Search results

This paper aims to determine the demand category and level of government and investors in public–private partnership (PPP) projects. It emphasizes the importance of meeting the demands of stakeholders and controlling the unreasonable demands. This study aims to improve the demand management of stakeholders in the PPP project and lay a foundation for the research on behavior based on the motivation theory.

This paper opted for a questionnaire survey to collect data based on indicators identified through literature. The participants come from the government and private sector (investors, contractors, operators, etc.) in China PPP Lecture Hall. The reliability, validity and variance analyses are used to test the reliability of data. Factor analysis and entropy method are used to determine demand categories and weights.

The government’s 14 demands are divided into four groups: satisfy public activities, self-interest, responsibility and relief financial pressure; 6 investor's demands are divided into development ability and satisfy social activities. The self-interest of government is higher than that of the publicity in PPP projects; investor's social reputation is most important, it is a foundation for obtaining external resources and achieving enterprise development.

Because of the chosen research approach, the demand indexes cannot be exhausted. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to enrich relevant contents further.

This paper includes implications for a targeted demand control mechanism and for managing the unreasonable demand.

This paper comprehensively identifies the demand hierarchy of the government and investors, and provides the theoretical basis for the target management of stakeholders.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the phenomenon of dual-role participants in public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Contractors who are also investors hold a dual-role that can improve project financing and technical ability. However, speculation without effort from the dual-role subjects can result in serious conflicts of interest between pure and dual-role investors. The authors considered contractors’ decisions regarding whether to invest and exert effort and discussed the distribution of interests between pure and dual-role investors based on different strategy combinations. The authors also analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of the dual-role phenomenon through the income model.

Based on game theory, this study constructed four types of revenue structure models for pure and dual-role investors in different decision-making choices. Then, the authors performed a comparative analysis of the dual-role participant’s income in different models.

When the contractor becomes a dual-role subject and expends significant effort (m1*), the revenue of stakeholders can be increased, which can achieve a win-win outcome. Meanwhile, the level of effort of the contractor can be guaranteed when the government or project company limits the investment proportion, rj. For a contractor, the channel of becoming a dual-role subject and expending effort is suggested for maximizing investment return.

The study optimized the PPP project system and investment structure and offered specific governance instruments for a PPP project company to prevent speculation by dual-role subject. Concretely, a dual-role subject was discussed in the context of PPPs; this discussion offers new insight for researchers. Four revenue models based on different contractor strategies were established, a finding that is beneficial for further improving the revenue governance of PPP projects. Finally, the study used a quantitative model to validate the advantages of the dual-role phenomenon, and the authors found that the proportion of equity can impact a dual-role investor’s effort level, thereby curbing speculation to produce a win-win outcome.

To contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, this study aims to explore how to encourage innovative green behaviors among college students and the mechanisms behind the formation of green innovation behavior. Specifically, this study examines the influences of schools, mentors and college students themselves.

A multilevel, multisource study involving 261 students from 51 groups generally supported this study’s predictions.

Proenvironmental and responsible mentors significantly predicted innovative green behavior among college students. In addition, creative motivation mediated the logical chain among green intellectual capital, emotional intelligence and green innovation behavior.

The study findings offer new insights into the conditions required for college students to engage in green innovation. In addition, they provide practical implications for cultivating green innovation among college students.

The authors proposed and tested a multilevel theory based on the ability–motivation–opportunity framework. In this model, proenvironmental and responsible mentors, green intellectual capital and emotional intelligence triggered innovative green behavior among college students through creative motivation.

Emotions, understood as evolving mental states, are pivotal in shaping individuals“' decision-making, especially in ambiguous information evaluation, probability estimation of events, and causality analysis. Public–private partnership (PPP) projects represent a confluence of “economic–environmental–social” dimensions, wherein stakeholder behavior follows the sequential progression of “cognition–emotion–action.” Consequently, comprehending the effects of emotional shifts on stakeholder's decision-making processes is vital to fostering the sustainability of PPP projects.

The paper utilizes rank-dependent expected utility and evolutionary game theory to systematically examine the influence of emotional factors on stakeholders' behavior and decision-making processes within PPP projects. The paper integrates three emotional state functions—optimism, pessimism and rationality—into the PPP framework, highlighting the intricate interactions among the government, private sector, surrounding public and the media. Furthermore, the paper amalgamates the evolutionary pathways of environmental rights incidents with the media's role. Through equilibrium analysis and numerical simulation, the paper delves into the diverse interplay of emotions across different phases of the environmental rights incident, assessing the impact of these emotions on the evolutionary game's equilibrium results.

Emotions significantly influence the microlevel decisions of PPP stakeholders, adapting continually based on event dynamics and media influences. When the private sector demonstrates optimism and the surrounding public leans toward rationality or pessimism, the likelihood of the private sector engaging in speculative behavior escalates, while the surrounding public refrains from adopting a supervisory strategy. Conversely, when the private sector is pessimistic and the public is optimistic, the system fails to evolve a stable strategy. However, when government regulation intensifies, the private sector opts for a nonspeculative strategy, and the surrounding public adopts a supervisory strategy. Under these conditions, the system attains a relatively optimal state of equilibrium.

The paper develops a game model to examine the evolutionary dynamics between the surrounding public and private sectors concerning environmental rights protection in waste incineration PPP projects. It illuminates the nature of the conflicting interests among project participants, delves into the impact of emotional factors on their decision-making processes and offers crucial perspectives for the governance of such partnerships. Furthermore, this paper provides substantive recommendations for emotional oversight to enhance governance efficacy.

