Much of the recent work on the epistemology of causation has centered on two assumptions, known as the Causal Markov Condition and the Causal Faithfulness Condition. Philosophical discussions of the latter condition have exhibited situations in which it is likely to fail. This paper studies the Causal Faithfulness Condition as a conjunction of weaker conditions. We show that some of the weaker conjuncts can be empirically tested, and hence do not have to be assumed a priori. Our results lead to (...) two methodologically significant observations: (1) some common types of counterexamples to the Faithfulness condition constitute objections only to the empirically testable part of the condition; and (2) some common defenses of the Faithfulness condition do not provide justification or evidence for the testable parts of the condition. It is thus worthwhile to study the possibility of reliable causal inference under weaker Faithfulness conditions. As it turns out, the modification needed to make standard procedures work under a weaker version of the Faithfulness condition also has the practical effect of making them more robust when the standard Faithfulness condition actually holds. This, we argue, is related to the possibility of controlling error probabilities with finite sample size (“uniform consistency”) in causal inference. (shrink)

This paper extends the AGM theory of belief revision to accommodate infinitary belief change. We generalize both axiomatization and modeling of the AGM theory. We show that most properties of the AGM belief change operations are preserved by the generalized operations whereas the infinitary belief change operations have their special properties. We prove that the extended axiomatic system for the generalized belief change operators with a Limit Postulate properly specifies infinite belief change. This framework provides a basis for first-order belief (...) revision and the theory of revising a belief state by a belief state. (shrink)

This paper proposes an adaptive formation tracking control algorithm optimized by Q-learning scheme for multiple mobile robots. In order to handle the model uncertainties and external disturbances, a desired linear extended state observer is designed to develop an adaptive formation tracking control strategy. Then an adaptive method of sliding mode control parameters optimized by Q-learning scheme is employed, which can avoid the complex parameter tuning process. Furthermore, the stability of the closed-loop control system is rigorously proved by means of matrix (...) properties of graph theory and Lyapunov theory, and the formation tracking errors can be guaranteed to be uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, simulations are presented to show the proposed algorithm has the advantages of faster convergence rate, higher tracking accuracy, and better steady-state performance. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship plays a significant role in promoting the social and economic development of a country. At present, entrepreneurship education is widely carried out in universities and colleges in order to improve students’ entrepreneurial ability, and then to provide support for the formation of a comprehensive entrepreneurial situation. As entrepreneurship education has gradually become a hot topic of teaching for innovation and entrepreneurship education of international students, studies on the influencing mechanism of entrepreneurship education of international students in relation to their (...) entrepreneurial behavior are conducive to providing theoretical basis and empirical evidence for international students’ entrepreneurship education, so as to pertinently guide international students’ innovation and entrepreneurship practice. This study aims to explore the influence of entrepreneurship education, government support for entrepreneurship, global competence, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intention on the entrepreneurial behavior of international students in the Republic of Korea. It summarized and drew on the results of the existing literature research. According to the contents and points of research, this study takes the international students studying in Korea as the sample and uses statistical analysis software, SPSS 22.0 and AMOS 24.0, to establish a structural equation model to conduct empirical study on the influencing mechanism of entrepreneurial behavior of international students in Korea, so as to better understand the influence of entrepreneurship education in Korean universities and colleges on entrepreneurial behavior of international students in Korea. Based on the analysis results, this study puts forward the theoretical basis for the policies related to effective management of entrepreneurship, which will help alleviate the unemployment of young people studying in Korea and the tight labor market supply and demand. (shrink)

Counterfeiting is common in many industries. For the authenticity of online channel products and to combat counterfeiting, many companies have begun to use blockchain technology to trace product information. This paper investigates a dual-channel supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer, in which the manufacturer sells its standard products through the retailer and adopts blockchain technology to launch the online channel to sell the traceable products. A Stackelberg game is developed to depict the pricing decision and channel strategy (...) choice for the manufacturer. It shows that both the manufacturer and the retailer can benefit from blockchain adoption. And the longer it takes for product traceability, the lower the price of online traceable products. It is beneficial for the manufacturer when consumers in the market are less concerned about information transparency. For consumer sensitivity, as consumers’ acceptance of direct sales channels increases, the selling prices of online traceable products have risen. Furthermore, as the traceability time-sensitivity coefficient increases, the sales price of the traceable products decreases, and the retail price of offline standard products rises. The conclusion of this paper has a certain guiding role for the dominant manufacturers in choosing whether to apply blockchain technology to improve the demand for traceable products. (shrink)

