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The difference in environmental factors is one of the main reasons for the accounting difference among countries. It is also one of the critical factors to be first considered when studying and understanding one country's accounting activities, and also when trying to harmonize and internationalize one country's accounting system. In international accounting research, accounting environment is the precondition to research and understand one country's accounting pattern, at the same time, such problems as which environmental factor decides national accounting style has been the arguing point. The research on environmental influences could not only find the solutions as what factors decide the differences among countries, but could answer the questions as if global accounting is going to remain the same, if each country will retain its own particular accounting pattern. It could not only help the outsiders to have a good understanding on one country's accounting theory and practice, but also could help the standard setters make a correct judgment and decision when setting and revising their accounting standards and harmonizing the international accounting standards by considering their own environment thoroughly. China's accounting has been the central point the outside stakeholders concern. As one of the countries with the fastest economic growth since its reform and open door policy was implemented in 1979, China has begun to attract foreign investment from many different countries, and in various forms. The global economy has become more and more integrated, and as a result China has succeeded in joining the WTO, which means that China has embedded itself in the international economic environment, its economy unavoidable has to be developed more towards a global one. Under this kind of environment, it has become increasingly urgent both to China and to overseas investors as well as to the other stakeholders to have a better understanding of China's accounting system and practice, and to harmonize China's accounting practice with international accounting traditions. The progress of global economy convergence has enforced the issued of global accounting convergence to be listed into the agenda, the international accounting community has been paying closer attention to the problems of harmonization and convergence, and the EU has decided that its listed companies are going to employ IAS accounting standards commencing from 2005. Exposed in this circumstance, China has already made a corresponding reaction in it accounting system reform. Though its accounting system has being reformed and revised since 1992 to adapt the national and international economy changes accordingly, but a gap still exists. How long and to what extent will China's accounting be in convergence with international traditions, is still in question.

PurposeThis paper aims to reexamine the link between board racial diversity and firm performance. It focuses on the mechanism through which board racial diversity could affect performance. The paper proposes and empirically tests the role of employee productivity and R&D productivity in the relationship between board racial diversity and firm financial performance.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a mediation analysis framework with the bootstrapping method to test both the direct and indirect effect of board diversity on firm performance. The data used in the study come from S&P 1500 with variables composed from COMPUSTAT, Institutional Shareholder Services and Wharton Research Data Services.FindingsContrary to prior findings, the results indicate that there is neither direct effect of board racial diversity on firm performance nor is there an indirect effect through either employee productivity or R&D productivity.Research limitations/implicationsBecause the data used in the paper are based on large public firms, the results may not generalize to small or private firms.Practical implicationsThe findings of the paper suggest that not all diversity measures matter in the same way and firms should carefully make board appointments to reduce the perception that they select directors for any reason other than qualifications.Originality/valueThe paper advances the literature on board diversity by examining two previously unexplored mediating variables of employee productivity and R&D productivity. It also uses more rigorous mediation analysis with bootstrapping method and a validation sample to improve robustness of the results.

ABSTRACTThe use of the Internet as an additional sales channel offers traditional retailers opportunities to reach expanded markets while improving the efficiency of their operations. Although the potential benefits of the online channel are clear, there are significant variations in the scope and depth of online channel use among retailers. Drawing from data on more than 100 publicly traded companies, this study examines the impact of online‐channel use on retailers' performance. The results suggest that the online channel provides significant improvements in sales, cost, inventory, and return on investments. In addition, we find that the timing of online‐channel adoption does not play a significant role in performance improvement, but having a local store presence does.

