Based on a sample of Chinese state-owned companies from 2007 to 2022, this paper studies the effect of government decentralization on directors’ and officers’ liability insurance purchase decision in state-owned enterprises and the moderating effect of industry competition and social trust. The results show: government decentralization reduces government protection, promotes market-oriented operation and risk-taking in state-owned enterprises, and in turn motivates state-owned enterprises to purchase D&O insurance. The incentive effect is restricted by industry competition and social trust atmosphere. Industry competition enhances the promotion effect, while social trust negatively moderates the relationship. In addition, this study also finds that government decentralization promotes risk taking and innovation, thereby promoting the purchase decision of D&O insurance. This paper introduces government decentralization into the study of the purchase decision of D&O insurance, enriches and expands the research on the affecting factors of the purchase decision of D&O insurance and the economic consequences of government decentralization, and provides a new explanation for the reality of the low use of D&O insurance in China’s transitional economy.

As the demographic dividend fades, ensuring full and high-quality employment emerges as a pressing concern. This paper investigates the interplay between high-speed rail (HSR) and the employment structure of manufacturing industry. First, we construct a multi-regional spatial economic model encompassing transport and factor costs. Then we divide manufacturing industry into labor-intensive, capital-intensive and technology-intensive types to assess HSR’s impact using data of Chinese industrial companies from 2005 to 2013. The findings are as follows. (1) The opening of HSR plays a significant inhibitory role, a promoting role and an insignificant role on the employment respectively in labor-intensive industry, capital-intensive industry and technology-intensive industry. (2) Our exploration of underlying mechanisms suggests the factor cost channel solely impacts labor-intensive industry, whereas capital deepening channel primarily elevates capital-intensive employment. (3) Heterogeneity research displays that financial development and government intervention mainly affect labor and capital intensive industries, while regional innovation level and the agglomeration of productive service industry influence technology intensive industries.

Grounded on the optimal contract and organizational change perspectives, this study investigates the effect of digital transformation on top management (TM)-employee pay dispersion. Based on the data from Chinese listed companies between 2007 and 2020, the results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between digital transformation and TM-employee pay dispersion. Besides, this inverted U-shaped relationship is strengthened by enterprise-employee relationship, that is, the stronger the enterprise-employee relationship, the steeper the inverted U-shaped relationship. Further deconstruction analysis shows that TM pay increases linearly with increasing levels of digital transformation, whereas employee pay decreases first and then increases with increasing levels of digital transformation, showing a U-shaped relationship. Our findings deepen the understanding of common prosperity in digital transformation.

The maturity mismatch of investment and financing, typically characterized by short-term debt for long-term Use (SDLU), affects Chinese enterprises’ development performance. This study combines mathematical modelling with empirical analysis to deeply analyze the internal mechanism of how maturity mismatch affects enterprises’ environmental performance. Then, by matching the Chinese data of Environmental Survey and Industrial Annual Survey, this study examines the impact and mechanism of how SDLU affects enterprises’ environmental performance. Our research finds that the SDLU has a negative effect on corporate environmental performance from both energy-saving and emission-reduction perspectives. Such an effect still holds after a series of robustness tests. We demonstrate that the investment distortion caused by SDLU may be the root reason underlying the negative effect. Specifically, this investment distortion mainly has a negative effect on enterprises’ environmental performance, through the crowding out effect of green investment and the over-investment effect of traditional fixed asset investment. Further analysis shows that such a negative effect exacerbates as the concentration of local banking industry increases. Also, the above negative effect is more significant in the industries facing stricter environmental regulation, provinces with lower knowledge density or firms under higher financial pressure. Based on the above findings, this paper enriches the empirical evidence on the consequences of SDLU on micro-level enterprises, and provides insights for the government to promote green development of enterprises through deepening financial reforms.

