The Influence of Corporate Social Relations on the Stability of Strategic Alliances

Our study aims to verify the effects of social relations, opportunistic behavior and trust among partners on the stability of strategic alliance. In order to test the hypotheses, 221 valid questionnaires collected from top managers of 50 strategic alliances in China. Moreover, the results also indicate that contractual governance can moderate the influence of high-level social relations on opportunistic behavior and trust between partners. It is found that the social relationship of senior managers cannot directly affect the stability of the alliance but can negatively affect the opportunistic behavior and positively affect the trust between partners. Opportunistic behavior and trust among alliance partners affect the stability of strategic alliance negatively and positively, respectively. Contract governance can enhance the influence of senior managers' social relationships on opportunistic behavior. In addition, contract governance shows the inverted U-shaped moderating effects on the relationship between senior managers' social relations and trust. Keywords: social relations, alliance stability, opportunistic behaviour, trust, contract governance DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-6-11 Publication date: February 29th 202

Joint Innovation Investment and Pricing Decisions In Retail Supply Chains With Customer Value

In the retail industry, customer value has become the key to maintaining competitive advantages. In the era of new retail, customer value is not only affected by the product price, but it is also closely related to innovations, such as value‐added services and unique business models. In this paper, we study the joint innovation investment and pricing decisions in a retailer–supplier supply chain based on revenue sharing contracts and customer value. We first find that, in the non-cooperative game, equilibrium only exists in the supplier Stackelberg game. However, revenue sharing contracts cannot coordinate the supply chain in the non‐cooperative game. By considering supply chain members’ bargaining power, we find that there exists a unique equilibrium for the Nash bargaining product. In addition, revenue sharing contracts can coordinate the supply chain and achieve the optimal consumer surplus. When the supply chain is coordinated, supply chain profit is allocated to the supply chain members based on their bargaining powers

Fungal strain engineering from understanding towards applications

Lignocellulosic biomass is an abundant and renewable resource, and has a promising potential as an alternative to fossil resources for industrial bioproduction of biofuels and value-added biochemicals. Filamentous fungi are the most important and efficient plant biomass degrading microorganisms and are widely used as cell factories in many industries. Fungal strain engineering has been applied for the development of more robust and versatile filamentous fungal cell factories, and considerable progress have been made in recent years, as described in Chapter 1. A thorough and comprehensive understanding of fungal physiological processes involved in plant biomass utilization is an essential prerequisite of rational and feasible strain engineering. Advances in omics technologies allow the important development of systems biology, and new genetic tools have been developed for improving the efficiency of genetic engineering of filamentous fungi, such as CRISPR/Cas9 technology. Chapter 2 showed that A. niger has the capacity to accumulate xylitol from lignocellulosic biomass and metabolic engineering is highly effective for the improvement of xylitol production in A. niger. This provides the industrial production of xylitol with an attractive alternative, as the direct use of lignocellulosic biomass by A. niger highly simplifies the xylitol bioproduction process. Besides, there are other crucial aspects in the process of xylitol production, which could be alternative targets for strain engineering, including the release of pentoses from lignocellulosic biomass and the transport of pentoses and polyols. The subsequent study showed that the manipulation of the xylanolytic transcriptional activator XlnR also effectively increased xylitol production from lignocellulosic biomass in A. niger. The transport of D-xylose was also considered to further stimulate xylitol production in Chapter 3. In addition to three characterized D-xylose transporters (XltA, XltB and XltC), a fourth D-xylose transporter (XltD) was identified in A. niger. XltD has similar efficiency as XltA, while XltB may be not a major D-xylose transporter under the tested conditions. The results also showed the existence of more D-xylose transporters in A. niger. Unfortunately, the modification of one D-xylose transporter in A. niger alone did not affect xylitol production, showing the complexity and redundancy of sugar transport system similar to sugar metabolism in A. niger. In Chapter 4, an L-arabitol transporter, LatA, was identified with high specificity for L-arabitol in A. niger and its homologs are widely present in Ascomycete fungi. Moreover, the deletion of latA positively affected L-arabitol production from wheat bran and sugar beet pulp, suggesting that this gene could be a target for the improvement of microbial cell factories. In Chapter 5, the interaction between three transcription factors GalX, GalR and AraR in D-galactose and L-arabinose catabolism was investigated in A. nidulans, revealing the involvement of all these regulators in D-galactose catabolism and the compensation phenomenon between different regulators. To summarize, the results of this thesis described different aspects of the physiology of Aspergillus species from metabolic and regulatory networks to sugar transport systems, which improve the understanding of these model fungi and facilitate the biotechnological applications of fungal cell factories for the production of valuable biochemicals

TIM: Teaching Large Language Models to Translate with Comparison

Open-sourced large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in various tasks with instruction tuning. However, these models can sometimes struggle with tasks that require more specialized knowledge such as translation. One possible reason for such deficiency is that instruction tuning aims to generate fluent and coherent text that continues from a given instruction without being constrained by any task-specific requirements. Moreover, it can be more challenging for tuning smaller LLMs with lower-quality training data. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework using examples in comparison to teach LLMs to learn translation. Our approach involves presenting the model with examples of correct and incorrect translations and using a preference loss to guide the model's learning. We evaluate our method on WMT2022 test sets and show that it outperforms existing methods. Our findings offer a new perspective on fine-tuning LLMs for translation tasks and provide a promising solution for generating high-quality translations. Please refer to Github for more details: https://github.com/lemon0830/TIM

