Search Results (1,269)

The rapid aging of social infrastructure constructed during Japan’s high-growth period presents a critical national challenge. Following a major tunnel collapse in 2012, Japan mandated a uniform “once-every-5-years” visual inspection policy. While establishing a safety baseline, this static span, largely an administrative compromise, fails to address the severe non-linear degradation dynamics exacerbated by extreme environmental shocks in disaster-prone regions. This study challenges the adequacy of this uniform interval by developing a probabilistic framework that integrates non-linear degradation dynamics with Multiple Dependent Competing Failure Processes (MDCFPs). To bridge the gap between engineering predictions and real-world operations, we incorporate assessor bias through Bayesian modeling of imperfect inspections. Furthermore, we transition from conventional agency-cost minimization to Social Life Cycle Cost (LCC) optimization, explicitly quantifying public health risks and socio-economic externalities. Large-scale Monte Carlo simulations ($N={10}^7$) reveal a critical divergence: while conventional agency-cost optimization misleadingly suggests an optimal preventive intervention point of 5–6 years, our rigorous evaluation identifies the absolute physical safety limit at exactly 2.79 years. This demonstrates that the practical 5-year default already severely breaches physical thresholds, exposing society to catastrophic fat-tail risks. These findings substantiate the urgent shift toward condition-based dynamic scheduling and highlight the necessity of implementing policy safeguards to ensure social equity for vulnerable communities. Full article

This study develops a framework for evaluating the social and economic impacts of low-cost road safety improvement projects. The proposed framework applies the Social Return on Investment (SROI) approach to compare the socio-economic outcomes of road safety engineering interventions within 4 levels—Tier 1: removing severe conflicts, Tier 2: reducing speed, Tier 3: managing conflicts, and Tier 4: increasing awareness. Traditional evaluation methods focus on crash reduction and economic efficiency; however, they provide limited information on social outcomes and lack a systematic approach for comparing local road safety interventions. To address this gap, data from 15 road safety improvement projects at different study locations are used to assess the social and economic impacts for three stakeholder groups: road users, communities, and government agencies. The social outcome is converted into monetary values over a five-year evaluation period. Statistical and sensitivity analyses are applied to compare differences across the hierarchy of road safety interventions and evaluate the robustness of the SROI results. Results show that higher-level interventions generate the greater social returns. The average SROI ratios for Tiers 1 to 4 are 17.0, 15.6, 11.5, and 8.1, respectively. Statistical analysis shows a significant difference between intervention levels (F(3,11) = 16.51, p < 0.001). Crash reduction and community satisfaction were the main positive impacts, while increased travel time, fuel consumption, and emissions reduced SROI. The proposed framework provides practical guidance for evaluating low-cost road safety measures based on socio-economic performance in decision-making. Full article

Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) subsidies have become an important policy instrument for improving energy affordability, reducing energy poverty, and supporting economic activities among vulnerable populations in Indonesia. However, the long-term sustainability of LPG subsidy policies remains a subject of debate due to concerns regarding fiscal burdens, governance challenges, and environmental impacts. This study aims to assess the sustainability of LPG subsidy policies through a case study in Cirebon City, West Java, Indonesia, using the Triple Bottom Line framework that integrates social, economic, and environmental dimensions. A qualitative case study approach was employed, utilizing semi-structured interviews, Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), field observations, and document analysis involving key stakeholders, including government agencies, Pertamina, LPG distributors, micro-enterprises, and household beneficiaries. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings indicate that LPG subsidies contribute positively to social sustainability by improving energy access, reducing household energy expenditures, and enhancing social welfare. The policy also supports economic sustainability through increased purchasing power, improved productivity of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), and local economic resilience. From an environmental perspective, LPG subsidies help reduce dependence on traditional fuels such as firewood and kerosene, thereby contributing to cleaner household energy use and indirectly supporting forest conservation. The study identifies significant challenges related to mistargeting, distribution leakages, fiscal pressures, and continued dependence on fossil fuels, which may hinder long-term sustainability and energy transition efforts. The findings suggest that LPG should be positioned as a transition fuel rather than a permanent energy solution. Strengthening subsidy-targeting mechanisms, improving digital governance systems, enhancing fiscal efficiency, and gradually promoting renewable energy adoption are essential to support sustainable energy governance and the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study contributes to the literature by providing an integrated sustainability assessment of LPG subsidy policies within the context of developing countries. Full article