Deep learning is widely used in the fields of information technology and education innovation but there are few studies for young children in the preschool stage. Therefore, we aimed to explore factors that affect children’s learning ability through collecting relevant information from teachers in the kindergarten. Literature review, interview, and questionnaire survey methods were used to determine the influencing factors of deep learning. There were five dimensions for these factors: the level of difficulty of academic, communication skills, level of active (...) collaboration, level of in-depth processing, and reflection level evaluation. Reliability and validity tests were used to analyze the data from questionnaires. In total, 100 valid questionnaires were collected. The Cronbach coefficients for academic challenge, communication, active cooperation, deep processing, and reflective evaluation were 0.801, 0.689, 0.770, 0.758, and 0.665, respectively. Principal component analysis revealed that there were three main factors that affect children’s learning depth: the level of deep processing, the level of reflective evaluation, and the active level of collaboration. In conclusion, there were several factors affecting deep learning in children and further studies are warranted to promote the development of this field. (shrink)

The flow of high-level talents in China is becoming more and more active and has a profound impact on the innovation and development of cities. Based on the research on the spatial distribution of the school and work stages of high-level talent in China, we study the structure and evolution of China’s high-level talent mobility network by using the data on the flow trajectory of talent among cities in China. The results show that: the spatial distribution of talents in the (...) two stages has greater consistency, but there is a change characteristic of “large dispersion, small agglomeration.” Compared with the school stage, the network in the work stage has much more connections; the centrality gap of cities has narrowed. “Core-periphery” structure of two networks is relatively significant and similar. The core layer in the two networks has not changed, but the subcore layer and the subedge layer have undergone changes. In addition, talents mainly flow to core and subcore cities. The space structure of network is more complex in the work stage, and it is expanding to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in southeastern China. (shrink)

Academic integrity policies at 200 institutions of higher education were examined for the presence of academic prohibitions against the nonmedical use of prescription stimulants or any other cognitive enhancing drug. Researchers used online search tools to locate policy handbooks in a stratified random sample of IHE’s drawn from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System database, searching for NMUPS/CED use as violations of either academic integrity or alcohol and other drug policies. Of 191 academic integrity policies found online, NMUPS/CED prohibitions were (...) present in only one. However, NMUPS was addressed in all but two of the 200 IHE AOD policies, often with language referencing IHE adherence to federal or state law. NMUPS/CED prohibitions are predominantly absent in IHE academic integrity policies, raising questions about whether colleges and universities are concerned about the use of enhancement drugs as a form of cheating. Implications for fairness, health promotion, and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Screen time has become a hot button issue in psychology with researchers fiercely debating its mental effects. If we want to understand the psychological dynamics of technology use, however, a numerical conceptualization of screen time will lead us to gloss over crucial distinctions. To make this point, the present article takes a hermeneutic approach to a negative form of screen time known as ‘phubbing’, which is the practice of snubbing conversational partners in favor of one’s phone. Using interview data, it (...) is demonstrated that whether or not phone use amounts to phubbing, that is, whether or not it tips over and becomes harmful, depends on a host of contextual factors such as relation (who), content (what), purpose (why), timing (when), and communication (how). These findings demonstrate that not all screen time is created equal: what is harmful and inappropriate in one context is benign in another, and vice versa. Simply put, screen time is not a numerical entity whose causal effects we can measure and explain, but a meaningful activity that we must try to understand. (shrink)

A main message from the causal modelling literature in the last several decades is that under some plausible assumptions, there can be statistically consistent procedures for inferring (features of) the causal structure of a set of random variables from observational data. But whether we can control the error probabilities with a finite sample size depends on the kind of consistency the procedures can achieve. It has been shown that in general, under the standard causal Markov and Faithfulness assumptions, the procedures (...) can only be pointwise but not uniformly consistent without substantial background knowledge. This implies the impossibility of choosing a finite sample size to control the worst case error probabilities. In this paper, I consider the simpler task of inferring causal directions when the skeleton of the causal structure is known, and establish a similarly negative result concerning the possibility of controlling error probabilities. Although the result is negative in form, it has an interesting positive implication for causal discovery methods. (shrink)

