Using data collected at two phases, this study examines why and how ethical leadership behavior influences employees’ evaluations of organization-focused justice, i.e., procedural justice and distributive justice. By proposing ethical leaders as moral agents of the organization, we build up the linkage between ethical leadership behavior and the above two types of organization-focused justice. We further suggest trust in organization as a key mediating mechanism in the linkage. Our findings indicate that ethical leadership behavior engenders employees’ trust in their employing (...) organization, which in turn promotes their justice perceptions toward the organization. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and some directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of how concepts pertinent to legal contracts can influence certain aspects of their digital implementation through smart contracts, as inspired by recent developments in distributed ledger technology. We discuss how properties of imperative and declarative languages including the underlying architectures to support contract management and lifecycle apply to various aspects of legal contracts. We then address these properties in the context of several blockchain architectures. While imperative languages are commonly used to implement smart contracts, we (...) find that declarative languages provide more natural ways to deal with certain aspects of legal contracts and their automated management. (shrink)

China’s historical mixed-ownership reform (the Reform) has prioritized enhancing the efficiency and financial performance of its large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) through introduction of partial private-sector equity ownership. However, the presence of a significant gap between China’s private enterprises’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and those of its SOEs suggests potential for Reform-related ownership changes to negatively impact economy-wide CSR performance. We therefore examine the Reform’s impact on private acquirer firms’ CSR practices. We use a proprietary data set of firms listed (...) on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges, covering the 2011–2015 period. Our findings identify that private firms can enhance their economic and political status through acquiring equity in state-controlled or SOEs and, following this, improve their CSR practices. Our findings have policy implications in the context of the world’s largest emerging market and, more generally, for SOE ownership reform in emerging and transition economies. (shrink)

We propose a theory of events and causes against the background of branching time. Notions discussed include possibility based on reality, transitions, events, determinacy, contingency, causes and effects. The main idea in defining causal relations is to introduce a certain preconditioning circumstance under which one event follows another. We also briefly compare this theory with some other theories.

The temporal structure of behavior contains a rich source of information about its dynamic organization, origins, and development. Today, advances in sensing and data storage allow researchers to collect multiple dimensions of behavioral data at a fine temporal scale both in and out of the laboratory, leading to the curation of massive multimodal corpora of behavior. However, along with these new opportunities come new challenges. Theories are often underspecified as to the exact nature of these unfolding interactions, and psychologists have (...) limited ready-to-use methods and training for quantifying structures and patterns in behavioral time series. In this paper, we will introduce four techniques to interpret and analyze high-density multi-modal behavior data, namely, to: (1) visualize the raw time series, (2) describe the overall distributional structure of temporal events (Burstiness calculation), (3) characterize the nonlinear dynamics over multiple timescales with Chromatic and Anisotropic Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA), (4) and quantify the directional relations among a set of interdependent multimodal behavioral variables with Granger Causality. Each technique is introduced in a module with conceptual background, sample data drawn from empirical studies and ready-to-use Matlab scripts. The code modules showcase each technique’s application with detailed documentation to allow more advanced users to adapt them to their own datasets. Additionally, to make our modules more accessible to beginner programmers, we provide a “Programming Basics” module that introduces common functions for working with behavioral timeseries data in Matlab. Together, the materials provide a practical introduction to a range of analyses that psychologists can use to discover temporal structure in high-density behavioral data. (shrink)

‘Ethics first’ reform in China significantly changes the governance framework for the research of emerging technologies. The misapplication of human genome editing technology reflects the urgent need to reform the governance framework. Strengthening ethics governance in medical research has become a consensus in China, where legal and ethical reforms are proceeding in parallel. The protection of human dignity, the prevention of biosafety risks, as well as the regulation of technological crimes are at the core of the legal system, which has (...) been embodied in numerous fundamental legislations following the CRISPR-babies incident. Establishing a national ethics committee to coordinate ethics governance, and reinforcing ethics review and external oversight are significant steps in ethical reform. Essentially, ethics governance requires implementing the basic concept of ‘ethics first’, focusing on forward-looking and preventive governance rather than delayed intervention, while maintaining openness and collaboration. (shrink)

