Firms innovate their new processes and products not only within their countries but also across national boundaries. This is known as cross‐border innovation, and many countries have initiated ...policies to support it. But how does government support influence cross‐border innovation? Through the lens of Porter's diamond model, this study conceptualizes government support as slack resources and investigates how it affects a firm's inventive activities in an uncertain, competitive global market. This study examines Chinese firms' patent filings in the United States under the enactment of the “innovative city” policy. We apply matching and generalized difference‐in‐differences techniques to this staggered quasi‐experimental setting and find that government support stimulates firms' cross‐border innovation. We further show that firms with higher research and development capacity take better advantage of government support. Finally, we show that government support leads to a rebalancing of exploratory and exploitative innovation such that a firm that has conducted more exploration will perform more exploitation and vice versa. Taken together, this study extends our understanding of slack from internal resources to government support in the context of global operations. Findings suggest that government actions that improve the ecosystem of innovation in one country strengthen firms' innovation and competitiveness overseas.
ABSTRACT
Healthcare providers are expected to compete across multiple performance dimensions, thereby managing both their financial productivity and the patients’ “in process” experiences. This fact ...creates tensions in some healthcare settings, as providers need to provide high‐quality care and positive customer experiences while still being financially responsible. Increasingly, these goals create pressures that require emergency departments (EDs) to generate operational efficiencies to improve how healthcare providers manage patient flow at different service stages and to deliver better care for an increasing number of patients at a more reasonable cost. From the perspective of managing patient process flow stage times, this article uses online ratings and secondary source data to examine how EDs can simultaneously improve both experiential and financial productivity performance. Our findings strongly indicate that EDs may be able to leverage the physician‐directed evaluation time stage to improve departmental efficiencies in both performance areas. However, the diminishing value of evaluation time and the time a patient spends in pre‐care for ED services are necessary contingencies to consider. Finally, to illustrate the practical relevance of these findings, we explore the perceived tradeoffs of managing the different patient flow time stages.
Time synchronization is crucial for cyber-physical systems (CPSs), e.g., wireless sensor and actuator networks. Cyber physical security is an important yet challenging problem. In particular, attacks ...to the time synchronization service may incur data distortion or even malfunction of the whole system. Sybil attack is one of the most common attack types for sensor networks, where a node illegitimately claims multiple identities. Existing secure time-synchronization protocols; however, cannot well address Sybil attacks in the time synchronization process. We propose a robust and secure time-synchronization protocol (RTSP) to defend against Sybil attacks. Different from previous secure timesync protocols, RTSP employs a novel graph theoretical approach, which is able to perform anomaly detection at the message level instead of the node level. This fine-grained detection ability enables RTSP to become robust against Sybil attacks, as well as node compromise and message manipulation attacks. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed protocol.
The “time-space compression” effect of high-speed rail (HSR) has effectively improved the accessibility of the cities and has had a profound impact on tourism. This study explores the impact of HSR ...on tourism development in cities along HSR lines from the perspective of transfer of transport advantages, then evaluates the impact of HSR on tourism development using panel data of 286 cities in China from 2005 to 2013 by the difference-in-differences (DID) method. The empirical results show that the opening of HSR has significantly increased the tourism revenue and tourist arrivals. These results are still holds after considering endogenous HSR lines placement, and by various robustness checks. Further analysis of nodal effect shows that node cities experienced greater growth in tourism revenue than non-node cities. The analysis of mechanism found that tourism development in node cities relied on hotel industry, while tourism development in non-node cities relied on scenic spots industry. The findings of this study validate the role of HSR as a catalyst for urban tourism development, and reveal the comparative advantages of tourism in different cities under the influence of HSR. This study has important reference value for the development of tourism industry policies in cities along and around HSR lines.
The "time-space compression" effect of high-speed rail (HSR) has effectively improved the accessibility of the cities and has had a profound impact on tourism. This study explores the impact of HSR ...on tourism development in cities along HSR lines from the perspective of transfer of transport advantages, then evaluates the impact of HSR on tourism development using panel data of 286 cities in China from 2005 to 2013 by the difference-in-differences (DID) method. The empirical results show that the opening of HSR has significantly increased the tourism revenue and tourist arrivals. These results are still holds after considering endogenous HSR lines placement, and by various robustness checks. Further analysis of nodal effect shows that node cities experienced greater growth in tourism revenue than non-node cities. The analysis of mechanism found that tourism development in node cities relied on hotel industry, while tourism development in non-node cities relied on scenic spots industry. The findings of this study validate the role of HSR as a catalyst for urban tourism development, and reveal the comparative advantages of tourism in different cities under the influence of HSR. This study has important reference value for the development of tourism industry policies in cities along and around HSR lines.
