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The online retail market shows a sharp increase in traffic during holiday sales. The ability to distinguish customers who will likely purchase is critical for provisioning traffic and for providing cost-effective promotions. This paper uniquely studies the browsing and purchasing behaviors of online shoppers during a yearly sale event in China, the world’s largest online marketplace. Based on 31 million action logs gathered from wide residential areas, we characterize the steps leading to purchases and determine their precursors. We investigate the effect of time (e.g., date, time of date), environment (e.g., platform, viewed category), and action (e.g., session time, clicks, sequence) on purchases. Action cues from shopping behaviors can be used for early detection. While most shoppers start with strong intentions to purchase, yet the moment of ordering comes rather impulsively within 30 seconds to several minutes of browsing. The predictive accuracy reaches as a high AUC of 0.924. The findings in this paper provide an understanding of traffic during mega sale events that can help online shops plan and provide a better user experience for upcoming shopping festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ownership and location strategies as contingency factors, which affect the relationship between SMEs’ open innovation activities and innovation performance in the context of emerging economies. Drawing from the corporate strategy and open innovation literature, we argued that SMEs with state and foreign ownership can more effectively capture economic rents from open innovation in a weak intellectual-property-rights regime. Meanwhile, the subnational environments in which SMEs locate their businesses is also crucial for them to capture value from open innovation. Using the data of 1050 SMEs in China, we found that state ownership positively and significantly moderates the relationship between openness and innovative performance, while foreign ownership partially supports the same effect. By disentangling the pro-business environment and the market development, we found that for SMEs that are located in a region with a stronger pro-business environment and a higher level of market development, open innovation can bring more value than it does for those located in regions with lower levels of those factors. Overall, this paper also contributes to our understanding of the complementary relationships between ownership and location strategies and open innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdsourced live video broadcasting services, such as Twitch and YouTube Live, are becoming increasingly popular. In such a service, viewers are allowed to perform rich interactions, such as posting comments and donating monetary virtual gifts, while watching videos. Understanding viewer interactions is essential for people to comprehend the production and consumption of the crowdsourced live video content and improve the service. However, the basic characteristics of the viewer interactions are still unknown. In this paper, we present a comprehensive measurement study of the viewer interactions on Douyu, a popular crowdsourced live video broadcasting website in China. Our measurement spans four months and contains comment posting and virtual gift donating interactions from tens of millions of viewers in hundreds of thousands of channels. Based on the measurement data, we carry out a content analysis on danmu comments and characterize the patterns of the viewer interactions. We build a suite of models for capturing the gift donating process, viewer activity, and channel popularity. We further analyze the influences of the broadcaster’s behavioral factors on a channel’s popularity and present methodologies for popularity predicting. Our measurement and analysis have important implications on the design and business policy of the crowdsourced live video broadcasting services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the deepening of electricity market reform in China, the competition in the electricity retail market becomes increasingly intense. Electricity retailers (ERs) need to explore new business models to enhance their competitiveness in the retail market. Meanwhile, with the improvement of industrial production and people's living standards, more and more nonlinear electrical equipment have been put into use, leading to severe harmonic pollution problems. Harmonic pollution causes loss of electricity, resulting in the economic loss of customers, especially for large industrial customers. In the above contexts, this paper proposes a novel business model that incorporates harmonic control as a value-added service into electricity retail contracts for utility-owned ERs. Both utility-owned ERs and customers can benefit from the designed business model. For customers, it helps them to improve the power quality while saving the electricity cost. For ERs, it helps them to cultivate the customer loyalty and improve the customer satisfaction. A case study is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed business model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional and global geo-political and geo-strategic whirlwind changes have pushed the states to revisit and reconceptualize their role and position. Mutual politico-economic and strategic significance propel them to constitute new alliances and sign new pacts and protocols. In the contemporary world, new avenues of regional and inter-regional economic cooperation and trade have achieved the centrality at the stage of international relations. China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a Sino-Pak joint initiative, has become the flagship project of inter-regional connectivity and integration. The CPEC would link the regions to promote regional and inter-regional commerce and trade cooperation and would boost the economic activities which would resultantly become helpful to seal off the vicious cycle of poverty. However, some regional and non regional states expressed their reservations over CPEC. The paper will seek whether or not CPEC can help Pakistan to overcome its energy crisis and cure the ever-ailing economy? The study will also analyze how operational CPEC would counter the Indian hegemonic designs in South Asia? The research will also frame a set of recommendations to capitalize the CPEC and counter the possible considerations to Pakistan's security and economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to medicines has become a major concern for countries worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, as pharmaceutical production and trade have been disrupted in the course of the crisis. Antibiotics are one group of medicines where worries about access have been raised. Access to the right antibiotic at the right time is important not only for curing infections of individual patients, but also for curbing antibiotic resistance globally. Reliable pharmaceutical supply is key to ensuring access to medicines. The global supply of generic medicines has over the last decades been transformed by the rise of India's pharmaceutical industry. In this paper, I trace the changing role of this industry for the global export of antibiotics, by mapping and describing changes in Indian antibiotic exports and discussing these in light of historical processes and events. The paper offers a novel approach to analyse global antibiotic trajectories by using