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More and more firms are utilizing social media as a distribution channel to sell products. By establishing business accounts on social media firms provide information service to strengthen their relationship with customers and boost sales. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pricing, information service provision and channel strategies of firms who sell products through social media.

The authors use a game theoretical model to study a dual-channel supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer. Two scenarios are considered – under one scenario the manufacturer and under the other the retailer, respectively, solely provides information service. Both firms’ pricing decisions and profits are compared.

The authors find that in the dual-channel model with either the manufacturer or the retailer providing information service to enhance the demand: a firm that has stronger social ties with customers is willing to provide more information services; when the manufacturer provides information service, it charges a direct price higher than the wholesale price, and whether the direct-channel price exceeds the retail price depends on the strength of the manufacturer’s social ties with customers; when the retailer provides information service, the direct price is equal to the wholesale price, both lower than the retail price; and a firm always prefers itself rather than the other firm to provide information service. However, the whole supply chain is better off if the manufacturer rather than the retailer provides information service.

Besides the relationship between firms and customers, the peer relationship among customers also impacts the supply chain performance, which might be studied in the future.

The study is novel in theoretically exploring the influence of firms’ social relationship with customers on firms’ pricing and channel strategies.

This study aims to explore the impact of well-educated young Chinese employees’ notions of work on their conflict management styles in the increasingly turbulent workplace to help better manage work-related conflict in the time of transition in China.

Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data from over 400 young Chinese employees. The data were first factor analyzed to explore the underlying dimensions of contemporary work notions in China’s transition period. Hierarchical regression analysis was then conducted to explore the relationship between dimensions of work notions and conflict management styles.

The results showed that well-educated young Chinese employees’ notions of work consisted of sense of control, fulfilling and rewarding, holistic concerns, personal growth and development and meaningfulness. The results further indicated that young Chinese employees with strong needs to satisfy individual interests in their work tend to use competitive methods to manage work-related conflicts, employees with strong needs to satisfy group interests in their work prefer to use collaborative methods and those who believe in collective efforts in achieving individual goals through group goals’ obtainment are more likely to use collaborative and compromising approaches.

This study provides a new perspective to manage work-related conflict in the Chinese context. The findings of this study are able to help enrich conflict management theories in China and suggest insightful conflict resolution approaches to work-related conflicts in China’s changing environment. This study also helps bridge the research gap between work notions and conflict management styles. The results of this study can greatly facilitate Chinese companies’ endeavors toward crafting a more innovative workforce and help improve employee performance in China’s transition to industrialization.

The precise segmentation of brain tumors is the most important and crucial step in their diagnosis and treatment. Due to the presence of noise, uneven gray levels, blurred boundaries and edema around the brain tumor region, the brain tumor image has indistinct features in the tumor region, which pose a problem for diagnostics. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, the authors propose an original solution for segmentation using Tamura Texture and ensemble Support Vector Machine (SVM) structure. In the proposed technique, 124 features of each voxel are extracted, including Tamura texture features and grayscale features. Then, these features are ranked using the SVM-Recursive Feature Elimination method, which is also adopted to optimize the parameters of the Radial Basis Function kernel of SVMs. Finally, the bagging random sampling method is utilized to construct the ensemble SVM classifier based on a weighted voting mechanism to classify the types of voxel.

The experiments are conducted over a sample data set to be called BraTS2015. The experiments demonstrate that Tamura texture is very useful in the segmentation of brain tumors, especially the feature of line-likeness. The superior performance of the proposed ensemble SVM classifier is demonstrated by comparison with single SVM classifiers as well as other methods.

The authors propose an original solution for segmentation using Tamura Texture and ensemble SVM structure.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some drivers of users’ participation in online social question-and-answer (Q&A) communities based on social cognitive theory and then identify the underlying mechanism of this process.

This study developed a research model to test the proposed hypotheses, and an online survey was employed to collected data. Totally, 313 valid responses were collected, and partial least squares structural equation modeling was adopted to analyze these data.

This study empirically finds that the outcome expectations (personal outcome expectations and knowledge self-management outcome expectations) are positively related to participation in online social Q&A communities. At the same time, users’ self-efficacy positively influences their participation behaviors. It can not only directly motivate users’ participation, but also indirectly promote participation behaviors through the two dimensions of outcome expectations. Besides, perceived expertise and perceived similarity are two positive and significant environmental elements affecting users’ participation.

This study extends the understanding about how participation behaviors will be motivated in the context of online social Q&A communities. Drawing on the social cognitive theory, constructs were established based on the features of these communities. Meanwhile, some mediating effects in the motivating process were also discussed.

The purpose of this study is to verify the effect of smart pedagogy to facilitate the high order thinking skills of students and to provide the design suggestion of curriculum and intelligent tutoring systems in smart education.

A smart pedagogy framework was designed. The quasi-experiment was conducted in a junior high school. The experimental class used the smart pedagogy and smart learning environment. The control class adopted conventional teaching strategies. The math test scores of these two classes were compared to verify the effectiveness of smart pedagogy.

