sample size was 234.
Findings
The results confirm that parental cultural capital, consumer value orientations and attitudes toward France have significant impacts on the consumer’s willingness to purchase cognac. Adult children of high cultural capital parents are more likely to buy cognac.
Practical implications
The findings of this paper provide meaningful insights into intergenerational influences on consumer purchase intention of cognac and socialization theory. The paper provides several managerial implications for segmentation, targeting and positioning of cognac in the US market.
Originality/value
As the first of its kind, this paper introduces the parents’ cultural capital into the consumer research regarding cognac. The longer-term effects that parents can have on grown children’s consumer behavior are confirmed, suggesting that parental influence persists well into adulthood and has impact on their brand preference.
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This paper studies how Chinese consumers respond to foreign goods in the post‐WTO era. Specifically, it examines brand sensitivity as a mediator and product cues as moderator of…
Abstract
This paper studies how Chinese consumers respond to foreign goods in the post‐WTO era. Specifically, it examines brand sensitivity as a mediator and product cues as moderator of purchase intention. Additionally, it examines consumer preferences for different products and consumption plans for the subsequent five years. The survey sample is drawn from a population of foreign product users from 34 cities in 18 provinces in China. Results provide evidence that brand sensitivity mediates the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and purchase intention; product cues moderate the effect of ethnocentrism on purchase intention. As the first study to link consumer ethnocentrism directly to brand sensitivity and purchase intention, this research provides some managerial implications. Global marketers can offset the negative effect of ethnocentrism by emphasizing brand image of its products, taking advantage of specific product cues, or by providing more comprehensive after‐sale service to reduce the perceived risk of purchasing imports. Also, price is still a hurdle that prevents Chinese consumers from mass consumption of foreign products. Global firms should not overestimate the purchasing power of Chinese consumers. This study represents a “snapshot” of Chinese consumers’ decision making at a time when their economic system is undergoing rapid change.
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Yujie Wei, Zhiyuan Li, James Burton and Joel Haynes
As a relationship‐oriented culture, customer‐firm relationship plays an important role in consumer decision making process in China. Moreover, there are significant regional…
Abstract
Purpose
As a relationship‐oriented culture, customer‐firm relationship plays an important role in consumer decision making process in China. Moreover, there are significant regional differences of Chinese consumers in terms of relationship proneness and its impact on relationship marketing outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the differences of relationship proneness and its effect on relational satisfaction, relationship commitment and benefits between consumers from north and south of mainland China.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on previous research and relationship marketing theories, a series of hypotheses were developed comparing the two populations on relationship‐related variables. Data were collected from two cities of China using survey method.
Findings
Regional differences exist between the two groups of Chinese consumers in relationship proneness, commitment, trust, and relationship benefits perceptions. Gender differences also exist. Relationship proneness interacts with region resulting in moderating effects on relationship marketing outcomes.
Research limitations/implications
This research has treated two groups of Chinese consumers as cohorts and individual differences are not taken into consideration. The sample includes only graduate students whose attitudes toward relationship marketing may deviate from average consumers of the country as they have higher education levels but lower income levels.
Practical implications
The findings of the research provide managerial implications for marketing segmentation in China. International and domestic marketers should consider using different marketing strategies on consumers from different regions of China.
Originality/value
The paper confirms the regional differences of Chinese consumers in relationship proneness, trust, relationship benefits and commitment. The paper contributes to the relationship marketing literature by relating consumer relationship proneness to relationship benefits, and confirming the moderating effect of relationship proneness on relationship benefits and relationship commitment.
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Haizhong Wang, Yujie Wei and Chunling Yu
There is a growing interest in brand formation and brand valuation among global firms today, but global marketers typically ignore one of the key factors of brand building �…
Abstract
Purpose
There is a growing interest in brand formation and brand valuation among global firms today, but global marketers typically ignore one of the key factors of brand building – corporation ability association (CAA). This paper aims to explore the structural relationship between CAA and consumer‐based brand equity variables and its product‐market outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
Utilizing Aaker and Keller's theoretical framework of brand equity, this paper develops a brand equity model combining customer‐based brand equity with product‐market outcome approaches. A set of scales are developed and tested on a national sample of Chinese consumers.