We examine the relationship between social insurance contributions and earnings management for publicly listed firms in China. Our empirical results show that the social insurance contributions burden significantly reduces the degree of earnings management by reducing the level of free cash flow. Additionally, the negative relation between social insurance contributions burden and earnings management is more pronounced when the internal and external social insurance pressures are high and when the firms are large non-state-owned enterprises. We also discuss the heterogeneity among (...) firms for different financing constraints, external financing environment, regional marketization, and internal and external corporate governance. Finally, we further find that under the dual collecting system, although the social security administration is a better collecting agency, the local tax bureau acting with full responsibility is more effective than the collecting system. (shrink)

In this paper it is shown that the meet-inaccessible degrees are dense in R. The construction uses an 0''-priority argument. As a consequence, the meet-inaccessible degrees and the meet-accessible degrees give a partition of R into two sets, either of which is a nontrivial dense subset of R and generates R - {0} under joins (thus an automorphism base of R).

The author examines He Lin's interpretation of Zhu Xi's method of intuition from a phenomenological-hermeneutical perspective and by exposing Zhu's philosophical presuppositions. In contrast with Lu Xiangshan's intuitive method, Zhu Xi's method of reading classics advocates "emptying your heart and flowing with the text" and, in this spirit, explains the celebrated "exhaustive investigation on the principles of things (ge wu qiong li)." "Text," according to Zhu, is therefore not an object in ordinary sense but a "contextual region" or "sensible pattern" (...) that, when merged with the reader, generates meanings. Furthermore, by discussing the related doctrines of Lao Zi, Zhuang Zi, Hua-Yan Buddhism, Zhou Dunyi, and Zhu Xi's own "One principle with many manifestations (li yi fen shu)," the author identifies the philosophical preconditions of Zhu's method. Based on this analysis, the author goes on to illustrate Zhu's understanding of "observing potential yet unapparent pleasure, anger, sorrow and happiness" and "maintaining a serious attitude (zhu jing).". (shrink)

In the Original publication of the article the revised date was erroneously published as: 20 August 2017 the correct date is: 20 August 2020.

Ultrasonic excitation has been widely used in the detection of microcracks on metal surfaces, but there are problems such as poor excitation effect of ultrasonic pulse, long time to reach the best excitation, and difficult to find microcracks. In this paper, an adaptive ultrasonic pulse excitation device and infrared thermal imaging technology have been combined, as well as their control method, to solve the problem. The adaptive ultrasonic pulse excitation device adds intelligent modules to realize automatic adjustment of detection parameters, (...) which can quickly obtain reliable excitation; the multidegree-of-freedom base realizes the three-dimensional direction change of the ultrasonic gun to adapt to different excitation occasions. When the appropriate ultrasonic excitation makes microcracks in the resonance state, the microcracks can be frictionated, which produce heat rise with the temperature. Then, the microcrack defect can be detected by the infrared thermal instrument through the different surface temperatures with imaging recognition method. Our detection experiments of the titanium alloy plates and the aluminum alloy profiles of marine engineering show that the method can get reliable detection parameters in a short time and measure the crack length effectively. It can be used in many aspects such as crack detection in mechanical structures or complex equipment operating conditions and industrial production processes. (shrink)

The Protestant Work Ethic is a powerful force in Western culture with far reaching effects on our values and judgments. While research on PWE as a cultural value is abundant in diverse disciplines, little research has explored how this cultural value facilitates the use of heuristics when evaluating the morality of others. Using both PWE and illusory correlation as foundations, this paper explores whether people attribute positive moral characteristics to others merely based upon a description as hardworking. Three experiments suggest (...) merely being described as hardworking leads to perceptions of greater honesty, a more careful and detailed approach to one’s work, accompanied by a lesser likelihood of engaging in cheating behavior and a greater likelihood of accountability. These results have implications regarding the detection of deviant/fraudulent behavior. (shrink)