The virtual display of products in e-commerce brings new problems of information asymmetry, and the overload of digital information also increases the difficulty of consumers' purchasing decisions. The real-time interaction between the streamer and the consumer during live streaming e-commerce will promote consumers' understanding of the product, reduce information asymmetry, and increase consumers' purchase intention. However, why do people trust the untouchable and unfamiliar streamers from live streaming e-commerce to purchase online? To understand this phenomenon, based on the perspective of (...) the information asymmetry theory and parasocial relationship theory, this research identified how social capital affected purchase intention in live streaming e-commerce. Through a questionnaire survey of live viewers, the purchase intention model constructed by empirical testing was used. The findings showed that the streamer's professionalism, the reciprocal expectation of live streaming, and the viewer's parasocial relationship could effectively increase the viewer's purchase intention. The occurrence of a streamer's negative public events could significantly reduce the viewer's purchase intention. The scale of live streaming and the streamer's commitment had no significant impact on the viewer's purchase intention. Trust played an intermediary role between the streamer's professionalism and parasocial relationship and the viewer's purchase intention. (shrink)

The current study examines the relationship between financialization, managers’ incentives, and the enterprise’s innovation. Based on the principal-agent and incentive theories, this study proposes a research model with two management incentives as moderating variables between financialization and the enterprise’s innovation. First, we analyze the direct relationship between financialization and the enterprise’s innovation. Second, we examine the moderating effect of managers’ equity incentive and compensation incentives on the relationship between entity financialization and the enterprise’s innovation in high-tech/non-high-tech enterprises and state-owned and (...) non-state-owned enterprises. This study covers the most recent updated data from both A-share listed companies in the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchange in China from 2009 to 2019. This study’s finding indicates a significant negative impact of entity financialization and the enterprise’s innovation. It means that the entity financial has a significant “crowding-out” effect on the enterprise’s innovation. This study also confirms that management incentives cannot effectively suppress a “crowding-out” impact of entity financialization on firm innovation because of the principal-agent severe problem in financialization. Finally, considering the heterogeneities of property rights and degrees of dependence on the enterprise’s innovation, a “crowding-out” effect of entity financialization on the enterprise’s innovation is more significant in high-tech and state-owned enterprises. Managers’ equity incentive significantly affects the enterprise’s innovation in high-tech enterprises, while the managers’ compensation incentive affects the enterprise’s innovation in state-owned enterprises. Our study could help the enterprise to improve the company manager’s incentive and provide the optimal assets allocation to improve the enterprise’s innovation ability. Lastly, this study provides significant policies and recommendations for the public sector high-tech enterprise and private sector high-tech enterprises. Moreover, policies and recommendations are fruitful for the public sector non-high-tech enterprise and private sector non-high-tech enterprise. (shrink)

With the increasing volume of web services in the cloud environment, Collaborative Filtering- based service recommendation has become one of the most effective techniques to alleviate the heavy burden on the service selection decisions of a target user. However, the service recommendation bases, that is, historical service usage data, are often distributed in different cloud platforms. Two challenges are present in such a cross-cloud service recommendation scenario. First, a cloud platform is often not willing to share its data to other (...) cloud platforms due to privacy concerns, which decreases the feasibility of cross-cloud service recommendation severely. Second, the historical service usage data recorded in each cloud platform may update over time, which reduces the recommendation scalability significantly. In view of these two challenges, a novel privacy-preserving and scalable service recommendation approach based on SimHash, named SerRecSimHash, is proposed in this paper. Finally, through a set of experiments deployed on a real distributed service quality dataset WS-DREAM, we validate the feasibility of our proposal in terms of recommendation accuracy and efficiency while guaranteeing privacy-preservation. (shrink)

We present a simple theory of actions against the background of branching time, based on which we propose two versions of an extended stit theory, one equipped with particular actions and the other with sets of such actions. After reporting some basic results of a formal development of such a theory, we briefly explore its connection to a version of branching ETL.

Resumo: Yang Naimei (杨耐梅) é uma estrela de cinema chinesa da primeira metade do século XX. O estudo discute a prática de vida e o significado de Yang Naimei como uma flapper chinesa. Flapper se refere à garota moderna que cresceu na Europa e na América, na década de 1920, e desafia o estilo de vida tradicional. Yang Naimei é boa em atuar como uma mulher indisciplinada, na tela. Ela teve muitos relacionamentos em sua vida. Ela acumulou riqueza e reputação (...) com sua carreira de atriz, que incorpora totalmente as características da flapper. No entanto, a sociedade da época não oferecia espaço suficiente para o desenvolvimento sustentável da geração de mulheres, como Yang Naimei, na vida econômica, política e pessoal. Com a sua juventude passada, ela foi eliminada pela indústria cinematográfica e sofreu com a pobreza e a doença, na segunda metade de sua vida. Tomando Yang Naimei como uma silhueta dos tempos, pode-se refletir sobre as voltas e reviravoltas do caminho de desenvolvimento das mulheres chinesas. (shrink)

This paper presents a short survey of recent developments in stit theories, with an emphasis on combinations of stit and deontic logic, and those of stit and epistemic logic.

