Adoption of e-commerce by the agri-food sector in China: the case of Minyu e-commerce company

In recent years, increasing numbers of smallholders in developing countries such as China have begun to sell agricultural products directly to consumers via online shops using a third-party trade platform. It is increasingly clear that e-commerce has become a new and effective way to help smallholders gain access to the market. The investigation of agricultural e-commerce practices has a significant role in helping to understand the development of the agri-food sector in China. This teaching case provides an example of adopting e-commerce in the interaction and trading activities between participants in the food sector through a typical agricultural products e-commerce company in China, Minyu E-commerce. Particularly, the case analyzes the business model evolution through the ecosystem life cycle at the company. This case can be used to teach graduate/postgraduate students in agricultural business, MBA and executive programmes about the agri-food e-commerce business model

A link prediction-based method for identifying potential cooperation partners: A case study on four journals of informetrics

© 2018 Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology, Inc. (PICMET). Global academic exchange and cooperation have become an increasing trend in both academia and industry, but how to quickly and effectively identify potential partners is becoming an urgent problem. This paper proposes a link prediction-based model to help researchers identify partners from a large collection of academic articles in a given technological area. We initially construct a co-authorship network, and take a series of indices based on network and similarity of researchers into consideration. A fitting model of link prediction is then established, in which logistic regression analysis is involved. An empirical study on four journals of informetrics is conducted to demonstrate the reliability of the proposed method