Suchergebnisse

Currently, much attention is paid to the political aims and influence of Chinese outward investment, especially in developing Africa. This paper attempts to fill the knowledge-gap of international entrepreneurship literature by analyzing the entrepreneurial behavior of Chinese firms under the background of south-south economic cooperation. Through the case studies, we analyze the distinctive entrepreneurial behaviors and characters of different types of Chinese firms with high entrepreneurial spirits in Africa during the transitional time. After comparing the various entrepreneurial behaviors between Chinese and West investors, this paper sheds light on the potential positive roles of the entrepreneurial spirit, high risk-behavior and adaptability to foreign environment, which are necessary to successfully seek new, overseas entrepreneurial opportunities from an emerging market. Applications for firms' managers and policy makers are also offered.

Abstract
In this paper, we construct new valuation schemes for the liabilities and economic capital of insurance companies. Specifically, we first build a 'SAHARA' valuation framework based on Symmetric Asymptotic Hyperbolic Absolute Risk Aversion utility functions. Then, we construct a 'SAHARA-CPT' framework that incorporates the previous utility function as a value function and that is based on Cumulative Prospect Theory. The process used for assessing a life insurance company's own funds consists in replacing the market-consistent parametrization with a utility-consistent parametrization that accounts for the risk aversion of the market and the long-term duration of the company's commitments. Our illustrations show that this approach leads to a lower value of the Own Risk and Solvency Assessment and to a lower volatility of own funds. The framework that is based on cumulative prospect theory has the advantage over the expected utility theory framework that it considers a precautionary overweighting of extreme events, as a tradeoff for additional model complexity.

With rapid economic development and restructuring, there are an increasing number of aged or obsolete buildings in large cities, such as Hong Kong. Adaptive reuse of these buildings provides an alternative for property stakeholders towards more sustainable practices instead of redevelopment or destruction. Adaptive reuse can also make great contributions to sustainable development by reducing construction waste and saving natural resources. As a result of industrial restructuring, manufacturing plants were migrated from Hong Kong to Mainland China during the 1980s and 1990s. Many industrial buildings then became vacant or under-utilised. Adaptive reuse of these industrial buildings is considered a viable way forward for all parties, including government, property stakeholders and the community. However, the problem is how to deal with multiple criteria to assess how these buildings can be reused for residential living, retail, training centres, or other purposes. Adaptive reuse of industrial buildings is discussed in this paper, and a fuzzy adaptive reuse selection model is developed for decision-making. A hypothetical example is used to demonstrate the application of the method and show its effectiveness.

Online mental health service (OMHS) platforms have contributed significantly to the public's mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. However, it remains unclear why the public used OMHS platforms for psychological help-seeking (PHS) behavior and how PHS behavior varied across different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the ecological PHS behavior data from two OMHS platforms, we extracted population, psychological problems, and influential factors of PHS behavior by text mining and time series analysis methods. Seven top-ranked psychological problems (i.e., depression and anxiety, lack of interest, suicidal tendencies, social phobia, feelings of being worried and afraid, suffering, anger) and seven influential factors (i.e., interpersonal relationships, love, family, work, psychotherapy, personal characteristics, marriage) were found. The online PHS behaviors related to different psychological problems and influential factors remained a growing trend before 2020 and has been increasing significantly due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Four main stages were found during the pandemic according to the changes in the online PHS population: sharp growth, significant decline, slight rebound, and slow decline. This study identified large-scale, spontaneous PHS behaviors among the online public during the COVID-19 pandemic and the various psychological problems and influential factors that varied across different stages of the pandemic, suggesting that the government and health practitioners should adopt effective policies and strategies to prevent and intervene in mental health problems for the online public.