Abstract:From the perspective of emotional experience, this study sequentially investigates people’s preferences for financial choice modes, the accompanied emotional experiences, and the effects of personality traits. First, through a large-scale online survey, it is found that people generally prefer active choice rather than passive choice under various financial risky decision-making conditions. Moreover, high-sensation-seeking males prefer active choice more than high-sensation-seeking females, while no gender difference was found between low-sensation-seeking males and females. Second, using a Balloon-Analogue Risk Task in behavioral experiments, the study finds that active choices brings greater emotional experiences, including greater sense of control and accomplishment, more happiness, and less pain. Finally, the sensation-seeking scale is combined with the BART experiment to find that high-sensation-seeking males are willing to take more risk than high-sensation-seeking females, while low-sensation-seeking males and females show no difference in their risk preferences.

Abstract:In recent years, more and more pre-IPO companies are absorbing venture capital (VC), but few literatures studied the motivation of introducing VC from a perspective of institutional background. Based on the specific background of stock issuance examination and approval system in China, this paper reveals, for the first time, the Chinese pre-IPO companies’ motivation of absorbing VC from the dimension of the VC advancing the probability of IPO success and the efficiency of the IPO process, which is different from the corresponding motivation of firms in developed markets. The evidences show that the VC not only significantly advances the CRSC’s approval probability of the backed firm’s IPO application for the first time, but also shortens the duration of the whole IPO process and duration of CRSC’s approval of IPO application, that these effects are mainly caused by the high reputation VC, and that other VC characteristics such as shareholding ratio, ownership, and number of VCs in a company, have no or inconsistent effects on the approval probability of IPO application and durations of the IPO process.

Abstract:The problem how retailers with bounded rationality, in the long-term evolution of market competition with network externalities, chooses between profit maximization and revenue maximization for their marketing strategies is investigated using evolutionary game theory. Firstly, considering network externality, this paper develops a dynamic evolutionary game of the asymmetric duopoly retailers’ competition. Secondly, the paper discusses the evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) of the dynamic system that depend on product substitutability, the strength of network externality, and the market reservation price, and examines their effects on the ESS. Thirdly, it is extended to the case where retailers can choose a mixed strategy with any preference ratio, and the effect of the market reservation price on the evolutionary stability of retailers’ preference ratio is explored. Lastly, numerical examples are given to verify the theoretical results.

Abstract:This paper develops three decision models for closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) with trade-ins, including the centralized decision model (model C) , the manufacturer selling and the third-party collecting model (model M3P) , and the retailer selling and the third-party collecting model (model R3P) , and investigates the optimal pricing and collection strategies for each model. The theoretical analysis and numerical experiments show that, in terms of the profits obtained by the manufacturer and the whole supply chain, model C dominates model M3P and model M3P dominates model R3P; in terms of the third-party collector’s profits, model M3P dominates model R3P. However, in terms of environmental performance, none of them dominates the others according to the life-cycle assessment methodology.

Abstract:Taking buyback contract as an incentive mechanism of supply chain system, the optimal ordering quantity, pricing, and system coordination in a single-supplier single-retailer supply chain under distribution-free environment is investigated. The supplier and the retailer are both risk neutral. Researches on the performance and coordination of supply chain under distribution-free environment are of great importance, especially for new products with insufficient historic sales data, short life cycle products, and products which are difficult to identify the demand distribution by Probability Theory. An upper-bound expected revenue model, a lower-bound expected revenue model and a minimum expected revenue model are established, respectively, for the supplier-retailer supply based on the expected revenue criterion and distribution-free approach. The optimal ordering quantity, pricing decision, and system coordination under the different demand-dependent pricing modes are analyzed. The result shows that the coordination ability of the buyback contract increases as the supply-chain system’s expected revenue changes from the upper-bound expected revenue model to the lower-bound expected revenue model and finally to the minimum expected revenue model. Namely, for the upper-bound expected revenue model, the buyback contract cannot coordinate the supply chain; for the lower-bound expected revenue model, there exists a unique buyback contract; and for the minimum expected revenue model, the buyback contract is a reactive function of the wholesale contract, which can flexibly coordinate the supply-chain system.

Abstract:Introducing Schumpeter competition in industry (SCII) and the crossing effect between technological and market professional efforts into our model, the paper studies the simultaneous optimization of the contract duration (complexity of innovation) , organizational form and residual claims in order to motivate innovation. The paper finds that integration of technology and market professionals is a prioritized organizational form to motivate teams in the absence of principal-agent problems, and that organizational forms of teams could not exert any impact on either contract duration or residual claims. The study also finds that both the SCII and the originality of innovation are negatively correlated with the contract duration, and that the organizational form of teams is dependent on the relationship among the crossing effect, technological originality, and market originality. This study improves the actual operability with reference to innovation incentives and strengthens the response to industrial competition.

Abstract:The paper studies the different impacts of the design of both the efficiency-centered business model and the novelty-centered business model based on CAS (Complexity Adaptive System) theory. After rethinking the dependent variable——organizational adaptation——affecting the design of the business model and using the “orderly” state and “edge of chaos” state of complex adaptive systems to analyze the design of the two type of models, the empirical testing finds that the design of the efficiency-centered business model has a positive relationship with the simple adaptation, and the design of the novelty-centered business model has a positive relationship with the complex adaptation. Furthermore, referring to the concept of “the law of requisite variety” and “systematic complexity matched environmental complexity”, the paper puts forward the idea that the basis of enterprise adaptive evolution is whether the design of the business model matches with internal organizational complexity and external environmental uncertainty. When the organizational structure, strategy and objectives are simple and the environment is stable, enterprises should design the efficiency-centered business model; when the organizational structure is complex, the business strategy and objectives are diversified, and the environment is complex and dynamic, enterprises should design the novelty-centered business model.

Abstract:Comparative opinions widely exist in online reviews as a common way of expressing consumers’ ideas. Meanwhile, such online opinions are key proxies for detecting product competitiveness. Firstly, comparative opinion pairs are extracted in feature-levels through text mining and sentiment analysis. Then, based on the comparative opinion pairs, a single-link graph, a dichotomic-link graph and a multi-link graph are built respectively, where the weights of edges are determined by the sentimental strength. Next, a feature-level comparative network is calculated by employing sophisticated network algorithms, including PageRank and Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search. The proposed comparative network can identify the strengths and weaknesses of compared products. Experimental results show that the feature-level comparative networks are correlated with SalesRank significantly, thus enabling the prediction on sales volume.