Search results

The purpose of this study is to use the corrected stress field theory to derive the shear capacity of geopolymer concrete beams (GPC) and consider the shear-span ratio as a major factor affecting the shear capacity. This research aims to provide guidance for studying the shear capacity of GPC and to observe how the failure modes of beams change with the variation of the shear-span ratio, thereby discovering underlying patterns.

Three test beams with shear span ratios of 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 are investigated in this paper. For GPC beams with shear-span ratios of 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5, ultimate capacities are 337kN, 235kN and 195kN, respectively. Transitioning from 1.5 to 2.0 results in a 30% decrease in capacity, a reduction of 102kN. Moving from 2.0 to 2.5 sees a 17% decrease, with a loss of 40KN in capacity. A shear capacity formula, derived from modified compression field theory and considering concrete shear strength, stirrups and aggregate interlocking force, was validated through finite element modeling. Additionally, models with shear ratios of 1 and 3 were created to observe crack propagation patterns.

For GPC beams with shear-span ratios of 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5, ultimate capacities of 337KN, 235KN and 195KN are achieved, respectively. A reduction in capacity of 102KN occurs when transitioning from 1.5 to 2.0 and a decrease of 40KN is observed when moving from 2.0 to 2.5. The average test-to-theory ratio, at 1.015 with a variance of 0.001, demonstrates strong agreement. ABAQUS models beams with ratios ranging from 1.0 to 3.0, revealing crack trends indicative of reduced crack angles with higher ratios. The failure mode observed in the models aligns with experimental results.

This article provides a reference for the shear bearing capacity formula of geopolymer reinforced concrete (GRC) beams, addressing the limited research in this area. Additionally, an exponential model incorporating the shear-span ratio as a variable was employed to calculate the shear capacity, based on previous studies. Moreover, the analysis of shear capacity results integrated literature from prior research. By fitting previous experimental data to the proposed formula, the accuracy of this study's derived formula was further validated, with theoretical values aligning well with experimental results. Additionally, guidance is offered for utilizing ABAQUS in simulating the failure process of GRC beams.

The globalisation of markets, emerging concepts of sustainable development, and circular economy have defined the boundaries within which organisations must compete and address the needs of key stakeholders. As circumstances change, boundaries are often replaced by the relationships between companies and the communities they serve. Consequently, strategy has become a central aspect of sustainable leadership and the foundation for implementing strategic management in a dynamic system of relationships. Every company is born and grows within social and economic ecosystems. Drawing on the metaphor of biology, ecosystems are described as dynamic interconnections among various elements that influence and foster entrepreneurship. Interconnections between players (such as marketplaces, organisations, governments, and universities) create a flow of expertise, abilities, knowledge, experience, and tangible resources. Economic and social ecosystems involve various actors and components that continuously coexist and interact, leading to the creation of numerous mutual relationships. Consequently, it is crucial for managers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the internal and external environments. Various decision-making tools and strategies can be used to achieve this goal. These tools were developed to assist managers, researchers, and consultants in making informed decisions under complex scenarios. This chapter presents several decision-making strategies and tools, including the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix, General Electric (GE) matrix, Balanced Scorecard (BSC), PEST, PESTEL analysis, and SWOT analysis.

Propaganda is a prevalent technique used in social media to intentionally express opinions or actions with the aim of manipulating or deceiving users. Existing methods for propaganda detection primarily focus on capturing language features within its content. However, these methods tend to overlook the information presented within the external news environment from which propaganda news originated and spread. This news environment reflects recent mainstream media opinions and public attention and contains language characteristics of non-propaganda news. Therefore, the authors have proposed a graph-based multi-information integration network with an external news environment (abbreviated as G-MINE) for propaganda detection.

G-MINE is proposed to comprise four parts: textual information extraction module, external news environment perception module, multi-information integration module and classifier. Specifically, the external news environment perception module and multi-information integration module extract and integrate the popularity and novelty into the textual information and capture the high-order complementary information between them.

G-MINE achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the TSHP-17, Qprop and the PTC data sets, with an accuracy of 98.24%, 90.59% and 97.44%, respectively.

An external news environment perception module is proposed to capture the popularity and novelty information, and a multi-information integration module is proposed to effectively fuse them with the textual information.

This study is aimed to explore the dynamic performance incentive model for a flexible PPP contract to handle uncertainties based on supervision during the long-time concession period, so as to ensure operation performance and benefits of the public sector while protecting the economic benefit of the private sector, thus avoiding unnecessary renegotiation.

The microeconomic and principal–agent theories and relevant studies on the basic incentive model and flexible contract are fully utilized. The procedure for developing the dynamic incentive model and the assumptions about the quantitative relationships among fundamental variables or factors are first proposed. The static incentive model without incentive parameter adjustment and then the dynamic incentive model allowing incentive parameter adjustment are successively developed. Finally, the propositions regarding the valid adjustment ranges of the incentive parameter with respect to the economic, social and hybrid benefits of the public sector and the economic benefit of the private sector are suggested.

The dynamic incentive model enables to achieve a flexible contract to handle uncertainties on the PPP project to ensure the benefits of the public sector while protecting the benefit of the private sector. The economic, social and hybrid benefits of the public sector and the economic benefit of the private sectors can be respectively realized through adjusting the reward–punishment coefficient under different adjustment ranges and different importance. The incentive model is able to ensure the benefits of the public sector while protecting the benefit of the private sector by controlling the private sector's effort level unknown to the public sector.