Findings
The data provide support for ten of the 12 hypotheses. The results indicate that CAA is an important factor in building and preserving brand equity. CAA and brand awareness have impact on quality perception, which has positive impact on brand resonance, brand extensibility, and price flexibility. Brand resonance has positive influence on brand extensibility and the intention to repurchase.
Practical implications
For global marketers operating in China, brand equity is a cultural market‐based asset and global companies must focus on building corporation ability association in China in order to enjoy the substantial competitive and economic advantages provided by brand equity. Theoretically, the proposed brand equity model is an extension of the model proposed by Keller.
Originality/value
For the first time, CAA is integrated into fhe brand equity model. This may provide a theoretical base for further research in the endorsement role of company ability in brand equity building.
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Guanghui Ye, Songye Li, Lanqi Wu, Jinyu Wei, Chuan Wu, Yujie Wang, Jiarong Li, Bo Liang and Shuyan Liu
Community question answering (CQA) platforms play a significant role in knowledge dissemination and information retrieval. Expert recommendation can assist users by helping them…
Abstract
Purpose
Community question answering (CQA) platforms play a significant role in knowledge dissemination and information retrieval. Expert recommendation can assist users by helping them find valuable answers efficiently. Existing works mainly use content and user behavioural features for expert recommendation, and fail to effectively leverage the correlation across multi-dimensional features.
Design/methodology/approach
To address the above issue, this work proposes a multi-dimensional feature fusion-based method for expert recommendation, aiming to integrate features of question–answerer pairs from three dimensions, including network features, content features and user behaviour features. Specifically, network features are extracted by first learning user and tag representations using network representation learning methods and then calculating questioner–answerer similarities and answerer–tag similarities. Secondly, content features are extracted from textual contents of questions and answerer generated contents using text representation models. Thirdly, user behaviour features are extracted from user actions observed in CQA platforms, such as following and likes. Finally, given a question–answerer pair, the three dimensional features are fused and used to predict the probability of the candidate expert answering the given question.
Findings
The proposed method is evaluated on a data set collected from a publicly available CQA platform. Results show that the proposed method is effective compared with baseline methods. Ablation study shows that network features is the most important dimensional features among all three dimensional features.
Practical implications
This work identifies three dimensional features for expert recommendation in CQA platforms and conducts a comprehensive investigation into the importance of features for the performance of expert recommendation. The results suggest that network features are the most important features among three-dimensional features, which indicates that the performance of expert recommendation in CQA platforms is likely to get improved by further mining network features using advanced techniques, such as graph neural networks. One broader implication is that it is always important to include multi-dimensional features for expert recommendation and conduct systematic investigation to identify the most important features for finding directions for improvement.
Originality/value
This work proposes three-dimensional features given that existing works mostly focus on one or two-dimensional features and demonstrate the effectiveness of the newly proposed features.
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Weihua Liu, Jiahe Hou, Yujie Wang and Ou Tang
Drawing on the stakeholder theory, this study aims to empirically analyse the impact of platform enterprises’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) announcements on corporate…
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on the stakeholder theory, this study aims to empirically analyse the impact of platform enterprises’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) announcements on corporate stock market value. This study also estimates the moderating effect of stakeholder orientation and responsibility categories of CSR announcements, the platform enterprise type and the degree of CSR disclosure.
Design/methodology/approach
The event study method is used to analyse the change in stock market value of 191 CSR announcements from 137 Chinese platform enterprises. In addition, a case analysis is presented for two platform enterprises with the best practices to validate and complement study findings.
