Does being green facilitate product innovation? This study examines whether green management in firms operating in China fosters radical product innovation to a greater extent than it does incremental product innovation and investigates the underlying institutional mechanisms involved in the relationship between green management and product innovation. The findings show that green management is more likely to lead to radical product innovation than to incremental product innovation. Moreover, government support as a formal institutional benefit more strongly mediates the effect of (...) green management on radical product innovation than its effect on incremental product innovation; whereas social legitimacy as an informal institutional benefit more strongly mediates the effect of green management on incremental product innovation than its effect on radical product innovation. These findings provide important implications for explaining how firms employ green management to facilitate product innovation. (shrink)

Our study examines how a company’s engagement in corporate social responsibility influences word of mouth about the company on Twitter, particularly during a service delay. We use the airline industry as the study context. On the popular social medium Twitter, people post tweets about airline services and raise concerns about service delays when flights are delayed, canceled, or diverted. Drawing on the literature on legitimacy and the halo effect, we argue that a company’s CSR engagement enhances its corporate image, which (...) in turn, influences WOM about the company on Twitter. We predict and find that airlines with better CSR engagement receive more positive word of mouth and less negative word of mouth on Twitter. We also find that service delays reduce PWOM and increase NWOM, with the additional finding that the positive relationship between service delays and NWOM is less strong for airlines with better CSR engagement. We conduct additional analyses to investigate the effects of environmental, social, and governance CSR on PWOM and NWOM. Our study has practical implications in informing companies about the benefits of CSR engagement in relation to public opinion during service delays. (shrink)

Previous literature has demonstrated the important role that trust plays in developing and maintaining well-functioning societies. However, if we are to learn how to increase levels of trust in society, we must first understand why people choose to trust others. One potential answer to this is that people view trust as normative: there is a social norm for trusting that imposes punishment for noncompliance. To test this, we report data from a survey with salient rewards to elicit people’s attitudes regarding (...) the punishment of distrusting behavior in a trust game. Our results show that people do not behave as though trust is a norm. Our participants expected that most people would not punish untrusting investors, regardless of whether the potential trustee was a stranger or a friend. In contrast, our participants behaved as though being trustworthy is a norm. Most participants believed that most people would punish someone who failed to reciprocate a stranger’s or a friend’s trust. We conclude that, while we were able to reproduce previous results establishing that there is a norm of reciprocity, we found no evidence for a corresponding norm of trust, even among friends. (shrink)

The resource-based model of self-regulation provides a pessimistic view of self-regulation that people are destined to lose their self-control after having engaged in any act of self-regulation because these acts deplete the limited resource that people need for successful self-regulation. The cognitive control theory, however, offers an alternative explanation and suggests that the depletion effect reflects switch costs between different cognitive control processes recruited to deal with demanding tasks. This account implies that the depletion effect will not occur once people (...) have had the opportunity to adapt to the self-regulatory task initially engaged in. Consistent with this idea, the present study showed that engaging in a demanding task led to performance deficits on a subsequent self-regulatory task only when the initial demanding task was relatively short but not when it was long enough for participants to adapt. Our results were unrelated to self-efficacy, mood, and motivation. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on a class of singular fractional differential equation, which arises from many complex processes such as the phenomenon and diffusion interaction of the ecological-economic-social complex system. By means of the iterative technique, the uniqueness and nonexistence results of positive solutions are established under the condition concerning the spectral radius of the relevant linear operator. In addition, the iterative scheme that converges to the unique solution is constructed without request of any monotonicity, and the convergence analysis (...) and error estimate of unique solution are obtained. The numerical example and simulation are also given to demonstrate the application of the main results and the effectiveness of iterative process. (shrink)

Fecal microbiota transplantation is reportedly the most effective therapy for relapsing Clostridium Difficile infection and a potential therapeutic option for many diseases. It also poses important ethical concerns. This study is an attempt to assess clinicians’ perception and attitudes towards ethical and social challenges raised by fecal microbiota transplantation. A questionnaire was developed which consisted of 20 items: four items covered general aspects, nine were about ethical aspects such as informed consent and privacy issues, four concerned social and regulatory issues, (...) and three were about an FMT bank. This was distributed to participants at the Second China gastroenterology and FMT conference in May 2015. Basic descriptive statistical analyses and simple comparative statistical tests were performed. Nearly three quarters of the 100 respondents were gastro-enterologist physicians. 89% of all respondents believed FMT is a promising treatment modality for some diseases and 88% of whom chose clinical efficacy as the primary reason for recommending FMT. High expectation from patients and pressure on clinicians was reported as the most frequent reasons for not recommending FMT. The clinicians who had less familiarity with FMT reported significantly more worry related to the dignity and psychological impact of FMT compared to those who have high familiarity with FMT.More than half of the respondents were concerned about the commercialization of FMT, although almost one in five respondents did not see this as a problem. We found most respondents have positive attitudes towards FMT but low awareness of published evidence. Informed consent for vulnerable patients, privacy and protection of donors were perceived as the most challenging ethical aspects of FMT. This study identified areas of limited knowledge and ways of addressing ethical issues and indicates the need to devise the education and training for clinicians on FMT. (shrink)

