No abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of relational embeddedness on entrepreneurship in Taiwanese subsidiaries in China that are facing an uncertain and emerging environment.Design/methodology/approachFirst, four case studies are conducted to modify theoretical concepts and measuring instruments to fit them into the entrepreneurial context of multinational subsidiaries in a transitional economy. In the second stage, a survey is conducted to examine the associations between relational embeddedness and subsidiary entrepreneurship. A total of 265 executive officers, which is approximately 29 percent of 922 managers in the mailing list, reply to the questionnaire on their subsidiaries.FindingsThis study finds that subsidiary entrepreneurship has an inverse U‐shaped relationship with regards to customer or supplier relational embeddedness, a positive relationship with corporate relational embeddedness and no relationship with government relational embeddedness.Originality/valueBased on this study of Taiwanese subsidiaries operating in China there is an inverse‐U‐shaped link between relational embeddedness and customers and suppliers. Hence, this study confirms that over‐embeddedness with customers or suppliers negatively influences subsidiary entrepreneurship.

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the world’s manufacturing industry, particularly in terms of the continued increase in logistics costs that has led to an increase in business operating costs. This study proposes a two-stage model for evaluating the most appropriate outsourcing logistics companies for a manufacturing factory. In the first stage, a modified Delphi method was used to recruit experienced experts to determine criteria for evaluating outsourcing logistics vendors and establish a hierarchical structure. In the second stage, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used to evaluate suitable logistics companies based on the hierarchical structure. Finally, a case study was conducted to demonstrate the suitability of the two-stage model for evaluating outsourcing logistics companies for reducing logistics costs while maintaining service quality. The proposed model can be used as a basis for evaluating outsourcing logistics companies.

No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the rapid development of the digital economy. Previous studies have indicated that shipping fees are essential in delivery strategies and significantly impact order generation rates. According to market research, 68% of consumers would increase their orders to reach the minimum threshold for free delivery. However, previous studies have focused on the problem of setting free shipping thresholds, so the existing model of the e-commerce platform only allows consumers to choose whether to pay the total shipping fees or conditional free delivery with a free shipping threshold. A lack of literature concerns the partial pay for shipping fees before reaching the free shipping threshold. Therefore, this study proposes a new pricing model for shipping strategy that allows consumers to pay partial shipping fees. This model can increase the flexibility of consumer choice, thus increasing consumers’ willingness to purchase, which in turn increases the revenue of the e-commerce platform. The model was validated for 9-month on the e-commerce platform of a Smart-Integration company. The results showed that after introducing the new pricing model, the e-commerce platform’s sales grew by about 9%. This proposed model’s theoretical extension and empirical results can remedy the research gap in the extant literature.