The existing research mostly analyzes the impact of persuasion theory on investors from the perspective of text information in the project display page, that is, the “seen” project introduction. Few studies focus on how investors can persuade and attract investors to invest in audio. Because audio and text belong to two different media, whether the previous research conclusions can be fully applied to audio research needs to be verified. Although research has confirmed that the use of audio is beneficial to crowdfunding results, the research on audio features is insufficient. This paper takes the technology crowdfunding video of the Kickstarter platform as the research object, extracts its audio, that is, the “heard” project introduction, extracts the language persuasion features of audio from the perspective of expression features and content features, and then studies the impact on the success rate of crowdfunding. The research results show that, unlike the text research, the style of appeal to emotion and appeal to analysis in audio will have a negative impact on science and technology projects. The over-expression of positive emotions in the videos of technology crowdfunding projects, like the expression of negative emotions, will inhibit the success of the project. Technology projects have a certain professional threshold, and the over-expression of emotions will affect investors’ recognition of the professionalism of the whole project. Therefore, when making videos of technology crowdfunding projects, financiers should reduce the over-expression of positive emotions. In addition, this paper also proves that the more obvious the analytical style is, the more likely it will have a negative impact on the success of crowdfunding. Therefore, it is suggested that the financiers of crowdfunding should properly adjust the proportion of analytical content when making videos. Since the speakers and audiences of the promotional videos of science and technology projects are mostly male, the more male voices appear in the promotional videos, the more negative impact will be on the emotional expression and analytical style.

Venture capital network community is a network structure containing strong and weak syndication relationship, although the cooperation and trust relationship within the network community is strong, there is no lack of the phenomenon of movement across network community of venture capital institutions. Is this a self-help behavior of institutions in order to break the resource constraints and information cocoon house? Based on the research sample of venture capital institutions in the CVSource database from 2000 to 2021, this paper empirically tests the role and mechanism of movement across network community of venture capital institutions on investment performance. The study finds that the movement across network community of venture capital institutions is a self-help behavior on the whole, which helps to improve the investment performance of institutions. The mechanism analysis shows that the movement across network community of venture capital institutions has a weak effect on the improvement of investment performance when the level of the institution’s own resources is higher, and it is stronger when the degree of institutional investment specialization is higher. In addition, when the scale of the network community is large, the movement across network community of venture capital institutions has a stronger effect on the improvement of investment performance. This paper reveals the internal mechanism of how the movement across network community influences investment performance, and provides empirical reference and corresponding guidance for the behavior decision-making of venture capital institutions.

Intellectual property protection is an important institutional factor for stimulating innovation and improving innovation resources. This paper constructs urban-level intellectual property protection indicators from two dimensions: intellectual property system supply and intellectual property judicial protection. Taking China’s A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2021 as research samples, this paper systematically examines the impact of intellectual property protection on enterprise digital technology innovation and the underlying mechanism. The study finds that intellectual property protection can significantly promote enterprises’ digital technology innovation, and the above conclusion still hold after a series of robustness tests. The influence channel test shows that the increase in the intensity of R&D investment and the improvement of the level of digital transformation are important ways for intellectual property protection to empower enterprises’ digital technology innovation. The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the enabling effect of intellectual property protection on digital technology innovation is more significant in the group of state-owned enterprises, large-scale enterprises and intellectual property industry enterprises. The above research findings are helpful for further exploring the effect of intellectual property protection on enterprise digital technology innovation, and thus provide policy reference for relevant government departments to use intellectual property protection to stimulate enterprise digital technology innovation.

Exaptation is an important source of enterprise innovation, but the existing literature pays little attention to it. In this paper, a moderated mediating model is formed by introducing two variables- absorptive capacity and boundary-spanning search - to explore the influence of strategic foresight on exaptation, focusing on the mediating role of boundary-spanning search and the moderating role of absorptive capacity. The results show that: strategic foresight has a significant positive impact on exaptation, and boundary-spanning search mediates the relationship between strategic foresight and exaptation; potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity strengthen the relationship between boundary-spanning search and exaptation, and potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity regulates the mediating role of boundary-spanning search. The research conclusion is an extension of the trigger mechanism for adaptation, which helps to reveal the formation path of adaptation from a strategic perspective and is of great significance for enterprises to promote the practice of adaptation.