E-commerce platforms involve interactions among platform governance, manufacturer pricing, consumer perception, and managerial cognition. This study examines how platform overconfidence and consumer product-fit perception accuracy affect pricing, profitability, and operational mode selection. Product-fit perception accuracy denotes the probability that consumers correctly perceive the mismatch between their preferences and product attributes. We develop a two-period dynamic game involving two competing platforms and two manufacturers and compare resale and agency modes under simultaneous and sequential decisions. Equilibrium analysis shows that, under the agency mode, overconfidence increases promotional allowances and manufacturers’ first-period and switching-purchase prices, while its effect on repeat-purchase prices depends on a mismatch-cost threshold. Under the resale mode, overconfidence raises wholesale prices only within an intermediate range, and product-fit perception accuracy can have either a positive or negative effect depending on the level of overconfidence. Sequential decision-making further produces different pricing responses for leader and follower platforms due to differences in commitment and information conditions. Numerical analysis under the specified parameter settings indicates that resale tends to generate higher platform profits when consumers’ perceived product-quality level is high. When this level is low, the relative profitability of the two modes becomes more sensitive to overconfidence, product-fit perception accuracy, and decision position, with agency becoming more profitable in some parameter regions. These results characterize how governance mode and decision timing shape the economic consequences of managerial overconfidence and product-fit information within the modeled platform setting. Full article

This paper focuses on the wellbeing of a sample of older and predominantly middle-class UK individuals drawn from the Mass Observation Project (MOP) participant panel in 2020, covering the first months of the global COVID-19 pandemic and first UK national lockdown. It finds that socio-economic circumstances to some extent cushioned individuals against negative impacts of the pandemic but given the range of experiences within the sample, individual wellbeing cannot be explained by socio-economic position alone. Wellbeing emerged through a complex interaction of attitudes, activities, resources and circumstances, highlighting the dynamic interplay of agency and social structures that helps to understand more general features of living well. The findings also highlight that self-evaluated happiness depends partly on what individuals consider happiness to mean. Full article

Against the backdrop of the expanding digital economy, artificial intelligence, as a key technology underpinning corporate digital transformation, is increasingly influencing corporate governance practices and firms’ financial behavior. Using data from Chinese A-share listed firms from 2016 to 2024, this study applies a double machine learning approach to investigate the effect of AI on corporate accounting information quality and to identify the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The empirical results indicate that greater AI application significantly improves accounting information quality. This effect operates primarily through three channels: reducing operational risk, easing financing constraints, and mitigating agency costs. Further analysis reveals that the improvement in accounting information quality associated with AI is stronger for firms located in regions with higher levels of marketization and more developed digital infrastructure, as well as for firms facing less intense market competition. By examining accounting information quality as an important economic consequence of AI adoption, this study broadens the existing literature on the governance effects of AI and provides additional empirical evidence on the channels through which AI contributes to higher-quality accounting information. The findings also provide practical implications for policymakers seeking to improve the implementation of the “AI Plus” initiative and for firms pursuing digital transformation alongside improvements in intelligent governance. Full article