ObjectiveTo investigate the effects of cell phone dependence on mental health among undergraduates during the COVID-19 pandemic and further identify the determinants that may affect their mental health in China.MethodsThe data were collected from 602 students at a medical school in Shanghai via an online survey conducted from December 2021 to February 2022. The Mobile Phone Addiction Index and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale were applied to evaluate CPD and mental health, respectively. Independent sample t-test and one-way analysis of variance were (...) employed to compare the means of continuous variables among categorical groups. Correlations between continuous variables were detected using Pearson's correlation analysis. Univariable and multivariable logistic regressions were employed to identify the determinants of mental health.ResultsAmong the 402 eligible students, 73.88% were women with an average age of 20.19 ± 2.36 years. On average, the DASS score was 32.20 ± 11.07, the CPD score was 36.23 ± 11.89, and the cell phone use duration was 7.67 ± 3.61 h/day. CPD was found to have a negative effect on mental health among college students in Shanghai. Additionally, cell phone use duration, age, being senior students, faculty-student relationship, insomnia, tobacco use, obesity, and life satisfaction were clarified as contributing factors to mental health among college students.ConclusionHigh degree of CPD could have a negative effect on college students' mental health, which might lead to some psychological problems. Appropriate actions and effective interventions are highly needed to prevent severe psychological injuries among college students in China. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present some results instit theory, a theory of agency proposed by N. Belnap and M. Perloff. We will establish a correspondence between the numbers ofstit modalities and the complexity degrees ofbusy choice sequences in semantic structures, and consequently, a correspondence between the number of modes of actions/inactions instit theory and the complexity degrees ofbusy choice sequences in semantic structures.

The main purpose of this paper is to prove that in every stit semantic structure that contains a busy choice sequence, neither does doing imply refraining from refraining from doing, nor does refraining from refraining from doing imply doing.

This study examines the tensions between the western concept of professional independence and accountants’ commitment to significant others under the care perspective of guanxi. The principle of professional independence is founded on arm’s-length transactions to avoid undue influence on professional and ethical judgement. However, in the relational society of China, social interactions based on Confucianism elicit a duty of care and concern towards significant others in important relationships. For a professional accountant, the commitment to persons with whom they have guanxi (...) is potentially at odds with their commitment to professional independence. Data collected from interviews with Chinese accounting professionals, accounting academics and expatriate accountants working in China provide insight on how Chinese accounting professionals discharge their obligations under guanxi. Notions of guanxi and the rules of exchange identified in Hwang’s (Knowledge and action: A social psychological interpretation of Chinese cultural traditions, Sin-Li, Taipei, 1995) model of “Confucian ethics for ordinary people” provide the lens to explain the ethical dilemmas facing Chinese accountants. The findings suggest that accounting professionals prioritise the interests of their superiors and clients over the users of financial reports. Despite accountants’ moral obligation to protect the public interest, personal and professional obligations in China struggle to extend beyond client or employer interests mostly because of the absence of a formal relationship or connection with the public. This contrasts sharply with the notion of professional independence practised in western societies, where accounting professionals must be independent of their clients and superiors and commit to a duty to protect the public interest. The outcome of this study demonstrates the impediments to transplanting western concepts to different cultures. (shrink)

Trust is of great significance to the economic and social development of a country. In the case of China, the trust of rural women has undergone tremendous changes along with the development of rural areas. It is seen that the trust of rural women has changed from localized to generalized trust, and it is stated that the major factor leading to this transformation is education. To explore the phenomenon empirically, the current study uses the survey data of rural women sourced (...) from China Family Panel Studies over the year 2018. Through the ordered probit model, the study reveals that education plays a significant role in influencing rural women’s generalized trust and localized trust. Through mediation analysis, the study further reveals that reliance on Internet information, access to public resources, and income are the factors mediating the relationship between education and generalized trust. Besides, the outcomes further unveil that the impact of education on localized trust is stronger when the level of mobility is low. For robustness check, the current study additionally employs a regression discontinuity model. The overall findings elucidate that education is the major factor triggering the trust of rural women in China. The findings propose that policymakers in China should imply education-oriented strategies as individuals with higher levels of education are more inclined to trust others. (shrink)

