With the rapid development of knowledge payment, customers are faced with a large number of knowledge products when purchasing, leading to the need for an effective recommendation system. However, existing recommendation systems cannot accurately and adequately represent paid knowledge products with implicit but specialized features and sparse interactive histories, and thus are deemed not suitable for such products. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation system for knowledge products, the core of which is the designed customer-oriented representation of knowledge products. Specifically, we utilize customer activity information on the free knowledge sharing platform as the knowledge document for each customer of paid knowledge products, to extract customer knowledge background and preference. Then, a deep learning-based model Doc2vec is adopted to transfer knowledge documents to customer knowledge background vectors. Such vectors of a particular paid knowledge product are further aggregated to a product-level vector for customer-oriented product representation, based on which two recommendation results are generated with product ratings and similarities of paid knowledge products, respectively. Extensive comparative experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system for the representation and recommendation of paid knowledge products. This paper will contribute to the literature of knowledge payment and recommendation systems, as well as provide practical implications for the information service and the operation of knowledge products on knowledge payment platforms.

In the context of the global low-carbon economy, the carbon cap-and-trade mechanism (CCATM) plays an important impact on the production and trade of enterprises and is widely implemented by most governments to reduce carbon emissions. In this paper, we investigate a two-stage supply chain game model with a stochastic demand under the CCATM, in which the manufacturer has two production modes and the retailer has two order opportunities, and both of them make green effort. The results show that the optimal decision is irrelevant to carbon cap while is relevant to carbon emissions per unit product. The profits of both the manufacturer and the retailer increase under the CCATM. Furthermore, we explore the optimal decisions under the buyback contract and the payment contract provided by the manufacturer to the retailer. We find that the transfer payment can’t improve the profit while the buyback contract can do. We further extend our model by investigating the scenario with the risk-averse channel members, and find that the first optimal order quantity of the retailer would reduce due to risk aversion, while the manufacturer would invest more green effort and the manufacturer would be more likely to cooperate with a lower risk-averse retailer.

In recent years, two pricing policies are commonly adopted by on-demand delivery service platforms (e.g., Meituan PaoTui and Costco) that provide delivery services to heterogeneous customers via self-scheduling providers. One called “transaction-based” pricing policy (TBPP) allows the platforms to determine a per-service wage paid to providers and a price charged to customers for each transaction. The other one called “membership-based” pricing policy (MBPP) also allows the platforms to announce a wage paid to providers but charge customers a membership fee for using an unlimited number of the services in a certain period (e.g., one month). This paper considers an on-demand delivery service platform with self-scheduling providers and two classes of customers (i.e., regular and frequent customers). We aim to analyze and compare the platform’s profits and welfare performances generated by the two pricing policies. If the number of regular customers and their preference for TBPP equal the number of frequent customers and their preference for MBPP, respectively, we show that compared with the MBPP, employing the TBPP is beneficial for the platform but is detrimental for customers and providers. However, adopting the MBPP (TBPP) can simultaneously benefit the platform, customers and providers if frequent customers’ preference for MBPP is higher (lower) than regular customers’ preference for TBPP or the number of frequent customers is larger (less) than regular customers.

As an important part of the enterprise information system, accounting information plays a significant role in enterprise management decision-making. This study investigates the impact of accounting information quality on corporate labor investment efficiency. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms, we show that higher accounting information quality is associated with higher labor investment efficiency (i.e., a lower deviation of labor investment from the expected employment level justified by economic fundamentals). Firms with higher accounting information quality reduce underinvestment and overinvestment in labor by alleviating financial constraints and agency conflicts. Cross-sectional tests indicate that this effect is more pronounced among non-state-owned enterprises and firms with higher labor adjustment costs. The robustness test shows that our results are robust to alternative proxies, endogeneity concerns, and controls for non-labor investments. This study sheds light on how enterprise information systems influence management decision-making practices from the perspective of accounting information quality.

Mergers have become an important means for low-carbon manufacturers to improve their efficiency and competitiveness. This paper studies the impact of horizontal mergers between asymmetric low-carbon manufacturers on product diversity, profits, consumer surplus, and the environment. In the premerger model, we consider two asymmetric manufacturers in terms of market potential that produce two products and compete on prices and carbon emissions. In the postmerger model, the two asymmetric manufacturers merge into one firm. The merged manufacturer can either continue to produce two products and collude on both products’ prices and carbon emissions or enjoy both production and green technology investment cost savings to produce only one product. Our result suggests that when the merged manufacturer produces two products, the merger does not necessarily lead to higher prices, which stands in sharp contrast to the conventional wisdom. Furthermore, the merger always benefits the manufacturer but harms consumers. When the merged manufacturer chooses to produce only one product, however, we confirm that the merger can lead to a win-win-win outcome, i.e., the manufacturer, customers, and environment all become better off if either the production or investment savings are salient. The conventional wisdom shows that salient costing savings lead to price reduction. Nevertheless, we show that the merged manufacturer can charge consumers higher prices to provide lower-emission products. In addition, we show that improving investment (production) cost savings is more effective for the merged manufacturer if these two cost savings are salient (not salient). Finally, the merged manufacturer should not reduce diversity if these two cost savings are relatively low because the profit and consumer surplus may be simultaneously lower. We also extend our base model to the case where there exist three manufacturers in the premerger model and the merged firm still operates in a competitive market.