The dynamic incentive model helps implement a flexible PPP contract to handle uncertainties during the operation period, thus controlling the effort level of the private sector and ensuring the benefits of the public sector while protecting the economic benefit of the sector. It enables to clarify the quantitative relationships between the operation performance, the benefits of the stakeholders, the effort level of the private sector and the reward–punishment coefficient. This study contributes to the domain knowledge of the incomplete contract theory for designing a flexible PPP contract with dynamic incentive and supervision mechanism by applying the microeconomic and principal–agent theories.

This study aims to investigate the mechanism of the misinformation spread based on the elaboration likelihood model and the effects of four factors – emotion, topic, authority and richness – on the depth, breadth and structural virality of misinformation spread.

The authors collected 2,514 misinformation microblogs and 142,006 reposts from Weibo, used deep learning methods to identify the emotions and topics of misinformation and extracted the structural characteristics of the spreading network using the network analysis method.

Results show that misinformation has a smaller spread size and breadth than true news but has a similar spread depth and structural virality. The differential influence of emotions on the structural characteristics of misinformation propagation was found: sadness can promote the breadth of misinformation spread, anger can promote depth and disgust can promote depth and structural virality. In addition, the international topic, the number of followers, images and videos can significantly and positively influence the misinformation's spread size, depth, breadth and structural virality.

The influencing factors of the structural characteristics of misinformation propagation are clarified, which is helpful for the detection and management of misinformation.

An optimal control model is built considering the private sector's opportunistic effort diversion and reciprocal effort improvement, while a numerical study is conducted to draw some managerial implications.

In infrastructure PPP projects, private sectors may opportunistically divert part of their effort from the current projects to other projects to allocate their limited human resources. Nevertheless, this effort diversion can be inhibited by dynamic incentives since the private sectors reciprocally exert greater effort into the current projects when receiving the dynamic incentives. This article investigates how the government specifies the output standard that the private sector should meet and offers dynamic incentives to mitigate the private sector's opportunistic effort diversion.

The output standard for the private sector to acquire the dynamic incentives should be specified as the output level corresponding to the private sector's optimal long-run stationary equilibrium (OLSE) effort level, which decreases with its reciprocal preference level but increases with its effort-diverting level. The optimal dynamic incentives comprise an initial incentive and a periodic OLSE incentive, which declines with the reciprocal preference level but improves with the effort-diverting level. Besides, the numerical study reveals that the government should distinguish whether the bidders have high effort-diverting levels and, if so, should focus on their reciprocal preference levels and decline the bidders with low reciprocal preference to avoid utility loss.

This article provides a theoretical model combining opportunistic behavior with reciprocal preference through an optimal control lens, thus embedding the problem of incentive design into a broader socioeconomic framework.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of private investor's fair preference on the governmental compensation mechanism based on the uncertainty of income for the public-private-partnership (PPP) project.

Based on the governmental dilemma for the compensation of PPP project, a generalized compensation contract is designed by the combination of compensation before the event and compensation after the event. Then the private investor's claimed concession profit is taken as its fair reference point according to the idea of the BO model, and its fair utility function is established by improving the FS model. Thus the master-slave counter measure game is applied to conduct the behavior modeling for the governmental compensation contract design.

By analyzing the model given in this paper, some conclusions are obtained. First, the governmental optimal compensation contract is fair incentive for the private investor. Second, the private fair preference is not intuitively positive or negative related to the social efficiency of compensation. Only under some given conditions, the correlation will show the consistent effect. Third, the private fair behavior’s impact on the efficiency of compensation will become lower and lower as the social cost of compensation reduces. Fourth, the governmental effective compensation scheme should be carried out based on the different comparison scene of the private claimed portfolio profit and the expected revenue for the project.

This study analyzes the effects of private investor's fair preference on the validity of governmental generalized compensation contract of the PPP project for the first time; and the governmental generalized compensation contract designed in this study is a pioneering and exploratory attempt.

The national logistics policy report published by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Tourism in 2011 proposes to establish international logistics strategy teams in 10 different regions around Japan to satisfy the increasing demand for advance transportation infrastructure and stay competitive in Asia Pacific. The globalization of world economies creates many opportunities as well as challenges for international logistics companies to gain more business chances in this changing environment. The purpose of this paper is to improve service quality of international logistics companies and explores the quality function deployment in terms of quality evaluation method. The logistics service is particularly characterized by offering a series of transport solution and including other logistics activities. The major customers of the logistics services are the industrial clients. The customer satisfaction is key managerial mission since the competitiveness is a growing issue in this industry. The quality function deployment is one of the unique procedures to expose the requirements of customer and transform them into managerial tasks by cross correlation analysis between requirements and technical measures. The empirical study is performed to investigate service quality of the logistics industry by focusing on a group of leading logistics companies.

This paper aims to examine the effectiveness of control mechanisms in promoting collaborative performance by exploring the moderating effects of formal institutions (government support and legal enforcement in this study) and informal ties (business ties in this study) on the relationship between control mechanisms and collaborative performance.

A conceptual model is developed with the direct effects of contractual execution and relational norms on collaborative performance and the moderating effects of government support, legal enforcement and business ties on the above relationships. Hierarchical regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses based on 393 responses from Chinese computer and computer components distributors.

The empirical results generally support the conceptual model. First, consistent with most previous studies, both contractual execution and relational norms contribute to collaborative performance. Second, government support and business ties weaken the role of contractual execution, whereas legal enforcement strengthens it. Third, business ties enhance the effects of relational norms, and, unexpectedly, government support also fosters the relationship between relational norms and collaborative performance.

First, this study solves the problem of conflicting findings on the relationship between contract and performance by examining the effect of contractual execution, rather than contract design, on collaborative performance. Second, this study contributes to institutional theory by examining the moderating role of formal institutions. Third, this study deepens the understanding of the role of business ties by exploring its moderating effect on the relationship between control mechanisms and collaborative performance.