international trade data from publicly available resources combined with a secondary literature review. I show that India's pharmaceutical industry today holds a key role as one of the world's biggest exporters of antibiotic medicines, but with an increasing dependency on China as a supplier of antibiotic ingredients. This produces both opportunities and concerns for access to antibiotics globally. • Offers a novel approach to trace antibiotic and pharmaceutical geographies. • Uses international trade data to map India's role for global antibiotics supply. • Describes that India has become one of the world's biggest exporters of antibiotics. • Shows that India is highly dependent on China for import of antibiotic ingredients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to provide an original examination of the nature of the proliferation of sensitive materials and technologies by Chinese entities. A number of publications have attempted to understand the issue of proliferation stemming from businesses based in China, with many having commented on the efforts undertaken both by international actors and by the Chinese government to prevent it. However, relatively few scholars have sought, in any systematic and sustained way, to understand the types of Chinese companies involved in proliferation and the evolution of their behaviour. This paper seeks to argue and account for the declining role of, and concern regarding, Chinese state-owned enterprise in the global proliferation problem. Different accounts for this change, and the relating proliferation challenge posed by China, are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present paper proposes two weighted goal-programming models for optimizing crude oil production in the middle and later periods of oilfield development. These models divide the oil yield optimization problem into two stages according to the characteristics of Chinese oil companies' yield compositions. In the first stage, the total planned crude oil yield will be optimized by four sub-yields, while each sub-yield will be allocated optimally among different oil extract plants in the later stage. A case study is conducted to validate the proposed models. The results show that the model can address the annual crude oil yield planning subjectively. Moreover, the proposed model can rationally allocate resources among various extract oil plants and effectively reduce production costs in the context of ensuring planned oil yields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The five Central Asia countries are the core regions along the “Silk Road Economic Belt”. The deeply study of the trade potentials between China and the five Central Asia countries has great significance to push forward our country’s strategy of “Belt and Road”. Regarding to the analysis of current trade situation between China and the five Central Asia countries, this paper builds the corresponding gravity model to analyze the total trade potentials between China and the five Central Asian countries. The result of empirical analysis shows that the factors such as economic development level, transportation cost, tariff level and SCO are the main factors affecting export and bilateral trade. The economic development level of the two sides and SCO have positive impact on the export and bilateral trade total volume, while distance and tariff level play hindering role in the export and bilateral trade total volume. China and the five Central Asian countries have strong trade complementary, and therefore have a good trade development prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how changes in the structure of household income have affected inequality in urban China during the reform period. We conducted an inequality decomposition analysis by income sources using the household-level data from the Chinese Household Income Project Surveys for 1988, 1995 and 2002. The analysis reveals that the contribution of wages and salaries to inequality has declined over the years. Business income, which served as the inequality enhancing component in 1988, has turned into an inequality reducing force in 1995 and 2002. The marginal analysis reveals that 1% increase in business income neutralises about two-thirds of the increase in inequality caused by an equivalent increase in wages and salaries. Some business issues and policy options are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chinese petty traders are the most popular and yet most controversial foreign population that most Africans meet and engage with on a regular basis. Although the quality of their goods is suspect, their contribution of affordable goods to some African societies is recognized. There has been much discontent directed towards them, especially by small traders, because they are seen as undercutting local traders, not contributing to the local economy, and only interested in short-term gain. This paper examines the role of Chinese traders in Kampala, Uganda and their contributions to that country's economy according to a number of economic indicators as informed by the survey that the authors conducted in Kampala in 2012. It also analyses the Ugandan government's attitude toward these traders, the policies it implements, and the prospects for further investment in Uganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging Northern Sea Route (NSR) represents change to the existing liner network for China-EU container shipping. It is necessary to re-examine the container network in this context and assist liner companies in decision-making. This paper assesses the potential of the NSR based on designing a multi-port multi-trip liner service by establishing a two-stage optimization model. Based on the estimated data of NSR shipping, ship routing schemes on both the NSR and conventional routes are proposed. It is determined that container service along the NSR is largely influenced by ice-breaking charge, seasonality, and cargo volume, which makes NSR more likely to act as a supplementary line of the liner network in the short or medium term. The results also indicate that use of NSR may drive the redeployment of shipping network and hub ports in the long term. This study's conclusions may prove useful for strategic planning by liner companies, port authorities, and governments to assess the operation of liner service via the NSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the political campaigns launched by the Chinese Communist Party in the Maoist period, full mobilisation of the masses became the norm. Yet it was not just the authorities and their myriads of units and personnel who became involved. In order to achieve maximum impact, the CCP targeted and mobilised the families of the actors concerned. This paper examines the strategy and measures implemented by the CCP during the Five Antis Movement to manipulate the wives and children of businessmen and merchants and to use them as leverage in pressing businessmen and merchants to ' confess' and reveal their alleged wrongdoings in business deals with the state. Although most chose to resist and to side with their husband or father, political pressure was strong enough to force family members to become the instruments of power within the family. While the actual overall cost is impossible to evaluate, enlisting family members into political struggle left a legacy of distrust and uncertainty, which in turn dealt a serious blow to family ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]