Many open collaboration platforms (e.g., Wikipedia) have recently utilized automated algorithmic agents, called Bots, to solve the issue of stagnating user participation. However, understanding of ...how such a bot agent affects user activities in open collaboration is limited. In this study, we examine (i) whether bot intervention affects user participation and (ii) whether the impact of bot intervention could vary by characteristics of open collaboration works. We pursue our research goals by utilizing a rich dataset from between 2005 and 2017 from an online open collaboration platform. The platform has recently utilized two types of unique bots that interact with human users in open collaboration. By employing difference-in-differences approach, we show that bot intervention in open collaboration leads to unintended consequences as it significantly demotivates user participation. We further show that the negative effect of bot intervention is alleviated if more active users are engaged or if covered topics have a higher concentration in a collaboration work. This provides directions for businesses to resolve the unintended demotivation problem in utilizing bot agents.
•We analyze the impact of bot intervention on user participation.•We examine whether such impact could vary by characteristics of open collaboration works.•We use a rich dataset between 2005 and 2017 from an online open collaboration platform.•We show that bot intervention in open collaboration leads to unintended consequences.•We show that the negative effect of bot intervention is alleviated if more active users are engaged.
Metabolomics is an essential method to study the dynamic changes of metabolic networks and products using modern analytical techniques, as well as reveal the life phenomena and their inherent laws. ...Currently, more and more attention has been paid to the development of metabolic histochemistry in the fungus field. This paper reviews the application of metabolomics in fungal research from five aspects: identification, response to stress, metabolite discovery, metabolism engineering, and fungal interactions with plants.
•Tartary buckwheat was evaluated for starch properties.•Starch was characterized using SEM, XRD, RVA and DSC.•Tartary buckwheat starch has unique pasting and physicochemical properties.•Tartary ...buckwheat starch was a potential source of retrograded starch.
A starch rich fraction is a side product in Tartary buckwheat processing. This study investigated the fractions that are of technological and nutritional interest. Tartary buckwheat starch granules had a diameter of 3–14μm, and presented a typical type “A” X-ray diffraction pattern. They contained nearly 39.0% amylose. The solubility of Tartary buckwheat starch was much lower at 70–90°C (ranging within 9.9–10.4% at 90°C) than that in maize (up to 49.3%) and potato (up to 85.0%) starch. The starch of one variety of Tartary buckwheat had significantly lower solubility at 70°C and 80°C than that of common buckwheat. The starch peak viscosity and breakdown were higher and pasting time was shorter in Tartary buckwheat than in that of the starch of common buckwheat. Tartary buckwheat starch had unique pasting and physicochemical properties, and is thereby capable of being exploited as a suitable raw material of retrograded starch in food processing.
► Significant varietal difference in yield was observed under AWD conditions. ► Spikelets per panicle was responsible for varietal difference in yield. ► There was no difference in yield between AWD ...and continuously flooded rice. ► AWD saved 24–38% irrigation water compared with continuously flooded rice. ► AWD had higher water productivity than continuously flooded rice.
Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) irrigation has been proven to be an effective water-saving technology for irrigated rice system. There is limited information on the performance of “super” hybrid rice varieties under AWD conditions. This study was conducted to compare grain yield and other related traits between a “super” hybrid rice variety and a water-saving and drought-resistance rice (WDR) variety and to identify plant traits which were responsible for varietal difference in grain yield under AWD conditions. Yangliangyou 6 (YLY6, a “super” hybrid rice variety) and Hanyou 3 (HY3, a WDR variety) were grown under AWD and continuously flood-irrigated (CF) conditions across different levels of nitrogen input in Hubei, China in 2009 and 2010. Grain yield, yield attributes, total water input, water productivity, and nitrogen use efficiency were measured. AWD saved 24% and 38% irrigation water compared with CF in 2009 and 2010, respectively. There was insignificant difference in grain yield between AWD and CF. On average, YLY6 produced 21.5% higher yield than HY3 under AWD conditions. Like grain yield, YLY6 showed consistently higher water productivity and physiological nitrogen use efficiency than HY3. Both total dry weight and harvest index contributed to higher grain yield of YLY6. Among the yield components, large sink size which was caused by more spikelets per panicle was mainly responsible for high grain yield of YLY6 compared with HY3. These results suggest that high-yielding varieties developed for the continuously flood-irrigated rice system could still produce high yield under safe AWD experienced in this study. “Super” hybrid rice varieties do not necessarily require more water input to produce high grain yield. Increasing the number of spikelets per panicle should be a primary target of breeding high-yielding rice varieties for AWD conditions.