Wear failure happens frequently in rubber seal of high-speed rotating shaft because of the dry friction. Some traditional lubrication methods are not effective because of the restrictions on the relative high speed, temperature and others. This paper aims to present a new method of lubrication with gas film for the rotation shaft seal based on the contact design.

To obtain the generation condition of gas film and good effect of lubrication in the contact gap between the shaft and its seal, a series of micro-spiral grooves are designed on the contact surface of rubber seal so as to obtain a continuous dynamic pressure difference.

The result is that the distribution of the gas film in the micro-gap is continuous under the design of the spiral grooves and the contact with eccentricity because of the deformation of rubber seal, which is verified through the simulation calculation and experiment test. It is confirmed that the lubrication method with gas film through designing micro-spiral grooves on the contact surface is effective, and can achieve self-adaptive air lubrication for the high-speed shaft under the premise of the reliable sealing.

The method of gas film lubrication is realized through designing a microstructure of spiral grooves on the rubber surface to change the contact status, which can form a mechanism of adaptive lubrication to reduce the dry friction automatically in the contact gap. For the cross-scale difference between the rubber seal and gas film, a new modeling method is presented by building the mapping relation for the split blocks and repairing technique with integrated computer engineering and manufacturing, to reduce the possibility of nonconvergence and improve the efficiency and accuracy of calculation.

Individuals who spend a large percentage of their incomes on consumption are perceived to prefer risks. Since entrepreneurs are well recognized as risk-takers, this chapter investigates whether consumption propensity is associated with entrepreneurship. Using micro-level data from Chinese Household Income Project, we find that households with a higher income–consumption ratio on average have a higher preference for risk-seeking, while they have a lower probability to be entrepreneurs. However, households who have higher consumption–income ratio and are in the top 10% of the wealth distribution are more likely to embark on entrepreneurship. In addition, we find that in-system connection (relationship with government-related units) decreases the likelihood of starting new business, while out-system connection (relationship with market units) increases it. These findings suggest that in an imperfect financial market, start-up finance and connections play important roles for entrepreneurship.

This paper provides a structural model to value startup companies and determine the optimal level of research and development (R&D) spending by these companies.

This paper describes a new variant of float-the-money options, which can act as a financial instrument for financing R&D expenses for a specific time horizon or development stage, allowing the investor to share in the startup's value appreciation over that duration. Another innovation of this paper is that it develops a structural model for evaluating optimal level of R&D spending over a given time horizon. The paper deploys the Gompertz-Cox model for the R&D project outcomes, which facilitates investigation of how increased level of R&D input can enhance the company's value growth.

The author first introduces a time-varying drift term into standard Black-Scholes model to account for the varying growth rates of the startup at different stages, and the author interprets venture capital's investment in the startup as a “float-the-money” option. The author then incorporates the probabilities of startup failures at multiple stages into their financial valuation. The author gets a closed-form pricing formula for the contingent option of value appreciation. Finally, the author utilizes Cox proportional hazards model to analyze the optimal level of R&D input that maximizes the return on investment.

The integrated contingent claims model links the change in the financial valuation of startups with the incremental R&D spending. The Gompertz-Cox contingency model for R&D success rate is used to quantify the optimal level of R&D input. This model assumption may be simplistic, but nevertheless illustrative.

Once supplemented with actual transaction data, the model can serve as a reference benchmark valuation of new project deals and previously invested projects seeking exit.

The integrated structural model can potentially have much wider applications beyond valuation of startup companies. For instance, in valuing a company's risk management, the level of R&D spending in the model can be replaced by the company's budget for risk management. As another promising application, in evaluating a country's economic growth rate in the face of rising climate risks, the level of R&D spending in this paper can be replaced by a country's investment in addressing climate risks.

This paper is the first to develop an integrated valuation model for startups by combining the real-world R&D project contingencies with risk-neutral valuation of the potential payoffs.

This paper aims to get rid of the traditional basic principle of using the motor as the variable stiffness drive source, simplify the structure of the exoskeleton and reduce the quality of the exoskeleton. This paper proposes to use shape memory alloys (SMA) as the variable stiffness drive source.

In this study, SMA is used to construct the active variable stiffness unit, the Brinson constitutive model is used to establish a dynamic model to control the active variable stiffness unit and the above active variable stiffness unit is used to realize the force control function and construct a lightweight, variable stiffness knee exoskeleton.

The dynamic model constructed in this paper can preliminarily describe the phase transformation process of the active variable stiffness unit and realize the variable stiffness function of the knee exoskeleton. The variable stiffness exoskeleton can effectively reduce the driving error under the high-speed walking condition.

The contribution of this paper is to combine SMAs to construct an active variable stiffness unit, build a dynamic model for controlling the active variable stiffness unit and construct a lightweight, variable stiffness knee exoskeleton.

The purpose of this paper is to use a simple method to enhance the ability of lower limb exoskeletons to restore balance under large interference conditions and to solve the problem that biped robot stability criterion cannot be fully applied to the underactuated lower limb exoskeletons.

The method used in this paper is to construct an underactuated lower extremity exoskeleton ankle joint with a torsion spring. Based on the constructed exoskeleton, the linear inverted torsion spring pendulum model is proposed, and the traditional capture point (CP) concept is optimized.

The underactuated exoskeleton ankle joint with torsion springs, combined with the improved CP concept, can effectively reduce the forward stepping distance under the same interference condition, which is equivalent to enhancing the balance ability of the lower extremity exoskeleton.

The contribution of this paper is to enhance the balance ability of the exoskeleton of the lower limbs under large interference conditions. The torsion spring is used as the exoskeleton ankle joint, and the traditional CP concept is optimized according to the constructed exoskeleton.