Identification of an l-Arabitol Transporter from Aspergillus niger

l-arabitol is an intermediate of the pentose catabolic pathway in fungi but can also be used as a carbon source by many fungi, suggesting the presence of transporters for this polyol. In this study, an l-arabitol transporter, LatA, was identified in Aspergillus niger. Growth and expression profiles as well as sugar consumption analysis indicated that LatA only imports l-arabitol and is regulated by the arabinanolytic transcriptional activator AraR. Moreover, l-arabitol production from wheat bran was increased in a metabolically engineered A. niger mutant by the deletion of latA, indicating its potential for improving l-arabitol-producing cell factories. Phylogenetic analysis showed that homologs of LatA are widely conserved in fungi

A loss-of-function allele of OsHMA3 associated with high cadmium accumulation in shoots and grain of Japonica rice cultivars

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPostprin

A stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problem with jumps in an infinite horizon

In this paper, a stochastic linear-quadratic (LQ, for short) optimal control problem with jumps in an infinite horizon is studied, where the state system is a controlled linear stochastic differential equation containing affine term driven by a one-dimensional Brownian motion and a Poisson stochastic martingale measure, and the cost functional with respect to the state process and control process is quadratic and contains cross terms. Firstly, in order to ensure the well-posedness of our stochastic optimal control of infinite horizon with jumps, the $L^2$-stabilizability of our control system with jump is introduced. Secondly, it is proved that the $L^2$-stabilizability of our control system with jump is equivalent to the non-emptiness of the admissible control set for all initial state and is also equivalent to the existence of a positive solution to some integral algebraic Riccati equation (ARE, for short). Thirdly, the equivalence of the open-loop and closed-loop solvability of our infinite horizon optimal control problem with jumps is systematically studied. The corresponding equivalence is established by the existence of a $stabilizing\ solution$ of the associated generalized algebraic Riccati equation, which is different from the finite horizon case. Moreover, any open-loop optimal control for the initial state $x$ admiting a closed-loop representation is obatined

Giant photoinduced lattice distortion in oxygen-vacancy ordered SrCoO2.5 thin films

Despite of the tremendous efforts spent on the oxygen vacancy migration in determining the property optimization of oxygen-vacancy enrichment transition metal oxides, few has focused on their dynamic behaviors non-equilibrium states. In this work, we performed multi-timescale ultrafast X-ray diffraction measurements by using picosecond synchrotron X-ray pulses and femtosecond table-top X-ray pulses to monitor the structural dynamics in the oxygen-vacancy ordered SrCoO2.5 thin films. A giant photoinduced strain ({\Delta}c/c > 1%) was observed, whose distinct correlation with the pump photon energy indicates a non-thermal origin of the photoinduced strain. The sub-picosecond resolution X-ray diffraction reveals the formation and propagation of the coherent acoustic phonons inside the film. We also simulate the effect of photoexcited electron-hole pairs and the resulting lattice changes using the Density Function Theory method to obtain further insight on the microscopic mechanism of the measured photostriction effect. Comparable photostrictive responses and the strong dependence on excitation wavelength are predicted, revealing a bonding to anti-bonding charge transfer or high spin to intermediate spin crossover induced lattice expansion in the oxygen-vacancy films.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, support materia

Soft Language Clustering for Multilingual Model Pre-training

Multilingual pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer abilities, however, their performance is hindered when the target language has distant typology from source languages or when pre-training data is limited in size. In this paper, we propose XLM-P, which contextually retrieves prompts as flexible guidance for encoding instances conditionally. Our XLM-P enables (1) lightweight modeling of language-invariant and language-specific knowledge across languages, and (2) easy integration with other multilingual pre-training methods. On the tasks of XTREME including text classification, sequence labeling, question answering, and sentence retrieval, both base- and large-size language models pre-trained with our proposed method exhibit consistent performance improvement. Furthermore, it provides substantial advantages for low-resource languages in unsupervised sentence retrieval and for target languages that differ greatly from the source language in cross-lingual transfer

Carbon emissions of cities from a consumption perspective

Carbon emission inventories are the foundations of climate change mitigation and adaptation in cities. In this study, we estimated production-based CO2 emissions from fossil energy combustion and industrial processes for eleven cities in China in 2012 and used input-output theory to measure their consumption-based CO2 emissions. By comprehensively comparing production- and consumption-based emissions, six developed cities were consumption-based cities with import-depended trade pattern, while the other five were production-based cities which were mostly in medium size and might transform into consumption-based cities with socioeconomic development. Emissions from imports accounted for over 50% in consumption-based emissions in most cities, which shows the significance of interregional cooperation in tackling climate change. From the perspective of final use, emissions caused by fixed capital formation occupied first in most cities, which was determined by their economic development models