Should I scan my face? The influence of perceived value and trust on Chinese users’ intention to use facial recognition payment

While China has seen the widespread adoption of facial recognition payment, concerns over the potential risks impede the further growth of user acceptance. Drawing on the perspectives of perceived value and trust, we developed a research model to explore how the Chinese users’ trade-off between perceived benefits (perceived convenience and perceived novelty) and perceived risks (perceived privacy risk and perceived financial risk) influences their usage intention. Based on survey data from 1,200 Chinese mobile payment users, this study uses structural equation modeling to examine the hypotheses. Our results show that perceived convenience positively influences perceived value, while privacy risk and financial risk negatively influence perceived value and trust. Although perceived novelty has no significant effect on perceived value and trust, perceived value positively influences trust, and both of them have a positive effect on the intention to use. Furthermore, our moderation analysis indicates that the influence of perceived value on the intention to use is stronger among users who consider facial information to be more sensitive. The theoretical implications for research as well as the practical implications for practitioners are also discussed.     

Critical research on eco-cities? A walk through the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City,China

This article uses the narrative tool of a walk through Tianjin Eco-City, China, as an entry point in raising and discussing key questions in contemporary eco-city research. Eco-city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent in policy and political-economic discourses in a variety of locations as new urban spaces where blueprints for low carbon economies can be trialled. In light of this, the article highlights the key necessity of, firstly, considering scale when analyzing eco-city ‘futures’. Secondly, the article argues for the need to interrogate eco-cities’ definitions, as well as evaluation, performance and monitoring frameworks, as this will aid in critical analyses of the marketing, presentation and actually built urban environments in eco-city projects. Thirdly, the question of internal social resilience and the emergence of communities within newly-built eco-cities needs to be assessed: this is of crucial importance in light of the exclusive, gated nature of several flagship eco-city projects under construction at the time of writing. Lastly, the article argues that research on eco-city projects needs to consider not only the high-tech, new urban environments materialized as eco-cities, but also the production and reproduction of large, often transient populations of low-paid workers who build eco-cities and who form what the article calls the ‘new urban poor’, forming ‘workers’ cities’ on the edges of flagship ‘sustainable’ urban projects worldwide.     

The gift of authoritarian experience: The determinants of online political efficacy in new democracies

This paper represents an effort to investigate the impact of perceived new media credibility on citizens’ online political efficacy (OPE) in new democracies. Unlike their counterparts in mature democracies and outright authoritarian states, citizens of new democracies face the challenge to reconcile their democratic present with the authoritarian past. Their online political behaviors therefore are likely to be shaped by the interaction between democratic realities and authoritarian legacies or memories. The current study argues that in new democracies, the relationship between credibility of new media and OPE is contingent upon citizens’ authoritarian experience. Since authoritarian experience delivers a sense of relative acquisition through a comparison mechanism, it is expected to play a positive role in moderating the association between credibility of new media and OPE. We test the proposition by studying a sample of Taiwanese residents interviewed during the 2015 Taiwan Communication Survey (TCS). Our empirical analyses produce strong supportive evidence for the positive conditioning effect of authoritarian experience and the result is robust to different model specifications and alternative measures of authoritarian experience.     

Funding information in Web of Science: an updated overview

Despite the limitations of funding acknowledgment (FA) data in Web of Science (WoS), studies using FA information have increased rapidly over the last several years. Considering this WoS’ recent practice of updating funding data, this paper further investigates the characteristics and distribution of FA data in four WoS journal citation indexes. The research reveals that FA information coverage variances persist cross all four citation indexes by time coverage, language and document type. Our evidence suggests an improvement in FA information collection in humanity and social science research. Departing from previous studies, we argue that FA text (FT) alone no longer seems an appropriate field to retrieve and analyze funding information, since a substantial number of documents only report funding agency or grant number information in respective fields. Articles written in Chinese have a higher FA presence rate than other non-English WoS publications. This updated study concludes with a discussion of new findings and practical guidance for the future retrieval and analysis of funded research.