BackgroundIn recent years, some researchers have engaged in scientific misconduct such as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism to achieve higher research performance. Considering their detrimental effects on individuals’ health status (e.g., patients, etc.) and extensive financial costs levied upon healthcare systems, such wrongdoings have even more salience in medical sciences. However, there has been little discussion on the possible influence of medical researchers’ existing creative performance on scientific misconduct, and the moral psychological mechanisms underlying those effects are still poorly understood.MethodsWe build (...) a moderated mediation model to test how medical researchers’ creative performance affects their scientific misconduct and explore the role of moral licensing and moral identity in this process. Based on situational experiments and projection techniques, 287 medical researchers in China participated in a survey.ResultsMedical researchers’ creative performance positively relates to scientific misconduct, and moral licensing plays a mediating role in the relationship between them. In addition, moral identity has a negative moderating effect on the mediating effect of moral licensing on creative performance and scientific misconduct.ConclusionMoral licensing plays a fully mediating role in the relationship between creative performance and scientific misconduct. And moral identity negatively moderates the indirect effect of creative performance on scientific misconduct through moral licensing. The findings provide theoretical and practical implications for the prevention of medical researchers’ scientific misconduct. (shrink)

This study explores the emergence and productivity of word order usage in Mandarin-speaking typically-developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder, and examines how this emergence relates to frequency of use in caregiver input. Forty-two caregiver-child dyads participated in video-recorded 30-min semi-structured play sessions. Eleven children with ASD were matched with 10 20-month-old TD children and another 11 children with ASD were matched with 10 26-month-old TD children, on expressive language. We report four major findings: Preschool Mandarin-speaking children with ASD (...) produced word order structures with pervasive ellipsis at similar rates to language-matched TD children, but also displayed differences from TD children in their usage of SVt and VtO frames; Grammatical productivity was observed in both TD children and children with ASD; moreover, children with ASD with higher expressive language produced less stereotyped language; Both TD children and children with ASD heard a range of word orders in their caregivers’ input, with TD children’s input greater in amount and complexity; however, caregivers of both groups also showed no age/language-related changes in word order usage; Few word-order-specific correlations emerged between caregivers and their children; however, strong correlations were observed for mean length of utterances for both groups: Caregivers who produced longer/more complex utterances had children who did the same. Taken together, it seems that despite their pragmatic deficits, the early grammatical knowledge of word order in Mandarin-exposed children with ASD is well preserved and in general follows the typical developmental pattern. Moreover, caregiver input is broadly rather than finely tuned to the linguistic development of TD children and children with ASD, and plays a more important role in children’s general syntactic development than in specific word order acquisition. Thus, early word order usage in preschool Mandarin-speaking TD children and children with ASD may be influenced by both caregiver input and child abilities. (shrink)

The economic stability of a country, such as Pakistan is dependent on the construction of mega-projects, such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. However, certain external factors and project characteristics may delay the construction of infrastructure projects; scholars have not investigated the development of CPEC from this perspective. In addition, the COVID-19 outbreak has hindered CPEC initiatives. This analysis will examine the effect of external environment factors on CPEC, and benchmark the project’s effects on economic stability through CPEC’s development by incorporating (...) 523 samples obtained from employees of various CPEC projects. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze all hypotheses proposed here on AMOS 21.0 tools. According to the findings of this study, the CPEC external environment and project benchmark characteristics have a negative effect on the construction of CPEC development. Furthermore, the development of CPEC is found to have a significant effect on economic stability. However, fear of COVID-19 has weakened the relationship between CPEC development and economic stability. Finally, we also discuss the implications and limitations of the study. (shrink)

Does honesty result from the absence of temptation or the active resistance of temptation? The “will’’ hypothesis suggests that honesty results from the active resistance of temptation, while the ”grace” hypothesis argues that honesty results from the absence of temptation. We examined reaction time and measured the cheating behavior of individuals who had a chance to lie for money. In study 1, we tested the “grace” hypothesis that honesty results from the absence of temptation and found a priming effect of (...) moral constructs on increasing honest behavior. In study 2, we investigated the individual’s moral identity in the same context, articulating different mechanisms that lead people to behave ethically. The result confirms that the “grace” hypothesis was valid for people who had a high moral identity, while the “will” hypothesis was accurate for individuals who had a low moral identity. (shrink)

Dung’s abstract argumentation provides us with a general framework to deal with argumentation, non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming. For the extension-based semantics, one of the basic principles is I-maximality which is in particular related with the notion of skeptical justification. Another one is directionality which can be employed for the study of dynamics of argumentation. In this paper, we introduce two new extension-based semantics into Dung’s abstract argumentation, called grounded-like semantics and initial semantics which satisfy the I-maximality and directionality principles. (...) The initial semantics has many good properties and can be expected to play a central role in studying other extension-based semantics, such as admissible, complete and preferred semantics. (shrink)