If we inspect closely the works that ascend to world literature from the peripheral, David Damrosch’s well-recognized argument that “world literature is writing that gains in translation” may need some revision, because apparently translation is not the sole factor that decides the formation of world literature. Translated works do not necessarily represent the best part in one national literature. Damrosch’s overemphasis on translation differences and untranslatability in world literature tends to overlook the syncretism of heterogeneous literatures: The influence of Roman (...) Empire on Indian Buddhism, the influx of elements from Indian, Arabic, and Persian stories into European writers’ creation, the genres of China’s ancient literature influenced by Buddhism, etc. Furthermore, a great deal of Chinese idioms and allusions appearing in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese literatures provide us a general view of how world literature forms through exchange and syncretism. On this account, Damrosh’s argument may be reformulated as “world literature is writing that gains in variation.” Variation reflects the ability to absorb otherness and then to create something new. Meanwhile, the perspective of literary syncretism will help us reasonably distinguish world literature and national canons. (shrink)

The pressure control for a liquid nature gas ship is vital for the cargo handling system which is a nonlinear, unstable, and controllable complex system accompanied by the dynamics of time delay. To improve the control effect, this article proposed a robust controller based on closed-loop gain shaping algorithm by mirror-mapping approach. In addition, the complete mechanism models for the system are established to predict the changes of temperature, pressure, and liquid inventory in the cargo tank. The heat exchanges and (...) evaporation of liquid are also considered. By collecting the data from the LNG ship “Dapeng,” the system models are validated. At the same time, the comparative experiment is introduced to verify the reliability and effectiveness. The scheme has been compared with the 2-DOF structure control law of modified Smith predictor. The comparative experimental results show that the scheme proposed in this note has a strong disturbance rejection ability and steady-state performance. The controller designed in this note has advantages of simplified construction method, satisfactory control effect and robustness. (shrink)

In place of the traditional epistemological view of knowledge as justified true belief we argue that artificial intelligence and law needs an evidence-based epistemology according to which scientific knowledge is based on critical analysis of evidence using argumentation. This new epistemology of scientific evidence (ESE) models scientific knowledge as achieved through a process of marshaling evidence in a scientific inquiry that results in a convergence of scientific theories and research results. We show how a dialogue interface of argument from expert (...) opinion, along with its set of critical questions, provides the argumentation component of the ESE. It enables internal scientific knowledge to be translated over into a wider arena in which individual nonexpert citizens and groups can make use of it. The external component shows how evidence is presented and used in a legal procedural setting that includes fact-finding, weighing the credibility of expert witnesses, and critical questioning of arguments. The paper critically reviews the standards of admissibility of scientific evidence using the ESE. (shrink)

Alcohol displays on Facebook are ever present and can be socially desirable for college students. Because problematic drinking is a concern for college students, this research sought to understand how different types of information on a Facebook page influence first year college student likelihood to drink. Telephone interviews were conducted with 338 incoming college freshmen from two large national universities. Data were obtained from a vignette prompt that presented a scenario in which a senior college student’s Facebook profile displayed wall (...) posts, pictures, and status updates that were drinking related or prosocial in nature. Participants were asked to report intention to drink alcohol with that student if they were together at a party. Findings supported the following hypotheses: Wall posts were most influential (the stickiest), followed by pictures, followed by status updates. Findings provide additional empirical support for established online impression formation patterns, and also provide evidence that virtual cues are being ingrained as schemas in interpersonal communication. These results are discussed in relation to the concept of sticky cues in impression formation. (shrink)

Many corporations actively engage in political activities to enhance their relationships with politicians, facilitating access to scarce resources and creating competitive advantages. We investigate corporate donations to explore how they initiate interactions between firms and new local leaders in China. Specifically, we propose that political turnover creates unique opportunities for firms to win over new officials via corporate donations, especially in competitive markets. Moreover, we find that firms that make generous donations at the beginning of a new city secretary’s tenure (...) receive more attention from representatives of new local leaders, especially firms that were politically disadvantaged under a predecessor’s governance. Empirical studies on the turnover of city secretaries between 2001 and 2012 in China strongly support our hypotheses. Consequently, this study improves our understanding of how corporate donations initiate social exchanges between firms and politicians. (shrink)