Affective computing research has advanced emotion recognition systems using facial expressions, voices, gaits, and physiological signals, yet these methods are often impractical. This study integrates mouse cursor motion analysis into affective computing and investigates the idea that movements of the computer cursor can provide information about emotion of the computer user. We extracted 16–26 trajectory features during a choice-reaching task and examined the link between emotion and cursor motions. Participants were induced for positive or negative emotions by music, film clips, (...) or emotional pictures, and they indicated their emotions with questionnaires. Our 10-fold cross-validation analysis shows that statistical models formed from “known” participants could predict nearly 10%–20% of the variance of positive affect and attentiveness ratings of “unknown” participants, suggesting that cursor movement patterns such as the area under curve and direction change help infer emotions of computer users. (shrink)

A 203-m-high gravity dam being built in earthquake-prone areas needs to be investigated very carefully to determine its dynamic responses, damage mechanism, and safety evaluation. The dynamic characteristics, seismic responses, failure mode, and safety evaluation of the above structure are presented through dynamic fracture test for small-scale model on shaking table. Because the strength of the model material is very low, the traditional strain gauge is also not easy to be glued to the surface of model. It is difficult to (...) measure the accurate strain data of small-scale model during testing. Therefore, Fiber Bragg Grating strain sensor is presented to obtain the strain of small-scale model during testing, due to its high sensitivity. The dynamic strain and residual strain are obtained with the FBG sensors embedded in model. The FBG sensor is adhered to model material completely and shows advantages of ease for installation, high sensitivity, and reliability compared with traditional resistance strain gauge. The model during testing is submitted with earthquake wave from the Chinese Code. In the experiment, the peak ground acceleration of the first crack in the model indicates the safety level of the gravity dam. The crack locations and forms determine the damageable part of gravity dam under intense earthquake. After the final analysis, the safety evaluation result of the gravity dam under strong earthquake is given in order to guide the implementation of the project. (shrink)

Some recent evidence has suggested that perspective taking skills in everyday life situations may differ across cultural groups. In the present study, we investigated this effect via culture priming in a group of Chinese-English bilingual adults in the context of a communication game. Results showed that the participants made more perspective taking errors when interpreting the game instruction under the Western than the Chinese primes. The findings suggest that the ability to assume others' mental states not only can be used (...) strategically but is also influenced by the currently active cultural frame in the mind of the bilingual. The present study provides the first evidence for a cultural effect on perspective taking using a within-sample approach via culture priming. (shrink)

For an economist, ultimate goals of neuroeconomic research include improving economic policy analysis. One path toward this goal is to use neuroeconomic data to advance economic theory, and productive efforts have been made towards that end. Equally important, though less studied, is how neuroeconomics can provide quantitative evidence on policy, and in particular the way in which it might inform structural econometric inference. This paper is a first step in that direction. We suggest here that key forms of preference heterogeneity (...) can be identified by brain imaging studies and, consequently, linked stochastically to observable individual characteristics. Then, recognizing that brain-imaging studies are substantially costly, we derive conditions under which the probabilistic link between observable characteristics and type, a quantity critical to policy analysis, can be estimated more precisely by combining data from traditional and brain-based decision studies. (shrink)

This paper investigates the hesitant fuzzy linguistic multiple attribute group decision-making problem with the heterogeneous relationship among the attribute variables that cannot be solved by most existing decision-making methods. To address this problem, a new operator is introduced based on partitioning attribute variables into different sets according to their interrelationship. This operator is called the extended Heronian mean operator. To obtain each expert’s comprehensive values of the alternatives in the hesitant fuzzy linguistic MAGDM problem, we investigate the EHM operator under (...) a hesitant fuzzy linguistic environment and propose the hesitant fuzzy linguistic EHM operator and the hesitant fuzzy linguistic linear support degree weighted EHM operator. In addition, the axiom definition of a linguistic type similarity measure of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets is proposed. The weight of the experts can be determined based on this type similarity measure. Finally, a practical case is presented to demonstrate the steps of our method, and a comparison analysis illustrates its feasibility and effectiveness. (shrink)

The frequent data convergecasting from the sensor nodes to the gateways may cause imbalanced energy consumption in the Wireless Highway Addressable Remote Transducer networks, yielding a short network lifetime and frequent failures in the data acquisition. Existing solutions always tend to tradeoff between the hardware cost, routing complexity, and energy consumption, making the sensor nodes suffer from expensive hardware investment, overloaded network computation, or imbalanced energy consumption. In this paper, an Adaptive Freeshape Clustering protocol is developed for saving and balancing (...) the energy consumption in the WirelessHART networks. In AFC, the Region of Interest is first divided into several fan-shaped clusters. The sensor nodes in each fan-shaped cluster compete for the positions of Cell Node, and the nodes that have succeeded in the competition adjust the radius of their coverages to cover the fan-shaped clusters adaptively with the minimum overlapped areas. In this way, each fan-shaped cluster can be subdivided into several freeshape zones regarding each CN’s coverage, and the CN in each cluster takes charge of convergecasting the data to the CH. The simulations show that AFC can prolong the network lifetime by 37% compared with other related schemes, e.g., HEED, FLOODING, and DIRECT, whereas it can reduce the degree of energy imbalance by 1.29%. (shrink)