Existing studies have not formed a systematic theoretical explanation for the mechanism of impression management strategies affecting the stigma of entrepreneurial failure. Through two experiments, this study explores the impact and boundary conditions of impression management strategies on the legitimacy of subsequent entrepreneurship of failed entrepreneurial firms in the context of being stigmatized by entrepreneurial failure. Results show that: compared to the defensive strategies in impression management, acquisitive strategies have a better effect in alleviating the negative impact of entrepreneurial failure stigma on the legitimacy of subsequent entrepreneurship. Adopting acquisitive strategies on the basis of defensive strategy implementation has a more significant effect on promoting the legitimacy of subsequent entrepreneurship. Corporate reputation plays a mediating effect in the relationship between impression management strategy and subsequent entrepreneurial legitimacy. When suffering from low stigma level, a single type of impression management strategy can alleviate the negative impact of stigma of entrepreneurial failure; when suffering from high stigma level, two strategies are required at the same time to significantly enhance the legitimacy of subsequent entrepreneurship. The conclusions provide theoretical guidance for entrepreneurial failure enterprises to implement impression management strategies to cope with failure stigma.

Based on the brand personality theory, this paper develops a scale for the brand personality of red tourism destinations in China by using methods including literature review, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, online text mining, and questionnaire surveys. The study explores the impact of different brand personality dimensions of red tourism on tourists’ sense of happiness and behavioral intentions, and examines the mediating role of tourists’ sense of happiness. The findings are as follows. (1) The brand personality of red tourism destinations in China consists of 20 indicators in total, belonging to five dimensions, namely “Relaxing,” “Wisdom and Righteousness,” “Benevolence and Harmony,” “Loyalty and Bravery,” and “Innovativeness.” (2) Tourists’ sense of happiness is categorized into hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness, and the impact of different brand personality dimensions on tourists’ sense of happiness varies. “Loyalty and Bravery” and “Wisdom and Righteousness” have a greater impact on tourists’ eudaimonic happiness, while “Relaxing,” “Benevolence and Harmony,” and “Innovation” have a greater impact on tourists’ hedonic happiness. Moreover, hedonic happiness has a greater positive influence on tourists’ behavioral intentions than eudaimonic happiness. (3) Hedonic happiness plays a complete mediating role in the impact of “Wisdom and Righteousness” and “Benevolence and Harmony” on behavioral intentions, while eudaimonic happiness plays a complete mediating role in the impact of “Wisdom and Righteousness” and “Loyalty and Bravery” on behavioral intentions. “Innovativeness” has a direct impact on tourists’ behavioral intentions, and tourists’ sense of happiness plays a partial mediating role in this relationship. This study enriches the theoretical exploration of red tourism from the perspective of brand personality, and deepens the understanding of the impact of different personality dimensions on tourists’ sense of happiness and behavioral intentions. It provides insights for the design, development, and operation of red tourism routes and scenic spots.

As Chinese consumers pay more attention to the experience in brand communications, the word “Chengyi” frequently appears in consumer reviews. The marketing communication of international brands in the Chinese market is especially easy to trigger the problem of “Chengyi”. Although “Chengyi” has long been regarded as a key concept by brands, it is rich in meaning in the Eastern discourse system, and the field of marketing management lacks in-depth explanation and application of “Chengyi” from Chinese cultural roots. This study proposes the significance of Consumers’ Perceived Sincerity in brand communication. Based on the review of Confucian literature, this construct is defined formally. Using interviews and questionnaire surveys, this study develops the Consumers’ Perceived Sincerity Scale and determines its four-dimension structure. The reliability and validity of the scale are tested and prove to be well-performing. Through theoretical analysis and empirical research, the construct is distinguished from similar constructs in previous studies. In addition to providing a measure for further investigation of Consumers’ Perceived Sincerity, this study provides a new perspective and framework for brand analysis and management of marketing communications.

Against the backdrop of the burgeoning gig economy in China, platform companies are attempting to retain and motivate gig workers through gamified algorithmic management, yet the effectiveness of this mechanism lacks empirical support. Accordingly, this study, grounded in Manufactured Consent Theory, uses three-stage data from 338 platform-dependent gig workers to explore the mechanism and boundary conditions of how platform algorithmic gamification affects gig workers’ career commitment. The results show that: (1) algorithmic gamification has a significant positive impact on gig workers’ career commitment, with job control playing a mediating role in this relationship; (2) algorithmic transparency enhances the positive effect of algorithmic gamification on job control, but does not affect the mediating effect of job control; (3) algorithmic fairness has a substitutive effect on algorithmic gamification, namely, algorithmic fairness weakens the positive impact of algorithmic gamification on job control and further diminishes its mediating role. This study not only expands the research on the effects of algorithmic gamification but also provides insights for the optimization of platform algorithmic management.