The present study analyses the psychometric properties of the irrational procrastination scale in a sample of United States college students using the Rasch modeling approach. Results showed that the IPS items had a high level of reliability, good content validity, structural validity, and substantive validity, and no differential item functioning effects in terms of gender. The IPS was found to be unidimensional, supporting the originally proposed theoretical structure by Steel. Finally, psychometric implications derived from the results and study limitations are (...) discussed; recommendations for future investigations are also offered. (shrink)

We investigated the pairing of a financial news article prediction system, AZFinText, with sentiment analysis techniques. From our comparisons we found that news articles of a subjective nature were easier to predict in both price direction (59.0% vs 50.4% without sentiment) and through a simple trading engine (3.30% return vs 2.41% without sentiment). Looking into sentiment further, we found that news articles of a negative sentiment were easiest to predict in both price direction (50.9% vs 50.4% without sentiment) and our (...) simple trading engine (3.04% return vs 2.41% without sentiment). Investigating the negative sentiment further, we found that AZFinText was best able to predict price decreases in articles of a positive sentiment (53.5%) and price increases in articles of a negative or neutral sentiment (52.4% and 49.5% respectively). (shrink)

Brain lateralization of lexical tone processing remains a matter of debate. In this study we used a dichotic listening paradigm to examine the influences of the knowledge of Jyutping, linguistic-processing demand and tone type on the ear preference pattern of native tone processing in Hong Kong Cantonese speakers. While participants with little knowledge of Jyutping showed a previously reported left-ear advantage, those with a good level of Jyutping expertise exhibited either a right-ear advantage or bilateral processing during lexical tone identification (...) and contour tone discrimination, respectively. As for the effect of linguistic-processing demand, while an LEA was found in acoustic/phonetic perception situations, this advantage disappeared and was replaced by a bilateral pattern in conditions that involved a greater extent of linguistic processing, suggesting an increased involvement of the left hemisphere. Regarding the effect of tone type, both groups showed an LEA in level tone discrimination, but only the Jyutping group demonstrated a bilateral pattern in contour tone discrimination. Overall, knowledge of written codes of tones, greater degree of linguistic processing and contour tone processing seem to influence the brain lateralization of lexical tone processing in native listeners of Cantonese by increasing the recruitment of the left-hemisphere language network. (shrink)

Modern socialist economic reforms which center on the establishment of a commodity based economic system, demand a reconsideration of human nature. Marxism and human sociobiology give different answers to questions about human nature, but neither is complete in itself. It seems timely, therefore, to suggest that a combination of biological understanding with a Marxist-based social understanding would produce a more adequate notion of human nature, thereby helping us to resolve a number of problems posed by reforms currently taking place in (...) socialist countries. We might also hope to face new challenges posed in the future. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the ultimate bound set and positively invariant set of a 3D Lorenz-like chaotic system, which is different from the well-known Lorenz system, Rössler system, Chen system, Lü system, and even Lorenz system family. Furthermore, we investigate the global exponential attractive set of this system via the Lyapunov function method. The rate of the trajectories going from the exterior of the globally exponential attractive set to the interior of the globally exponential attractive set is also obtained (...) for all the positive parameters values a,b,c. The innovation of this paper is that our approach to construct the ultimate bounded and globally exponential attractivity sets assumes that the corresponding sets depend on some artificial parameters ; that is, for the fixed parameters of the system, we have a series of sets depending on λ and m. The results contain the known result as a special case for the fixed λ and m. The efficiency of the scheme is shown numerically. The theoretical results may find wide applications in chaos control and chaos synchronization. (shrink)

Shared brain regions have been found for processing action and language, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the premotor cortex, and the inferior parietal lobule. However, in the context of action and language generation that shares the same action semantics, it is unclear whether the activity patterns within the overlapping brain regions would be the same. The changes in effective connectivity affected by these activity patterns are also unclear. In this fMRI study, participants were asked to perform hand action and (...) verb generation tasks toward object pictures. We identified shared and specific brain regions for the two tasks in the left PMC, IFG, and IPL. The mean activation level and multi-voxel pattern analysis revealed that the activity patterns in the shared sub-regions were distinct for the two tasks. The dynamic causal modeling results demonstrated that the information flows for the two tasks were different across the shared sub-regions. These results provided the first neuroimaging evidence that the action and verb generation were task context driven in the shared regions, and the distinct patterns of neural information flow across the PMC-IFG-IPL neural network were affected by the polymodal processing in the shared regions. (shrink)

