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The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has had a substantial influence on the retail industry. However, AI adoption entails considerable responsibilities and risks for senior managers. In this study, the authors developed an evaluation and selection mechanism for successful AI technology adoption in the retail industry. The multifaceted measurement and identification of critical factors (CFs) can enable retailers to adopt AI technology effectively and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage.

The evaluation and adoption of organisational AI technology involve multifaceted decision-making for management. Therefore, the authors used the analytic network process to develop an AI evaluation framework for calculating the weight and importance of each consideration. An expert questionnaire survey was distributed to senior retail managers and 17 valid responses were obtained. Finally, the Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method was used to identify CFs for AI adoption.

The results revealed five CFs for AI adoption in the retail industry. The findings indicated that after AI adoption, top retail management is most concerned with factors pertaining to business performance and minor concerned about the internal system's functional efficiency. Retailers pay more attention to technology and organisation context, which are matters under the retailers' control, than to external uncontrollable environmental factors.

The authors developed an evaluation framework and identified CFs for AI technology adoption in the retail industry. In terms of practical application, the results of this study can help AI service providers understand the CFs of retailers when adopting AI. Moreover, retailers can use the proposed multifaceted evaluation framework to guide their adoption of AI technology.

This study explored the mediating effect of political embeddedness on the relationship between gender and performance of private enterprises in the emerging economy of China. Political embeddedness is examined in terms of personal characteristics of owners and their firm.

Secondary data were collected from the Chinese Private Enterprises Survey for the years 2002, 2006, 2014 and 2016 using responses to identical questions. Tobit models were implemented to examine hypotheses related to the gender gap. A bootstrapping approach was applied to examine hypotheses related to mediation through political embeddedness.

The gender effect on enterprise performance was found to be partially mediated by political embeddedness at the personal level and even more strongly by political embeddedness at the firm level, which is beyond the well-known mediation effect of bank loans.

The Chinese sample, in which guanxi plays a significant role with respect to women-led firms, may limit the generalizability of the findings to other emerging economies.

Given the mediating effects on firm performance of political embeddedness at the personal and firm levels, women business owners in China should pursue political involvement, possibly with the support of policymakers and mentors.

The relationship between businesswomen and political embeddedness is underexplored. This study innovates by applying the gender lens to the notion of political embeddedness and extending the construct of personal political embeddedness to the firm level.

This study aims to present multi-layered embeddedness and explore the main and interaction effects of political embeddedness on the performance of private enterprises in China. This study tests multi-layered embeddedness through interaction effects between three layers, namely, political, territorial and inter-firm embeddedness. Political embeddedness is related at the personal and the firm levels.

The authors used secondary data of four non-panel waves (2002, 2008, 2010 and 2016) of large samples having identical questions based on the Chinese private enterprises’ survey. The accumulated number of business owners’ responses is a total of 10,686.

The main effects of each of the layers of embeddedness showed a positive influence on enterprise performance consistently and unchanged over time which fits the Chinese Guanxi regardless of the immense macro-economic transition. However, unexpectedly some interactions showed negative significant effects on performance.

First, business owners should be aware of the specific contribution to the performance of political embeddedness at both the firm level and the personal level. Second, the pursuit of exercising simultaneously several layers of embeddedness may be detrimental to company performance. This study provides generalizable lessons regarding different embeddedness layers beyond the context of China’s transition economy.

First, the authors extend political embeddedness to the firm level whilst in previous research this construct had been mostly related to the personal level. Second, building on the resource-based view and redundant resources the authors present the disadvantage of “over-embeddedness” as related to multi-layered embeddedness which has been understudied.

Entrepreneurship research clearly documents the importance of human and social capital and stresses the way in which entrepreneurs take advantage of their own social affiliations and network strategies in pursuit of their entrepreneurial goals, yet the research on returnee entrepreneurs’ human and social capital is not sufficiently studied in the international context, in particular when returnees’ overseas human capital and social capital may be a misfit with local business environment. Using the data from Chinese returnee entrepreneurs’ venture activities in China, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of returnee entrepreneurs’ overseas capital (human and social) and domestic capital (human and social) on their venture performance in China, and further explore the interaction effect of different social and human capital with China’s entrepreneurial environment.

This study surveyed 500 start-up businesses created by returnee entrepreneurs in China to collect data. Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data on their demographic information, the information about the human and social capital of these returnee entrepreneurs, including domestic and overseas capital, various performance measures, and other control variables ending up with 226 usable questionnaires.

The results show that Chinese returnee entrepreneurs’ overseas human capital and social capital, as well as their domestic social capital, but not domestic human capital, have a significant impact on their venture performance. In addition, while domestic entrepreneurial environment does not affect the impact of overseas human and social capital on venture performance, it does provide an important contextual setting for domestic capital to improve returnee entrepreneurs’ venture performance.

The findings help enrich the understanding of the dynamic interplays among Chinese returnee entrepreneurs’ domestic human capital and social capital, overseas human capital, and social capital, as well as the entrepreneurial environment for returnee entrepreneurs’ success, which makes an important contribution to the international entrepreneurship theory by showing that overseas human capital and social capital are not a misfit with local markets. It also provides empirical support for the mediating effect of entrepreneurial opportunity identification. The important role of entrepreneurial opportunity is empirically supported in an international context: entrepreneurship is all about the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities and exploitation of this opportunity to create viable business entities for new products and services, even in the Chinese context, a culture which is very different from the ones where the entrepreneurship theory was developed.