The potential of neural networks for classification problems has been established by numerous successful applications reported in the literature. One of the major assumptions used in almost all studies is the equal cost consequence of misclassification. With this assumption, minimizing the total number of misclassification errors is the sole objective in developing a neural network classifier. Often this is done simply to ease model development and the selection of classification decision points. However, it is not appropriate for many real situations such as quality assurance, direct marketing, bankruptcy prediction, and medical diagnosis where misclassification costs have unequal consequences for different categories. In this paper, we investigate the issue of unequal misclassification costs in neural network classifiers. Through an application in thyroid disease diagnosis, we find that different cost considerations have significant effects on the classification performance and that appropriate use of cost information can aid in optimal decision making. A cross‐validation technique is employed to alleviate the problem of bias in the training set and to examine the robustness of neural network classifiers with regard to sampling variations and cost differences.

ABSTRACTWe study the distribution channel decision of a manufacturer who considers whether to add an online channel (direct channel) to its brick‐and‐mortar retailer (indirect channel). The retailer faces the opportunity to invest in store assistance to help consumers choose products and thus reduce product returns. Special attention is given to the impact of product returns and retailer's store assistance investment on manufacturer's dual channel decision. We examine conditions under which the manufacturer uses dual channels and how various relevant factors affect its channel decision under two settings, depending on whether the retailer has its own online store or not. When the retailer does not have its online store, we find that (i) the addition of the direct channel raises the wholesale price; (ii) the direct channel addition hurts the retailer if the nonreplacement rate is low; (iii) the manufacturer has a lower incentive to add the direct channel when the retailer's service cost is lower or its returns reduction rate from service investment is higher; and (iv) the manufacturer should treat its own returns handling cost as a key factor in its channel structure decision. In addition, when the retailer operates an online store, we find that the manufacturer may have an incentive to add a direct channel such that both firms own direct channels.

ABSTRACTIn this article, we consider distribution channel strategies for an incumbent manufacturer who produces two complementary products and must determine whether or not to have another company to sell its products. We identify factors that affect the manufacturer's motivation to use dual‐channel distribution. Our results show that both complementarity between complements and product substitutability between firms influence the manufacturer's channel strategy. We find that if the potential entrant does not produce the complement of the primary product, a higher complementary effect for the complement will weaken the motivation of the incumbent to add an indirect channel. We also find that the incumbent has a stronger incentive to add the indirect channel when a product's substitutability is high. Furthermore, we show that when the two channels have the same pricing power, the incumbent has a stronger incentive to sell through the indirect channel in a higher pricing power environment.

ABSTRACTThis article examines production and outsourcing decisions for two manufacturers that produce partially substitutable products and play a strategic game with quantity competition. When both manufacturers outsource key components to the same upstream supplier, their products become more substitutable due to the increased commonality of the products. In addition, outsourcing may create better consumer perception about the product if the manufacturers choose reputable suppliers with better brand or quality. We explicitly model the substitutability change and the brand/quality effect and provide conditions under which the manufacturers should outsource the components to a supplier. We present the subgame perfect Nash equilibriums for the situation in which there is only one supplier and the case in which two suppliers compete with each other in the upstream supply chain. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the findings.

Bottom-up self-assembly of simple molecular compounds is a prime pathway to complex materials with interesting structures and functions. Coupled reaction systems are known to spontaneously produce highly ordered patterns, so far observed in soft matter. Here we show that similar phenomena can occur during silica-carbonate crystallization, the emerging order being preserved. The resulting materials, called silica biomorphs, exhibit non-crystallographic curved morphologies and hierarchical textures, much reminiscent of structural principles found in natural biominerals. We have used a fluorescent chemosensor to probe local conditions during the growth of such self-organized nanostructures. We demonstrate that the pH oscillates in the local microenvironment near the growth front due to chemical coupling, which becomes manifest in the final mineralized architectures as intrinsic banding patterns with the same periodicity. A better understanding of dynamic autocatalytic crystallization processes in such simple model systems is key to the rational development of advanced materials and to unravel the mechanisms of biomineralization. ; This work was funded by the European Research Council (European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013, grant no. 340863) and the Spanish MINECO grant CGL2010-16882 (co-funded by FEDER) ; Peer reviewed