Findings
CSR announcements improve platform enterprises’ stock market value. Specifically, CSR announcements responding to platform enterprises’ external stakeholders, and CSR announcements with economic responsibility, have obvious positive impacts on stock market value. Furthermore, the maker platform’s CSR announcement has a more positive impact on stock market value than the exchange platform.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to identify the link between platform enterprises’ CSR announcements and stock market performance by empirical evidence, and it contributes to new knowledge of operating and evaluating platform enterprises’ CSR.
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The brake controller is a key component of the locomotive brake system. It is essential to study its safety.
Abstract
Purpose
The brake controller is a key component of the locomotive brake system. It is essential to study its safety.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper summarizes and analyzes typical faults of the brake controller, and proposes four categories of faults: position sensor faults, microswitch faults, mechanical faults and communication faults. Suggestions and methods for improving the safety of the brake controller are also presented.
Findings
In this paper, a self-judgment and self-learning dynamic calibration method is proposed, which integrates the linear error of the sensor and the manufacturing and assembly errors of the brake controller to solve the output drift. This paper also proposes a logic for diagnosing and handling microswitch faults. Suggestions are proposed for other faults of brake controller.
Originality/value
The methods proposed in this paper can greatly improve the usability of the brake controller and reduce the failure rate.
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Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the heterogeneity and correlations of agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions among provinces in China, and then policy implications are proposed.
Design/methodology/approach
After agricultural GHG accounting and a pre-analysis of inter-provincial heterogeneity, improved gravity model and the Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods are introduced to construct the network, being carried out from three aspects of the whole network, individual provincial characteristics and cluster analysis.
Findings
(1) There are significant regional variations in agricultural GHG scale among provinces owing to the layout of agricultural production, and the temporal trends show that the direction and speed of agricultural GHG scale change vary among provinces; (2) In terms of inter-provincial correlations, there exists a complex spatial network of agricultural GHG among provinces, which tends to be more complex, intensive and stable, while the status of the provinces in the network also has gradually become more balanced. All provinces played their respective roles in the four clusters of the network with agricultural layout and comparative advantages, and the distribution has continuously optimized.
Practical implications
The inter-provincial network characteristics of agricultural GHG emissions and its evolution have practical implications for differentiated and coordinated agricultural GHG reduction policies at the provincial levels.
Originality/value
This paper innovatively study inter-provincial agricultural GHG correlations in China with the SNA methods used to study economic and social connections in the past. There is some originality in the introduction of network theory and application of the SNA methods, which can provide some reference for researches in similar fields.
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Qinqin Li, Yujie Xiao, Yuzhuo Qiu, Xiaoling Xu and Caichun Chai
The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of carbon permit allocation rules (grandfathering mechanism and benchmarking mechanism) on incentive contracts provided by the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of carbon permit allocation rules (grandfathering mechanism and benchmarking mechanism) on incentive contracts provided by the retailer to encourage the manufacturer to invest more in reducing carbon emissions.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors consider a two-echelon supply chain in which the retailer offers three contracts (wholesale price contract, cost-sharing contract and revenue-sharing contract) to the manufacturer. Based on the two carbon permit allocation rules, i.e. grandfathering mechanism and benchmarking mechanism, six scenarios are examined. The optimal price and carbon emission reduction decisions and members’ equilibrium profits under six scenarios are analyzed and compared.
Findings
The results suggest that the revenue-sharing contract can more effectively stimulate the manufacturer to reduce carbon emissions compared to the cost-sharing contract. The cost-sharing contract can help to achieve the highest environmental performance, whereas the implementation of revenue-sharing contract can attain the highest social welfare. The benchmarking mechanism is more effective for the government to prompt the manufacturer to produce low-carbon products than the grandfathering mechanism. Although a loose carbon policy can expand the total emissions, it can improve the social welfare.
Practical implications
These results can provide operational insights for the retailer in how to use incentive contract to encourage the manufacturer to curb carbon emissions and offer managerial insights for the government to make policy decisions on carbon permit allocation rules.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the literature regarding to firm’s carbon emissions reduction decisions under cap-and-trade policy and highlights the importance of carbon permit allocation methods in curbing carbon emissions.