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Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explain cloud service transformation in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) based on technology-environment-organization paradigm and understand the role of cloud service trust in transformation process.Design/methodology/approach– A survey involving 107 SMEs was conducted to examine the research model and hypotheses.Findings– First, cloud service trust is found to have a significant positive effect on the SMEs' cloud service transformation intention. The second finding is about significant influences of technological drivers (reliability and information security), environmental drivers (institutional pressure, structure assurance, and vendor scarcity) and entrepreneurship on SMEs' cloud service trust. Further, the authors found mediating effects of trust on relationships between external drivers and cloud service transformation.Practical implications– For vendors, it suggests building cloud service trust by distinguishing advantages of their cloud service and by establishing strategic alliances with existing users in marketing to attract potential clients. Vendors should target entrepreneurial organizations as initial customers and then expand to other types of organizations. For users, the study implies the need of cultivating entrepreneurship, if they have innovative IT initiatives and need to speed up the IT innovation absorption. Market regulators can provide adequate structural assurances and survival-of-the-fittest market mechanism to stimulate cloud service market.Originality/value– This study is on the leading edge of systematically investigating drivers for SMEs' cloud service transformation and further reveals a mediating process, in which technological and environmental aspects have primary effects on cloud service trust that sequentially influences cloud service transformation. These mediating effects imply an essential trust building process of cloud service transformation.

People memory system plays a key role in the decision‐making process (DMP). In order to examine its influence on decision‐making, an individual's memory‐based decision‐making system is developed, and then, we integrate the multi‐agent decision systems and construct a sequential risky decision model on the basis of an informational cascade. This study aims at exploring the public's decisions on whether or not to take protective actions under risk. The findings indicate that people with different strength of ties to friends and relatives make huge differences on decision‐making. In the group with weak ties, the agent's total size of decision information and the level of risk perception are reducing in the sequential decision process. We further prove that people with weak ties are more prone to take no protective action, and the probability is also decreasing with the decision turn. The sequence of people with strong ties makes decisions dynamically with the intensity of released information. Finally, the influences of forgetting rate and memory capacity on people's decision‐making are examined. The model provides a new line of thought about building a multi‐agent system of DMP, which is also very helpful for the design of an information management system during emergencies. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mass incidents are inevitable in contemporary China and the first thing we should learn is to adopt a correct attitude towards them. Based on the three elements-activity, interaction and sentiment-of collective behaviors in 52 mass incidents in China during 2007-2011, we find that collective behaviors in mass incidents show significant differences in activity, interaction and sentiment. A grade evaluation method is proposed to estimate the evolution of collective behaviors in 52 mass incidents and to classify such behaviors into five grades. Then the influence factors on the three elements are analyzed using multiple linear regression. The regression results demonstrate that the impacts of location, casualties, inner-group relations, group scale and duration on the three elements are very significant. Finally, in the light of the regression results, some implications of collective behavior in mass incidents are proposed for the relevant authorities in responding to mass incidents. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

The United States and China, as the largest developed country and the largest developing country in the world, respectively, have their own overt and covert influences on the world. This article discusses the foreign responses when the US was hit by the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and China by the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. By using a three-stage process to describe disaster aid decisions, it was found that developed countries were more likely to grant disaster aid, but the scale of their assistance was not the largest. Evidence showed that countries were more likely to offer assistance if they were geographically located closer to the affected areas but this was not the case in decisions made on the type and amount of aid provided. Assistance from European countries, on the other hand, largely showed a form of cosmopolitan humanitarianism. (China/GIGA)