The car-sharing system is a popular rental model for cars in shared use. It has become particularly attractive due to its flexibility; that is, the car can be rented and returned anywhere within one of the authorized parking slots. The main objective of this research work is to predict the car usage in parking stations and to investigate the factors that help to improve the prediction. Thus, new strategies can be designed to make more cars on the road and fewer (...) in the parking stations. To achieve that, various machine learning models, namely vector autoregression, support vector regression, eXtreme gradient boosting, k-nearest neighbors, and deep learning models specifically long short-time memory, gated recurrent unit, convolutional neural network, CNN-LSTM, and multilayer perceptron, were performed on different kinds of features. These features include the past usage levels, Chongqing’s environmental conditions, and temporal information. After comparing the obtained results using different metrics, we found that CNN-LSTM outperformed other methods to predict the future car usage. Meanwhile, the model using all the different feature categories results in the most precise prediction than any of the models using one feature category at a time. (shrink)

Presently, the State Grid Corporation of China has accumulated a large amount of maintenance records for power primary equipment. Unfortunately, most of these records are unstructured data which lead to difficultly analyze and utilize them. The emergence of natural language processing technology and deep learning methods provide a solution for unstructured text data. This paper proposes a progressive multitype feature fusion model to recognize Chinese named entity of unstructured maintenance records for power primary equipment. Firstly, the textual characteristics and word (...) separation difficulties of maintenance records are analyzed, then 7 main entity categories of power technical terms from unstructured maintenance records are chosen, and 3452 maintenance records are labeled by these categories, which is so called EPE-MR training dataset. Secondly, the standard test reports, standard maintenance, and fault analysis reports for three types of power primary equipment are employed as corpus to train character embedding in order to obtain certain words representation ability of maintenance records. After that, progressive multilevel radicals feature extraction module is designed to get detailed and fine semantic information in a hierarchical manner. Further, radicals feature representation and character embedding are concatenated and sent to BiLSTM module to extract contextual information in order to improve Chinese entity recognition ability. Moreover, CRF is introduced to handle the dependencies among prediction labels and to output the optimal prediction sequence, which can easily obtain structured data of maintenance records. Finally, comparative experiments on public MSRA dataset, China People’s Daily corpus, and EPE-MR dataset are implemented, respectively, which show the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

BackgroundBilateral cerebral palsy is the most common type of CP in children and is often accompanied by different degrees of communication impairment. Several studies have attempted to identify children at high risk for communication impairment. However, most prediction factors are qualitative and subjective and may be influenced by rater bias. Individualized objective diagnostic and/or prediction methods are still lacking, and an effective method is urgently needed to guide clinical diagnosis and treatment. The aim of this study is to develop and (...) validate an objective, individual-based model for the prediction of communication impairment in children with BCP by the time they enter school.MethodsA multicenter prospective cohort study will be conducted in four Chinese hospitals. A total of 178 children with BCP will undergo advanced brain magnetic resonance imaging at baseline. At school entry, communication performance will be assessed by a communication function classification system. Three-quarters of children with BCP will be allocated as a training cohort, whereas the remaining children will be allocated as a test cohort. Multivariate lesion- and connectome-based approaches, which have shown good predictive ability of language performance in stroke patients, will be applied to extract features from MR images for each child with BCP. Multiple machine learning models using extracted features to predict communication impairment for each child with BCP will be constructed using data from the training cohort and externally validated using data from the test cohort. Prediction accuracy across models in the test cohort will be statistically compared.DiscussionThe findings of the study may lead to the development of several translational tools that can individually predict communication impairment in children newly diagnosed with BCP to ensure that these children receive early, targeted therapeutic intervention before they begin school.Trial registrationThe study has been registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry. (shrink)