Based on multi-goal pursuit framework and goal shielding theory, this study explores why and when supervisor bottom-line mentality influences subordinate task performance and unethical pro-organizational behavior. A total of 261 leader-member pairing data are collected in three stages, and hierarchical regression analysis is used to test the research hypotheses. Empirical results show that: (1) supervisor bottom-line mentality has a positive effect on subordinate task performance and unethical pro-organizational behavior; (2) task priority ethical cognition mediates the effect of supervisor bottom-line mentality on subordinate task performance and unethical pro-organizational behavior; (3) the intensity of task performance pay strengthens the relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and subordinate task priority ethical cognition; (4) the intensity of task performance pay strengthens the indirect effects of subordinate task priority ethical cognition on supervisor bottom-line mentality on subordinate task performance and unethical pro-organizational behavior.

Based on social exchange theory and regulatory focus theory and using psychological safety and regulatory focus as mediating and moderating variables, this paper constructs a model to explain the mechanism of how customer empowering behaviors influence employees’ proactive customer service performance. A multi-source and multi-wave questionnaire survey of 236 employee-supervisor dyads from service industry finds that (1) customer empowering behaviors have a significant positive effect on employee proactive customer service performance, and employees’ psychological safety plays a mediating role in the association between customer empowering behaviors and proactive customer service performance; (2) promotion focus strengthens the positive effect of customer empowering behaviors on employees’ psychological safety, while prevention focus inhibits such effect; (3) the higher the level of employee promotion focus, the stronger the positive effect of customer empowering behaviors on employees’ proactive customer service performance through psychological safety; in contrast, the higher the level of employees’ prevention focus, the weaker such indirect effect.

This study investigates the impact of the CEO-TMT interface, in terms of characteristic similarity and experience diversity, on corporate environmental strategy from the perspective of upper echelons theory. Using panel data of Chinese A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2011 to 2020, our findings reveal several key insights. First, the more similarities CEO and TMT members have in age, education level, and functional background, the more likely they are to share the same environmental values, develop mutual trust, and jointly take proactive environmental actions. Second, the more diverse CEO and TMT members are in political ties, overseas experience, and military service, the better able they are to acquire heterogeneous environmental information and resources, raise managerial attention on environmental issues, and make their company active in undertaking environmental responsibilities. Third, the positive effects of CEO-TMT characteristic similarity and experience diversity on corporate environmental strategy are more pronounced when firms face larger gaps between performance and aspiration. This research enriches the literature on the antecedents of corporate environmental strategy and top management team interface and provides implications for manufacturing firms to optimize top management team composition and implement environmental strategy.

Using 884 Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020 as research samples, this paper takes the perspective of business group culture to answer the core question of whether there is a “peer effect” in corporate social responsibility performance, and systematically analyzes the differences in cultural traits of business groups and the “learning mechanism” of peer effect. The study finds that there is a “peer effect” in corporate social responsibility performance under different business group cultural backgrounds. From the perspective of cultural traits differences of business groups, there is a peer effect in corporate social responsibility performance of inland, coastal, business-respecting and conservative business groups, while there is no such effect in light-business and innovative business groups. The learning path of the peer effect follows the learning patterns including “from inside to outside”, “excellent student model” and “pressure from chasers”. The research of this paper provides a reference at the level of enterprise strategy and government policy for inheriting and innovating Chinese traditional business culture, guiding the cultivation of entrepreneurs and talents through collaborative innovation of “social responsibility”, and promoting the high-quality development of Chinese economy.