With people’s concerns about the environment growing, the demand for organic food has increased. However, few studies have focused on organic dining intention. Therefore, this study examined generativity, which is defined as the direction and care for the growth of future generations through self-expanding forms, and its influence on attitude toward organic food, environment concern and dining intention. The moderating effect of age was also examined. A total of 418 responses were collected through a face-to-face survey from Shanghai respondents. PLS-SEM (...) was utilized to verify the model and test the relationships among the constructs. The results show that generativity directly influences environmental concerns, attitudes toward organic food and dining intentions. Furthermore, environmental concerns and attitudes toward organic food are mediating variables for generativity to affect dining intentions. The older the age group, the more likely it is for generativity to have a positive influence on attitude toward organic food and environmental concerns. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed in this study. (shrink)

This work investigates the finite-time control problem for a nonlinear four-tank cross-coupled liquid level system by the port-controlled Hamiltonian model. A fixed-free methodology is exhibited which can be used to simplify the controller design procedure. To get an adjustable convergent gain of the finite-time control, a feasible technique named damping normalization is proposed. A novel parameter autotuning algorithm is given to clarify the principle of choosing parameters of the PCH method. Furthermore, a finite-time controller is designed by a state-error desired (...) Hamiltonian function, and the relationship between the settling time and a parameter is given, which can be applied in practical engineering easily to adjust the settling time according to the industrial need. Finally, simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. (shrink)

BackgroundOrgan donation and transplantation in China are ethically complex due to questionable informed consent and the use of prisoners as donors. Publishing works from China can be problematic. The objective of this study was to perform a 10-year follow up on Chinese journals active in donation and transplant publishing regarding the evolution of their publishing guidelines.MethodsEleven Chinese journals were analyzed for 7 properties: (1) ethics committee approval; (2) procedure consent; (3) publishing consent; (4) authorship criteria; (5) conflict of interest; (6) (...) duplicate publication; and (7) data integrity. Results were compared with our 2008 study data. Additionally, open access status, impact factor, and MEDLINE-indexing were explored.ResultsMost journals heightened the ethical requirements for publishing, compared to the results of 2008. All 11 now require their published manuscripts to have data integrity. Ten of 11 require ethics committee approval and informed consent for the publication of research studies, whereas in the original study only 2 journals evidenced these requirements. Nine of 11 have criteria for authorship, require conflict of interest disclosure, and forbid duplicate publishing. None of the journals have a policy to exclude data that was obtained from unethical organ donation practices. Nine of 11 journals are MEDLINE-indexed but only 2 are open-access.ConclusionsMost journals have improved their general ethical publishing requirements but none address unethical organ donation practices. (shrink)

Are risk-takers more likely to engage in unethical behaviors? We examined the relationship between risk-taking propensity and cheating in two experimental studies. In Study 1, we examined the relationship between subjects’ risk-taking propensity and their actual self-serving dishonesty using a gambling-like task. The results suggested that risk-taking propensity, measured using a behavioral approach, was positively correlated with actual self-serving dishonest behavior. In Study 2, we measured participants’ performances using a matrices test and found that the positive correlation still held. We (...) found that participants with high risk-taking propensity reported a lower perceived probability of being detected, which might drive their dishonest behavior. (shrink)

This article remedies the divide in the theory of cultural performance between contingent strategy and cultural structure by bringing scene back in. Scene fuses components of performance and links local performance to macrolevel cultural structures and historical events. I theorize two conceptual elements: scene-act ratio and event-scene link. A scene creates an emotive context that demands consistent and timely performance; features of macrolevel events shape the emotive context of the scene. The two concepts can be deployed to explain variation in (...) performance effectiveness. The theory is illustrated in a comparative study of Chinese leaders' empathetic performance in disasters. (shrink)

This paper studies a simple dynamical system of stock price fluctuation time series based on the rule of stock market. When the stock price fluctuation system is disturbed by external excitations, the system exhibits obviously chaotic phenomena, and its basic dynamic properties are analyzed. At the same time, a new fixed-time convergence theorem is proposed for achieving fixed-time control of stock price fluctuation system. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is verified by numerical simulation.

Counterfactual thinking is presumed to play a preparatory function in promoting people’s behavioural intentions. This study specifically addresses the impacts of COVID-19 severity, tourists’ counterfactual thinking about the pandemic, and tourists’ perceived duty-free consumption value on the effect of a duty-free policy on travel intentions. Four hundred and ten participants took part in this study, which involved a 2 × 2 design. Results reveal the following patterns: compared to the absence of a duty-free policy in tourist destinations, enactment of a (...) duty-free policy leads to stronger visit intentions through greater perceived value and the effect of a duty-free policy on travel intention is moderated by tourists’ counterfactual thinking and COVID-19 severity. (shrink)