The smart pedagogy framework contains three sections including the situated learning (S), mastery learning (M), adaptive learning (A), reflective learning (R) and thinking tools (T) (SMART) key elements model, the curriculum design method and detailed teaching strategy. The SMART key elements model integrates the situated learning, mastery learning, adaptive learning, reflective learning and thinking tools to facilitate the high order thinking. The curriculum design method of smart pedagogy combines the first five principles of instruction and the SMART key elements model to design the curriculum. The detailed teaching strategies of smart pedagogy contain kinds of innovative learning methods. The results of the quasi-experiment proved that the learning outcome was significantly promoted by using smart pedagogy.

This research investigates a general framework that can be used to cultivate the high order thinking skills in different subjects and grades was one of the first to introduce high order thinking skills into smart education. The framework of smart pedagogy was innovative and effect in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pricing strategy and the impact of agents' risk preference in a dual-channel supply chain in which both agents are risk-averse.

The authors make use of the mean-variance (MV) method to measure the risk aversion of the agents and apply Stackelberg game to obtain the optimal strategies of the proposed models. Furthermore, the authors compare the optimal strategies with that in the benchmark model in which no agent is risk-averse.

The authors find that the pricing decisions can be divided into four categories according to the risk attitudes of the agents: the decisions that are independent of two agents' risk attitudes, the decisions that depend on only one agent’s risk attitude (i.e. depend on only manufacturer's risk attitude and depend on only retailer's risk attitude) and the decisions that depend on both agents' risk attitudes. In addition, the authors find that the retail price will be lower and the wholesale price in most cases will be lower than that in the benchmark when at least one agent's risk control is effective; the demand will be always increasing as long as one agent's risk control is effective. Furthermore, compared to the benchmark, a win-win strategy (i.e. Pareto improvement) for the supply chain members can be obtained in a certain range where the agents' risk controls are appropriate.

This research provides a theoretical reference for the managers to make the pricing decisions and the risk control in dual-channel supply chains with heterogeneous preference consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating effect of felt obligation for constructive change on the relationship between responsible leadership and organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE) in a China corporate environment, and this paper also analyze the moderated mediating effect of supervisor-subordinate guanxi on indirect relationship between responsible leadership and OCBE via felt obligation for constructive change.

This paper used 380 employee samples to analyze the relationship between responsible leadership and OCBE. Hierarchical regression analyses and structural equation modeling was adopted to analyze the data.

The authors found that the felt obligation for constructive change plays a fully mediating role between responsible leadership and OCBE. The authors also found a positive interaction between responsible leadership and supervisor-subordinate guanxi on felt obligation for constructive change, and then the indirect effect of responsible leadership on OCBE via felt obligation for constructive change was stronger when employees perceived a high-level supervisor-subordinate guanxi.

When responsible leadership stimulates employees to generate a high sense of constructive change, employees are more likely to engage in OCBE. This study provides evidence for cognitive evaluation theory. This study further demonstrated the importance of establishing high-quality supervisor-subordinate guanxi for responsible leaders and subordinates in China.

In the management practice of the organization, the role of responsible leadership should be strengthened in terms of leadership development and, employee training and promotion, and high-quality supervisor-subordinate guanxi help to promote the effectiveness of responsible leadership.

This paper discusses how and when responsible leadership influences OCBE in a China corporate environment.

More and more e-commerce web sites are using online customer reviews (OCRs) for customer segmentation. However, for durable products, customer purchases, and reviews only once for a long time, as while the product review score may highly affected by service factors or be “gently” evaluated. Existing regression or machine learning-based methods suffer from low accuracy when applied to the OCRs of durable products on e-commerce web sites. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach for customer segment analysis base on OCRs of durable products.

The research proposes a two-stage approach that employs latent class analysis (LCA): the feature-mention matrix construction stage and the LCA-based customer segmentation stage. The approach considers reviewers’ mention on product features, and the probability-based LCA method is adopted upon the characteristics of online reviews, to effectively cluster reviewers into specified segmentations.

The research finding is that, using feature-mention instead of feature-opinion records makes segment analysis more effective. The research also finds that, LCA method can better explain the characteristics of the OCR data of durable products for customer segmentation.

The research proposes a new approach to durable product review mining for customer segmentation analysis. The segment analysis result can provide supports for new product design and development, repositioning of existing products, marketing strategy development and product differentiation.

A new approach for customer segmentation analysis base on OCRs of durable products is proposed.

With the analysis of the causes of corruption, this study aims to investigate specific anti-corruption measures that can be implemented to reform the political system and the social climate of China.

This study examines 97 severe corruption cases of high-ranking officials in China, which occurred between 2012 and 2015. As this insinuates that both institutional and social corruption are major problems in China, the analysis delves into multiple facts of corruption, including different types, four primary underlying causes, and suggestions regarding the implementation of three significant governmental shifts that focus on investigation, prevention tactics and legal regulations.

China’s corruption is not only individual-based but also it has developed into institutional corruption and social corruption. Besides human nature and instinct, the causes of corruption can be organised into four categories, namely, social customs, social transitions, institutional designs and institutional operations. For the removed high-ranking officials, the formation of interest chains was an important underlying cause behind their corruption.

This study makes a significant contribution to the literature because this study provides a well-rounded approach to a complex issue by highlighting the significance of democracy and the rule of law as ways to regulate human behaviour to combat future corruption.