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Abstract. Trade-in remanufacturing is a commonly adopted business practice under which firms collect used products for remanufacturing by allowing repeat customers to trade in used products for upgraded ones at [...]

Meat is an important source of high-value protein providing sustainable nutrition for human health. The discolouration of meat results in significant waste, which threatens the sustainability of meat production in terms of availability, affordability, and utilisation. Advancing the knowledge of factors and underlying mechanisms for meat discolouration supports the sustainability transformation of meat production practices. Previous studies found that colour stability may be associated with signature changes in certain metabolites, including NADH, glutamate, methionine, and testosterone. This study aimed to confirm the effect of these metabolites and sex, sire, and muscle type on lamb meat colour. NADH and glutamate improved colour stability as evidenced by the increased metmyoglobin reductase activity, while methionine and testosterone had detrimental effects. Overall, lamb meat was discoloured with retail display for up to 10 days at 4 °C. The semitendinosus muscle had higher L*, b*, and hue angle and lower a* (p < 0.05) than other muscles, especially in ewes. Lamb meat from rams had a higher L* and hue angle and lower a* than the ewes (p < 0.05), especially in the colour-labile group, suggesting an interaction between sex and sire. The outcomes of this study will help make the production of meat more sustainable by assisting the meat industry in improving the selection of animals for meat production and processing practices to reduce meat waste due to discolouration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content-sharing social network platforms rely heavily on user-generated content to attract users and advertisers, but they have limited authority over content provision. We develop an intervention that leverages social interactions between users to stimulate content production. We study social nudges, whereby users connected with a content provider on a platform encourage that provider to supply more content. We conducted a randomized field experiment (N = 993 , 676) on a video-sharing social network platform where treatment providers could receive messages from other users encouraging them to produce more, but control providers could not. We find that social nudges not only immediately boosted video supply by 13.21% without changing video quality but also, increased the number of nudges providers sent to others by 15.57%. Such production-boosting and diffusion effects, although declining over time, lasted beyond the day of receiving nudges and were amplified when nudge senders and recipients had stronger ties. We replicate these results in a second experiment. To estimate the overall production boost over the entire network and guide platforms to utilize social nudges, we combine the experimental data with a social network model that captures the diffusion and over-time effects of social nudges. We showcase the importance of considering the network effects when estimating the impact of social nudges and optimizing platform operations regarding social nudges. Our research highlights the value of leveraging co-user influence for platforms and provides guidance for future research to incorporate the diffusion of an intervention into the estimation of its impacts within a social network. This paper was accepted by Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, operations management. Funding: H. Dai thanks the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) [Hellman Fellowship and Faculty Development Award] for funding support. R. Zhang is grateful for financial support from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council [Grant 16505418]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4622. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a periodic review joint pricing and inventory control model in which a firm faces both stochastic demand and fluctuating procurement costs. To address procurement cost fluctuation, the firm [...]

In this work, we report a controllable green synthesis of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) using chlorogenic acid (CGA) as the only reducing and stabilizing agent. The well-dispersed AuNPs are obtained due to the protection of CGA against aggregation. The resulting AuNPs are controllable in size and shape mainly by changing the molar ratio of HAuCl4 to CGA in reductive process. With an increase in CGA concentration, the average size of AuNPs increased, which resulted in different morphologies from spherical to flower-like shapes. The dropping speed of gold precursor is also found to influence the size of AuNPs in different trends. Additionally, the advantages of CGA for synergistic biological activities are demonstrated through the enhanced antioxidant activity of AuNPs with CGA for scavenging of DPPH radicals. The controllable size and shape of nanoparticles are potentially important in nanomedical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]