Thailand has become a prominent destination for contemporary Chinese mobility through international education, employment, entrepreneurship, family relocation, retirement, and lifestyle-oriented movement. However, these pathways are usually studied separately, obscuring how education, work, legal status, digital infrastructures, everyday adaptation, and belonging interact over time. This article reports a structured integrative review of 53 empirical, theoretical, methodological, and policy sources identified through targeted searches of publisher platforms, scholarly discovery services, Thai journal repositories, and institutional sources, supplemented by citation chaining. The synthesis develops a framework of layered belonging under negotiated mobility. Mobility begins with aspirations and capabilities situated within a regional opportunity structure; educational and other entry pathways provide uneven access to linguistic, social, and professional resources; and the conversion of these resources is mediated by language, digital and interpersonal networks, institutional support, and everyday competence while being filtered through visa rules, work authorization, employer dependence, occupational access, and public narratives. Belonging is therefore differentiated across six interdependent dimensions: affective-place, relational-social, functional-everyday, professional-economic, legal-institutional, and future-temporal. This framework explains why migrants may feel emotionally at home and socially connected in Thailand while remaining legally temporary, professionally dependent, or uncertain about long-term residence. The review clarifies the added value of the framework relative to place-belongingness, integration domains, social anchoring, and differentiated embedding; proposes six empirically testable propositions; and identifies implications for universities, employers, public agencies, and migrant-serving organizations. Full article

This study examines the direct and indirect associations of green leadership with green performance and organizational sustainability through green work climate and green innovative behavior. Drawing on Social Information Processing Theory, it specifies a bounded associational framework that differentiates leadership-related environmental cues, employee-perceived workplace context, self-reported behavioral action, and employee-assessed organization-referent outcomes. Data were collected from 798 employees working in five-star hotels and licensed travel agencies in Saudi Arabia and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings reveal positive associations among all focal constructs. Green leadership is most strongly associated with green work climate, while green innovative behavior is more closely associated with green performance than with organizational sustainability. All hypothesized specific and theoretically ordered serial indirect coefficients are statistically significant, including the extended association linking green leadership with organizational sustainability through green work climate, green innovative behavior, and green performance. By jointly estimating direct, specific indirect, and serial indirect associations, the study differentiates the perceptual and behavioral functions of green work climate and green innovative behavior and distinguishes green performance from broader organizational sustainability. From a sustainable development perspective, the findings identify employee-assessed organizational conditions associated with resource efficiency, waste reduction, environmentally oriented innovation, continuing environmental and social responsibility, local economic participation, and community well-being. These areas are relevant particularly to Sustainable Development Goals 8, 9, 12, and 13. However, because sustainable development was not directly measured, these implications concern the potential contribution of organizational practices to sustainable development rather than verified destination- or societal-level development outcomes. Full article

Background: Counterfeit alcoholic beverages pose a major public health threat in Nigeria, yet their infiltration of legitimate supply chains remains poorly understood, especially in Sub-Saharan African markets where informality and weak regulation create conditions overlooked by mainstream counterfeiting models. Methods: This study utilised a qualitative multiple case design, drawing on eight enforcement cases and fourteen semi-structured interviews with retailers, distributors, regulatory officers and police. Results: The findings revealed a contradiction to global models built on the model of upstream adulteration or transnational smuggling. The findings revealed that counterfeiting in Nigeria operates domestically, whereby the supply chain is vertically compressed network in which manufacturing, warehousing, distribution and retail are operated as whole within residential and commercial premises. Three operational clusters are identified: vertically integrated illicit hubs (Cluster A), covert urban micro-production sites (Cluster B), and peripheral component and distribution nodes (Cluster C). Conclusions: Theoretically, the study extends Transaction Cost Economics by showing illicit actors invert conventional governance logic to minimise detection rather than transaction costs; enriches Principal–Agent Theory by demonstrating dual-agency equilibria in which downstream intermediaries serve legitimate and illicit principals simultaneously; and integrates institutional voids theory to explain why this infiltration regime self-reinforces under fragmented licensing and sporadic enforcement. Full article