     

Evolution in city branding practices in China's Pearl River Delta since the year 2000

Place branding is a growing academic field, and the number of studies about place branding has proliferated in the literature in recent years. However, how the organizational environment around Chinese cities affects city branding strategies is still understudied. This contribution examines how the use of city labels has evolved in the Pearl River Delta since 2000 and explains the changes by three possible propositions: (1) self-reflection based on a city’s economic and regional position, (2) vertical inspiration from the national and provincial level governments, and (3) horizontal imitation from fellow municipal governments. It appears that cities in the Pearl River Delta encouraged the tertiary sector and pursued green images in their labelling choices until 2015. Municipalities tended to follow policies formulated by higher level governments and practices of pioneer cities, while since 2015 their strategies have become more self-reflective, mature and consistent. Compared with Western cities, municipal branding is more sensitive to influence from higher level government policies.     

Analyzing barriers of Smart Energy City in Accra with two-step fuzzy DEMATEL

The prevalence of Smart Energy City (SEC) has over the years been seen as a preemptive measure in dealing with many energy problems faced by cities. Like other cities, Accra faces several barriers on its way to achieve SEC. This research seeks to identify possible barriers hindering Accra as a city from becoming a SEC and prioritizing these barriers based on both importance with consideration of interactions between barriers using a two-step Decision Making, Trial and Evaluation Laboratory under fuzzy set environment i.e. two-step fuzzy DEMATEL. For Accra, the results indicate that market barriers are the most important barriers while limited access to capital has the highest global importance score in the whole SEC barriers system. Besides, technology barriers, policy barriers and market barriers are found as cause barriers and high cost of technology dispatches more impact on other barriers in technology barriers category. High interest rate and unstable currency, inadequate infrastructure requiring huge investments, insufficient legal and regulatory framework, high cost of technology and lack of information about cost and benefits of renewable energy technology are deserved to be paid more attention since they have both high important and cause indexes. The result is to enhance strategic decision making since this combination of methods deals with the possible human sentiments in decision making and also organizes barriers into cause and effect groups based on their interactions, with the cause groups been critical since their presence can give rise to effect group barriers.     

Not all emotions are created equal: Expressive behavior of the networked public on China's social media site

This study attempts to investigate the online expressive behavior of social media users in China. Specifically, we combine machine learning-based textual analysis with social network analysis to examine the structure and content of the discussion network which formed around the political aspects of food safety issues on China's Twitter-like Weibo. The findings suggest that Weibo-mediated communication space does not serve as an effective forum for deliberative discussion because people of like mind tend to cluster and the factor of emotion predominates. Further statistical analyses of a hand-coded sample show that emotional discussions influence people more than cognitive discussions, with distinct emotions (e.g., anger, fear and sadness) having different effects. A poster's status is also found to matter. We contend that this kind of online civic talk underlines an expressive form of rationality that transcends the dominant bipolar instrumental-communicative dimension for understanding the use of social media in online political discussion.     

Decarbonization of EU energy sector: techno-feasibility analysis of 100% renewables by 2050 in Cyprus

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Cyprus continues to be one of the European Union’s most energy import-dependent countries. It is of worthy note that Cyprus is also the only...     

Understanding cities through city brands: City branding as a social and semantic network

More and more towns, cities, regions, and countries are investing in branding campaigns in order to establish a reputation for themselves, and to have a competitive edge in today’s global market. In their essence, branding campaigns are places’ attempts to define themselves to target audiences. However, the literature and practice of place branding have focused on the competition of brands at the expense of exploring the relations between people, symbols, meanings, and physical characteristics of cities. Therefore, current branding measurement scales and indices used to understand the defining characteristics of places are problematic. This article first analyzes three of the prominent place branding indices: Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index, FutureBrand Country Brand Index, and East–West Nation Brand Perception Index. Subsequently, it proposes an analytical framework combining two network analysis methods – social and semantic – to evaluate place brands, called “Define–Measure–Visualize” (DMV). In order to argue for the feasibility of the proposed method, a sample dataset is created based on tweets about Boston and New York City. By introducing a consumer-centric and communications-based approach and exploring the connection between cities, people, and messages, the findings of this research can be used in understanding cities/places, measuring the success of branding campaigns, and managing future campaigns.