The purpose of this study is to develop a friction-type energy-harvesting device based on magnetic liquids (MLs). This MLs energy-harvesting device combines MLs with a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), reducing the friction thermal effect to improve the conversion efficiency and working frequency band.

First, the motion equation of the MLs is calculated using the Bernoulli and fluid continuity equations. Second, the sloshing process of an ML in a container is simulated using the finite element simulation method, and the magnetic field distribution of the permanent magnet in the MLs is calculated. Then, the output characteristic of the ML-TENG is deduced theoretically, and the influencing factors of the output voltage are analyzed. Finally, the output voltage of the MLs energy-harvesting device was tested experimentally, and the influence of the magnetic field on the output voltage was tested.

This study proposes a vibration energy harvesting device based on MLs. The output voltage of the device was obtained through simulation and experimental tests, and the effect of the magnetic field on the output voltage was obtained.

This study provides a method to convert vibration energy into electrical energy using the magnetic response and fluid characteristics of MLs, and the availability of the device is verified by simulation and experiment. This energy-harvesting device exhibits less loss and a more sensitive response.

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects that information systems (IS) capabilities can have on supplier collaboration and customer collaboration and on quality performance in service contexts. In addition, the study examines how supply chain collaboration influences quality performance under various levels of environmental dynamism.

The conceptual model for this study is designed on the basis of the resource-based view (RBV) and dynamic capabilities view (DCV). A survey of 156 UK service firms was conducted and the data analyzed to test theoretical model using the structural equation modeling method. Furthermore, the moderating effect of environmental dynamism was investigated.

The results show that IS capabilities are positively associated with supply chain collaboration. Both supplier collaboration and customer collaboration are positively related to quality performance. Supplier collaboration has a positive effect on customer collaboration. Environmental dynamism significantly moderates the relationship between customer collaboration and quality performance, but no moderating effect on the relationship between supplier collaboration and quality performance.

This study takes a step toward quelling concerns about the business value of IS, contributing to the development and validation of the measurement of IS capabilities in the service supply chain context. The study deepens our understanding of supply chain collaboration by making a distinction between supplier collaboration and customer collaboration and investigating the correlation of supplier collaboration and customer collaboration. The findings extend the empirical application of RBV and DCV. In addition, this study’s findings direct service firms to develop IS capabilities that can enhance specific kinds of supply chain collaboration activities, thereby enabling improved quality performance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate consumers' emotional responses to artificial intelligence (AI) defeating people. Meanwhile, the authors investigate the negative spillover effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes toward AI companies. The authors also try to alleviate this spillover effect.

Using four studies to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, the authors use the fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from the Transformers algorithm to run a sentiment analysis to investigate how AI defeating people influences consumers' emotions. In Studies 2 to 4, the authors test the effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes, the mediating effect of negative emotions and the moderating effect of different intentions.

The authors find that AI defeating people increases consumers' negative emotions. In terms of downstream consequences, AI defeating people induces a spillover effect on consumers' unfavorable attitudes toward AI companies. Emphasizing the intention of helping people can effectively mitigate this negative spillover effect.

The authors' findings remind governments, policymakers and AI companies to pay attention to the negative effect of AI defeating people and take reasonable steps to alleviate this negative effect. The authors help consumers rationally understand this phenomenon and correctly control and reduce unnecessary negative emotions in the AI era.

This paper is the first study to examine the adverse effects of AI defeating humans. The authors contribute to research on the dark side of AI, the outcomes of competition matches and the method to analyze emotions in user-generated content (UGC).

This paper is a study of the current trends and conditions of electronic resources for Chinese studies, based on a recent survey on the Internet of 29 Chinese libraries in North America and eight Chinese libraries in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The survey discussed current electronic resources for Chinese studies, with a union list of major Chinese language databases currently used in libraries in Asia and the US. Current views on the use and development of electronic resources for Chinese studies were summarised.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the USA seeks to promote its interests in peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait in the context of Taiwan’s unique political status and its democratic system.

A narrative analysis examines the recent history of Taiwan’s democratic development and USA responses to it.

The USA has responded in various ways to the dilemma of respecting the outcomes of elections in friendly democracies while protecting its own interests in peace and security. This was easy during the Ma Ying-jeou administration (2008-2016) but it is likely to become more difficult following Taiwan’s presidential election in January 2016.

This study draws on personal experience and an in-depth understanding of Taiwan politics and US diplomacy.

In his autobiography, Chen Shui-bian (1999, p. 40) condemned the Koumintang's (KMT's) corruption and praised the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for being free from money politics and corruption. The DPP fought the 1992 Legislative Yuan election campaign effectively on an anticorruption platform and used the same strategy in subsequent elections. If Chen Shui-bian had criticized the KMT for its involvement with “black gold” politics and had won the 2000 presidential election on his anticorruption platform, why was he and his family found guilty of corruption after his second term of office? The short answer is that even though he had promised to curb corruption, President Chen himself had succumbed to corruption after assuming office. In June 2002, Keesing's Contemporary Archives cited a poll in Taiwan that indicated that more respondents had perceived the DPP to be more corrupt than the KMT (Copper, 2006, p. 14).