Workplace romance presents a paradoxical challenge for organizations, capable of enhancing employee engagement while simultaneously triggering destructive interpersonal dynamics. This study probes the darker contours of this phenomenon within Saudi Arabia’s rapidly expanding hospitality and travel sectors—a context where Vision 2030’s ambitious tourism agenda renders workplace social processes especially consequential for organizational sustainability. While prior research has predominantly examined either the benefits of workplace romance or its isolated negative outcomes, limited empirical attention has been devoted to understanding how romance-induced social mechanisms jointly translate into counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) and whether psychological resources can buffer these adverse effects. Integrating the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework with Conservation of Resources theory, this study develops and tests a model wherein workplace romance (WR) functions as a relational stimulus that elicits workplace ostracism (WO) and employee envy (EE), which subsequently foster CWBs, with organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) moderating the WR–WO and WR–EE linkages. Survey data from 434 employees across international hotels and travel agencies were analyzed using PLS-SEM, demonstrating robust measurement properties. The results reveal that higher levels of workplace romance are statistically associated with higher levels of workplace ostracism and employee envy, each of which shows a significant indirect association between workplace romance and counterproductive work behaviors. In the hypothesized order, workplace romance is associated with workplace ostracism and employee envy, and these variables jointly exhibit a serial indirect association with counterproductive work behaviors consistent with the proposed model, although this pattern should be interpreted as correlational rather than causal given the cross-sectional design. Furthermore, OBSE significantly attenuates the positive effects of WR on both WO and EE, underscoring its function as a protective psychological reservoir. While the cross-sectional, self-report design and single-country focus constitute notable limitations, they also underscore the imperative for multi-source, longitudinal investigations. Practically, these findings suggest that proactively managing workplace romance, mitigating ostracism and envy, and cultivating OBSE may support organizational efforts that are consistent with SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) within Saudi Arabia’s tourism-led development trajectory, even though these goals were not directly measured in this study. Full article

With the increasing power of institutional investors, in order to compete for more investment agency business, the competition among institutional investors has become increasingly fierce. This paper studies a non-zero-sum game between two competing institutional investors who adopt mean–variance preferences and account for model uncertainty in order to derive robust optimal portfolios. The ambiguity-averse institutional investors can invest in a financial market with one risk-free bond and one individual stock. The objective of each institutional investor is to maximize the mean–variance utility of his terminal wealth relative to that of his competitor under the worst-case scenario of the alternative measures. By means of stochastic dynamic programming, we obtain closed-form expressions for the robust Nash equilibrium strategies and prove a verification theorem. Numerical simulations are finally presented to examine how model parameters influence the equilibrium strategies and to extract associated economic interpretations. Full article

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) can provide adaptive explanations, practice, feedback, and learner modelling at a scale that conventional one-to-one tutoring cannot readily achieve. Yet learning gains alone do not establish that an ITS is sustainable or beneficial to social well-being. This critical review integrates evidence on ITS effectiveness with research and policy guidance concerning learner agency, psychological well-being, inclusion, accessibility, data governance, algorithmic fairness, teacher roles, institutional capacity, and environmental responsibility. The review identifies a persistent evaluation gap: many studies privilege short-term achievement while under-measuring distributional effects, autonomy, emotional safety, teacher workload, lifecycle cost, and computational impact. To address this gap, the paper proposes the Human-Centered Sustainable Intelligent Tutoring Systems (H-SITS) framework as a conceptual and integrative framework for organizing candidate dimensions of sustainable tutoring and guiding future empirical validation. The framework organizes seven interdependent dimensions: pedagogical effectiveness; learner agency and well-being; inclusion and accessibility; trust, privacy, and fairness; teacher augmentation; institutional and economic viability; and environmental responsibility. It also presents a staged implementation roadmap and a research agenda emphasizing longitudinal, participatory, and equity-sensitive evaluation. The central conclusion is that sustainable tutoring is not a property of an algorithm alone. It is an outcome of socio-technical design, governance, and continuous evidence-based adaptation that keeps human flourishing, educational justice, and public value as primary objectives. Full article

