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This article belongs to the Section Physical Sensors ; A planar array of low profile horns fed by a transverse slotted waveguide array in the low millimeter-wave regime (28 GHz) is presented. The array of transverse slots cannot be directly used as antenna as it has grating lobes due to the fact that slot elements must be spaced a guided wavelength. However, these slots can be transformed into low profile horns that with their radiation patterns attenuate the grating lobes. To this aim, low profile horns with less than 0.6λ0 height were designed. The horns include a couple of chips that contribute to further reduce the grating lobes especially in the H-plane. The good performance of the designed array was demonstrated by both simulations and experiments performed on a manufactured prototype. A 5 × 5 array was designed that has a measured realized gain of 26.6 dBi with a bandwidth below 2%, still useful for some applications such as some radar systems. The total electrical size of the array is 6.63λ0× 6.63λ0. The radiation efficiency is very high and the aperture efficiency is above 80%. This all-metal solution is advantageous for millimeter-wave applications where losses sustained by dielectric materials become severe and it can be easily scaled to higher frequencies. ; This work was partially supported by the "Center for mmWave Smart Radar Systems and Technologies" under the Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan and partially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan under Grant numbers MOST 107-3017-F-009-001 and 107-2221-E-009-051-MY2. This work was also partially supported by the Spanish Government with grant numbers: TEC2016-79700-C2-2-R and PID2019-107688RB-C21.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of customer participation in a service delivery process by designing and testing an empirical model with the employees' point of view in mind.Design/methodology/approach– Using data collected from 166 pairs of customers and service employees in the context of professional financial insurance services, this study uses partial least square path modeling in SmartPLS to analyze the proposed model.Findings– The results of the study show that customer participation produces positive effects on employees' job satisfaction only if such participation minimizes job stress and meets employees' relational needs. Job stress and satisfaction were strong predictors for organizational commitment, but the proposed relationship between relational value and organizational commitment was not found.Practical implications– This study suggests that customer participation can be a win-win situation for employees and the service firm. Employees who create relational value with their customers effectively enjoy their jobs more and are more likely to build and maintain long-term relationships with their service firm.Originality/value– The findings highlighted the roles of the customer and the employee and indicated the heuristic value of viewing job satisfaction and organizational commitment as consequences of customer participation. This can enhance the understanding of how encounters should be designed to support employees and improve the co-creation of value.

Due to the Philippines' current condition in COVID-19, the Social Security System (SSS) has launched a mobile app as an intervention for walk-in appointments and another convenient way to exchange information. By integrating the extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study scrutinizes and investigates the various factors influencing the SSS mobile app's accessibility. An online questionnaire composed of 60 items required at least 200 respondents. The researchers measured twelve latent variables, including social influence, awareness of service, computer self-efficacy, quality of internet connection, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, subjective norms, the impression of use, demographic, attitude towards using, behavioral intention to use, and actual use of SSS mobile app. The results of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) indicated that awareness of service had a substantial direct influence on computer self-efficacy and perceived usefulness. In addition, computer self-efficacy had a substantial direct influence on the quality of internet connection and perceived ease of used, in which this perceived ease of use had a substantial direct influence on perceived usefulness and attitude toward using the mobile application. This study's findings can be used to provide information on the key factors that have been identified as having a considerable effect on the app's accessibility and further improving the overall service efficiency of the SSS mobile app. Finally, the study's model construct will be valuable for researchers and other sectors investigating user–software interaction of applicable government or private service mobile applications.

Our paper investigates the relationship between corporate governance (internal corporate governance mechanism) and announcement returns of spinoff firms, and examines whether such relationship can be explained by product market competition (external corporate governance mechanism). Using a sample of 269 completed spinoffs between 1983 and 2009, we find a nonlinear U-shaped relationship between corporate governance and the cumulative abnormal return around the announcement period. Moreover, we find that such a nonlinear relationship hinges on the level of competition in the market in which the spinoff firms operate. Specifically, we find that weak governance firms experience higher announcement period return only in highly competitive industries, while strong governance firms exhibit higher announcement period return, but only in moderately competitive industries. Our findings reconcile the mixed results in the literature regarding the relationship between corporate governance and firm value by examining the effect of product market competition on this relationship. Our results highlight the importance of product market competition as a moderator between corporate governance and the announcement period return of the spinoff firms.

In 2005, the Taiwanese government has drawn up The Talent Quality-management System (TTQS) for businesses and medical units to carry out internal human training by offering a sound education and training evaluating system. Hospital executives are more aware of the need to improve the competitiveness of clinical staff and realize that a patient-centered healthcare model requires continuous innovation and quality improvement to enhance the competitiveness of hospitals. Using two-stage clustering (Self-Organization Maps and K-means), this research identified different types of departments-including physicians, medical staff, and administrators and discussed the respective core competency of the different groups. The study result showed the importance of conveying the core competency to the various departments and units in hospitals. Based on analyses we found that hospital staff's core competency identification is essential to help construct a human resources system, serving as a reference for hospitals and corporations in the selection, education, utilization, and retention of talents, as well as a practical benchmark for core competency applicable in the human resource management of hospitals and corporations.