Cost reduction and efficiency enhancement are pivotal forces driving the transformation and upgrading of the logistics industry. Governments should foster an internal and external environment conducive to industry development, aiming to reduce operational costs and improve performance outcomes. However, a critical question is how to optimize the industrial ecosystem to promote efficiency. This paper focuses on China’s logistics industry and examines potential improvement opportunities from the theoretical perspectives of input-output and configuration analysis. Using a research framework based on industrial environment configuration, coupled with a three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)/Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model and Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) method, we quantify the impact of regional heterogeneity and random shocks on logistics efficiency. Subsequently, we analyze the relationship between environmental driving factors and logistics industry efficiency from a configuration perspective. The findings are as follows. (1) Government support as a direct driving factor, and consumer capacity and economic development as indirect driving factors, significantly reduce the redundancy in industry production value. (2) No single driving factor is necessary for achieving high efficiency; rather, high efficiency in the logistics industry results from the combined effect of multiple driving factors, with three specific industrial ecosystems conducive to improved efficiency outcomes identified. This mixed-method framework demonstrates strong complementarity, providing decision-making references from the perspectives of resource utilization and system integration to promote the efficient development of the logistics industry.

To enhance the core manufacturing advantages and achieve the “dual carbon” goal, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) make the alliances with downstream retailers and third-party remanufacturers (TPR) based on the authorized remanufacturing model, forming a closed-loop supply chain alliance structure of reverse recycling channel cooperation and forward sales channel competition. For better leveraging the positive effects of alliances, we construct four alliance structures, including no alliance, OEM-retailer alliance, OEM-TPR alliance and retailer-TPR alliance. Then, we optimize the decisions of enterprises under the market situation of differentiated product competition. Furthermore, we use the optimal profit of no alliance structure as the benchmark to test whether channel members have the motivation to form alliances with other members. Besides, the Nash negotiation model is used to solve the internal profit distribution problem of alliances and investigate the stability of each alliance structure. Meanwhile, the differences of optimal decisions, consumer surplus and environmental impact among different alliance structures are compared through theoretical and numerical analysis. The results show that the participation of the OEM in an alliance can intensify the competitive pressure of new and remanufactured products and stimulate the growth of total market sales; the retailer’s participation in an alliance increases the market share of new products, but it is not conducive to the recycling and remanufacturing of used products; when the TPR participates in an alliance, the retail price differences between the new and remanufactured products increases, which is beneficial to enhancing the market competitiveness of remanufactured products. Any two parties in the closed-loop supply chain are highly motivated to ally with each other, but only the alliance structure formed by the OEM and the retailer can remain stable. In addition, the OEM always has the advantage of profit distribution while the TPR always has the disadvantage of profit distribution in different alliance structures. From the consumer perspective, an alliance with the OEM can bring benefits to consumers; from the environmental point of view, an alliance with the TPR may be the most beneficial to the environment.

Either numerical simulations or qualitative analyses on the carbon tax policy in the related literature mainly focus on its emission reduction effectiveness and accompanying economic loss. However, this literature ignores the oriented impact of the carbon tax on production factors and the tax fairness caused by enterprise heterogeneity. More importantly, the flow of production factors among industries determines resources’ allocation efficiency. Meanwhile, tax fairness is the premise of the carbon tax policy implementation. Therefore, from the viewpoint of mechanism design, this paper first examines the issue about how to set the carbon tax rate under the Pigouvain framework. It is found though the Pigouvain tax rate is effective in the short run, it does not satisfy the long-term entry-exit condition and cannot reflect the heterogeneity of enterprises’ emissions. To improve the Pigouvian defects, we design a modified Pigouvain carbon tax mechanism by the integral idea. The results show that the new mechanism not only holds the short-term effectiveness of the Pigouvian tax, but also can avoid the long-term mismatch of resource allocation. At the enterprise level, the tax of the new mechanism is fair. Finally, we discuss the effects of green technology progress and emission reduction investment on the carbon tax mechanism design. All of this may provide market-oriented policy tools for achieving China’s carbon peak and carbon neutralization.