Traditional assessment practices in multilingual higher education continue to privilege text-based and monolingual demonstrations of learning, often limiting multilingual students’ opportunities to draw on their full linguistic repertoires and increasing assessment-related anxiety. Responding to calls for more equitable and inclusive assessment, this study investigates PLAYMOBIL pro-mediated Serious Play integrated with translanguaging as an innovative multimodal assessment framework that supports reflection, conceptual understanding, communication, and socio-emotional well-being. Employing a qualitative, comparative action-research design, the study was conducted across three higher education institutions in the United Kingdom, Albania, and Kosovo through three iterative action-research cycles involving implementation, observation, reflection, and pedagogical refinement. Data were triangulated through students’ three-dimensional PLAYMOBIL pro models accompanied by multilingual oral narratives, end-of-module reflective reports, qualitative post-intervention surveys, and lecturers’ observational field notes. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed that PLAYMOBIL pro-mediated translanguaging created an inclusive, dialogic, and low-anxiety assessment environment in which students exercised greater agency by drawing on their full linguistic and semiotic repertoires. The tactile and spatial affordances of PLAYMOBIL pro models enabled students to connect abstract disciplinary concepts with personal, cultural, and socio-economic experiences. Comparative findings highlighted contextual variations across sites. Students in the United Kingdom frequently described reduced English communication anxiety and increased confidence in expressing complex ideas, whereas students in Albania and Kosovo more often drew on translanguaging and spatial representations when engaging with regional and international business concepts. Across all settings, successive action-research cycles were associated with richer reflection and more elaborate conceptual explanations, suggesting that iterative pedagogical refinement may have contributed to these developments alongside the affordances of the PLAYMOBIL pro-mediated approach. This study advances scholarship on multilingual assessment by proposing an evidence-informed framework with potential applicability across multilingual higher education contexts and by illustrating how PLAYMOBIL pro-mediated Serious Play may support equity, learner agency, and meaningful participation. Full article

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries face the challenge of balancing their reliance on hydrocarbon resources with ambitious renewable energy transition goals, including initiatives such as Saudi Vision 2030. Despite these commitments, renewable energy deployment in the region remains relatively limited, highlighting the need to better understand the factors associated with renewable energy consumption. This study investigates the macroeconomic factors associated with renewable energy consumption in the six GCC countries over the period 2000–2024 using a hybrid methodology combining panel econometric methods and machine learning. Panel data were compiled from the World Bank and the International Energy Agency. The econometric results identify research and development (R&D) expenditure and trade openness as the two most important predictors of renewable energy consumption, jointly explaining approximately 63% of the variation (adjusted R² = 0.629). The random forest model supports these findings by ranking R&D expenditure as the most influential predictor, followed by trade openness. GDP, foreign direct investment, and inflation were not found to be significantly associated with renewable energy consumption in the final models and the structural characteristics of GCC economies. The random forest model also achieved an out-of-sample R-squared of 0.425 with a low RMSE (0.032), suggesting satisfactory predictive performance for an initial model. Sub-period analysis further suggests that the associations of R&D expenditure and trade openness strengthened after 2015, coinciding with the implementation of national energy transition strategies across the GCC. These findings suggest that technological innovation and economic openness may support the region’s energy transition, with greater investment in R&D and stronger international trade integration potentially facilitating renewable energy adoption. Full article

Facing interlinked environmental, social, and economic crises, advancing sustainability requires more than institutional reforms; it demands transforming individual mindsets, behaviors, and competencies. This study positions the individual as a central change agent and proposes an integrative model beyond traditional scoping review boundaries. It maps sustainability competencies across three interconnected domains: civic, educational, and professional engagement. Based on a comprehensive scoping review, the study identifies how these competencies are conceptualized and applied within distinct institutional contexts. By bridging fragmented disciplinary perspectives, the model uncovers shared patterns and role-specific nuances, emphasizing contextual adaptability and systemic thinking. Theoretically, the article contributes to developing a unified understanding of individual agency for sustainability. Socially, it highlights the urgency of empowering individuals, as citizens, students, or professionals, to take informed, responsible action in pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The findings offer insights for educators, policymakers, and organizations seeking to cultivate sustainability-oriented competencies across society. Full article