The emergence of conflicts between environmental safety incidents and protection rights generates sizeable political costs, which endangers the legitimacy of the government as well as political security and stability. This article further examines the role of political costs in environmental issues. First, political costs in relation to environmental issues are defined. An equilibrium strategic analysis is then presented using an evolutionary game model in which the strategic behavioral choices of government, enterprises, and citizens are investigated by embedding political costs in (...) the environmental governance system. Furthermore, the small-signal model was innovatively applied to simulate and analyze the stability of political costs under different equilibrium strategies in the system. The results show the following. Pubic behavior and government are the dominant factors that impact stability and instability, respectively. Public behavior is the core element that affects political cost consumption. When political costs are extremely depleted, the public will neglect economic interests, turn toward environmental interests, and choose the negative participation strategy, which destabilizes the system. The political cost signal at the optimal equilibrium point not only warns the government not to take the desperate action of concealing information asymmetry but also allows the government to let go of its hands to deal with the environmental issues. Corresponding policy recommendations are proposed. (shrink)

Supply chain financing guaranteed by third-party logistics firms is an effective way to solve the financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises. Studies have explored factors that affect the willingness of supply chain financial credit providers under guarantee of 3PL firms. However, whether the scale of 3PL firms will affect the bank’s credit decision has not been studied, as well as the neural processing of credit decisions. To clarify these issues, this study extracted behavioral and event-related potentials data when participants (...) performed a selection task of judging whether to grant credit to guaranteed financing-seeking enterprises according to the large or small scale of the 3PL guaranteeing firms. The behavioral results showed that under the condition of a large-scale 3PL guaranteeing firm, the willingness to provide credit to SMEs was higher than that under the condition of a small-scale 3PL guaranteeing firm. This finding indicates there was credit scale discrimination against 3PL guaranteeing firms in supply chain finance. The ERP results showed that compared with the condition of a large-scale 3PL guaranteeing firm, a greater N2 amplitude was induced under the condition of a small-scale 3PL guaranteeing firm, which indicated that credit decision makers experienced greater perceived risk and more decision-making conflict. In contrast, a larger LPP amplitude was detected under the condition of a large-scale 3PL guaranteeing firm, which indicated that large-scale 3PL guaranteeing firms received more positive comments and more positive emotions from credit decision makers than small-scale 3PL guaranteeing firms. Based on these results, this study reveals the cognition process of credit decision makers regarding the impact of the 3PL guaranteeing firm scale on the willingness to provide credit in supply chain finance and explains the theory of credit scale discrimination from the perspective of decision neuroscience. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the conditional dependence between China and U.S. stock markets by employing the Copula-mixed-data sampling framework. In the case of EPU, we consider the global EPU, the American EPU, and the China EPU. The empirical analysis based on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite index in China and the S&P 500 index in the U.S. shows that the tail dependence between China and U.S. stock markets is symmetrical, and the t (...) Copula outperforms alternative Copulas in terms of in-sample goodness of fit. In particular, we find that the t Copula-MIDAS model with EPU dominates the traditional time-varying t Copula in terms of in-sample fitting. Moreover, we observe that both the GEPU and AEPU have a significantly positive impact on the conditional dependence between China and U.S. stock markets, whereas CEPU has no significant impact. The tail dependence between China and U.S. stock markets exhibits an increasing trend, particularly in the recent years. (shrink)

In recent years, supply chain finance is exploited to solve the financing difficulties of small- and medium-sized enterprises. SME credit risk assessment is a critical part in the SCF system. The diffusion of SME credit risk may cause serious consequences, leading the whole supply chain finance system unstable and insecure. Compared with traditional credit risk assessment models, the supply chain relationship, credit condition of SME, and core enterprises should all be considered to rate SME credit risk in SCF. Traditional methods (...) mix all indicators from different index systems. They cannot give a quantitative result on how these index systems work. Furthermore, traditional credit risk assessment models are heavily dependent on the number of annotated SME data. However, it is implausible to accumulate enough credit risky SMEs in advance. In this paper, we propose an adaptive heterogenous multiview graph learning method to tackle the small sample size problem for SMEs’ credit risk forecasting. Three graphs are constructed by using indicators from supply chain operation, SME financial indicator, and nonfinancial indicator individually. All the graphs are integrated in an adaptive manner, providing a quantitative explanation on how the three parts cooperate. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed method has good performance for determining whether SME is risky or nonrisky in SCF. From the perspective of SCF, SME financing ability is still the main factor to determine the credit risk of SME. (shrink)