Under the background of the digital economy, the environmental games represented by Ant-Forest have led the gamification fashion of environmental protection, which is also an example of the technology-empowered environmental governance innovation. Although previous studies have confirmed that environmental games promote pro-environmental behavior, most of the existing studies are cross-sectional surveys, which can hardly smooth out the dispute about the relationship between the continuous use of environmental games and the normative environmental motivation, and to confirm the short-term and long-term effects of gamification interventions. This study recruits 141 subjects who have rare experience with Ant-Forest and first organizes a two-stage randomized field experiment. In the first stage (30 days), the subjects are randomly assigned to four experimental groups to receive corresponding experimental treatments and participate in a questionnaire survey before and after the experiment. In the second stage (110 days), all subjects do not receive any intervention and only participate in the follow-up survey at the end. A series of statistical analyses indicate that (1) normative environmental motivation can significantly positively predict the willingness to use environmental games a month later, but the willingness to use environmental games cannot predict normative environmental motivation in the future; (2) gamification intervention significantly improves the environmental concern and psychological ownership of players, and it is sustainable after the intervention is weakened or even disappear, while the traditional intervention, environmental appeals, can only significantly improve the environmental concern. (3) A negative interaction effect is observed between gamification intervention and environmental appeals. Therefore, gamification intervention with extremely low social and economic costs can be an effective alternative to environmental appeals. However, the government still needs to take comprehensive measures to train the public to “form a lasting and universal green lifestyle”. This study makes certain theoretical contributions to the exploration of the internal mechanism of how the sustainable use of environmental games influences players’ psychology and motivations.

The goal of government environmental regulation is to provide residents with a good living environment to protect the health of residents. Existing studies on environmental regulation mainly focus on the economic impact and environmental effect of environmental regulation, but there are relatively few studies on the relationship between environmental regulation and residents’ health, as well as the path and characteristics of action. This paper uses the data of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to estimate the impacts of different environmental regulation policy tools on public health by using the multi-layer mixed effects ordered Logistic regression model. Environmental pollution and economic growth are included in the mediating effects model to analyze the pathway mechanism of their impacts. The panel threshold model is used to further explore the heterogeneity of the impact of environmental regulations on public health in regions with different economic development conditions and pollution control levels. The findings are as follows. (1) Environmental regulation has a significant promoting effect on the improvement of public health. (2) Environmental regulation promotes the improvement of public health through the mediating effect of environmental pollution and economic growth. (3) The effect of environmental regulation on public health shows regional differences, and the effect of environmental regulation is stronger in regions with rapid economic development and better environmental pollution control. (4) The command-control and market-incentive environmental regulation policy tools significantly promote the improvement of residents’ health, among which the market-incentive environmental regulation policy tools have the best effect on health improvement, while the voluntary environmental regulation tools have no significant effect.

It is crucial for content platforms to achieve competitive advantage by building exclusivity to attract content producers to adopt platforms. However, it is still unclear about the exact dimensions of content platform exclusivity and how to build content platform exclusivity. This paper adopts the case study method, takes the resource advantage theory as the theoretical lens, selects a typical content platform Bilibili as the case sample, to identify the types of the exclusive construction of the content platform, i.e., content exclusivity, system exclusivity, and emotion exclusivity. This study also reveals the mechanism of three types of exclusivity construction by analyzing the key advantage resources and resource advantage actions of the content platform. First, content exclusivity is built by mobilizing experience resources, information resources and activity resources; second, institutional exclusivity is built by integrating proprietary knowledge resources, technical resources and stakeholder resources; third, emotional exclusivity is built by bundling identity support resources and honor reward resources. The research results contribute to the research on exclusivity theory by identifying three types of content platform exclusivity and revealing the process of exclusivity construction.

Under the pressure of transformation and upgrading, the backward production capacity in traditional manufacturing enterprises can hardly persist. The question of how to realize transformation and build a new niche has become an important issue for traditional manufacturing enterprises to survive and develop. This research takes Jigang as the research object and adopts the longitudinal single case study method. By exploring the upgrading process of Jigang’s transformation from “steel” to “intelligence”, the research aims to unravel the process path and internal mechanism of the construction of traditional manufacturing enterprises’ new niches under digital transformation. The findings are as follows. (1) Traditional manufacturing enterprises construct their new niches through two niche change processes of niche compression and niche transition. (2) Under digital transformation, the internal evolutionary mechanism behind the construction of new niche is remodeling forgetting, that is, quickly realizing organizational forgetting, learning and reshaping new knowledge and new practices with digital technology. The research summarizes the process and mechanism model of new niche construction, which not only expands the existing theories and makes up for the shortcomings of the existing studies, but also provides certain reference and inspiration for traditional manufacturing enterprises to construct their new niches and realizing transformation and upgrading.