Yong Liu

Jiangnan University · school of business

This article constructs a multiobjective super conflict grey target negotiation consensus approach to possibly solve problems of multiobjective group consensus. This approach considers relationships and behaviors of decision-makers (DMs), and the influence and constraint of the objectives by maximizing the satisfaction of DMs and the moderator and...

In the process of product ranking considering online reviews, they often are based on initial reviews and do not consider additional consumer reviews, but additional review information can sometimes directly affect consumers’ final decisions. To fully characterize the rich emotional preferences of consumers embedded in two-stage online customer rev...

Purpose We attempt to construct a grey three-way conflict analysis model with constraints to deal with correlated conflict problems with uncertain information. Design/methodology/approach In order to address these correlated conflict problems with uncertain information, considering the interactive influence and mutual restraints among agents and p...

Product quality prediction models based on big data and artificial intelligence technologies can quickly and accurately analyze massive amounts of data to ensure that products meet higher quality standards. However, in the process of data fitting, how to screen data sets with linear and nonlinear characteristics to improve the accuracy of the predi...

This chapter, which is mainly based on (Forrest et al., Dependence of a firm’s performance on its ecosystem’s upstream/downstream challenges. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Meeting of National Association of Business, Economics and Technology. National Association of Business, Economics and Technology, pp. 83–100, 2019a; Forrest et al., How cha...

In the present, rapidly changing world of business, various unprecedented kinds of markets have been developed or still been emerging accompanying the evolutionary development of modern technology. And, various types of players, both conventional and nonconventional, have been actively engaged in the activities of these developed and emerging marke...

This chapter, which is mainly based on (Forrest et al., Conditions under which synergistic innovations appear. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Conference of Decision Sciences Institute. Decision Sciences Institute, pp. 2061–2080, 2019a; Forrest et al., Simultaneous consumer utilities, multi-sided markets and consumer synergies. In: Proceedings o...

This chapter, which is mainly based on Forrest and Liu (Value in Business: A Holistic, Systems-Based Approach to Creating and Achieving Value. Switzerland: Springer; 2022, Chapter 18) and Liu et al. (Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 158, 120142; 2020), investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) may impact technological innovation. In t...

This chapter, which is mainly based on Forrest et al. (Rev Econ Bus Stud 14(2):125–149, 2021), investigates how a consumer’s utility and consequent optimization are determined by his natural endowments—self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and free will. It focuses on such general utility that is a function in the dollar value of consumption, th...

The concept of convexity plays an important role in the studies of economics in general and consumer theory in particular. By removing the unrealistic assumption that consumer preferences are complete on the set X of consumption choices, this chapter, which is mainly based on Forrest et al. (Studia Universitatis “Vasile Goldis” Arad—Economics Serie...

To support one of the key cornerstones of the current theory that will be systematically developed in the following parts of the book, this chapter presents a general theory on how each consumer, be it an individual person or a business firm, is a goal-oriented system. It reveals the systemic mechanism that underlies the operation of the four endow...

This chapter, which is mainly based on Forrest et al. (Pennsyl Econ Rev 29(1):92–115, 2022), provides a simplified approach to the study of evolutions of an economic market from the angles of profits and market competition. It first looks at the profit landscape of the primitive firms that serve sporadically existent demands in an emerging market,...

Traditional fault diagnosis for bearing usually requires a large amount of labeled data for training and deliberate selection of features and the diagnostic results are often too scattered to provide a thorough fault diagnosis procedure. To address these issues, we use data mining techniques to analyze the raw vibration signals of rolling bearings...

There exist a variety of resource conflicts due to resource-constrained in production lines during the period of renewal of sophisticated products manufacturing, probably leading to production delays and resource wastage. With respect to the resource conflicts of the resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem in sophisticated product lin...

Supplier selection is of great significance and role, which influence the quality of major product development, and economic security and life safety. However, there exists a variety of uncertain information as a result of evaluation experts’ strong subjective consciousness and complexity of decision environment in the process of supplier selection...

The concept of convexity plays an important role in the study of economics and consumer theory. For the most part, such studies have been conducted on the assumption that consumer preferences are a binary relation that is complete, reflexive and transitive on the set X of consumption choices. However, each consumer is a biological being with multid...

Many problems regarding channel conflicts exist in the pricing process of a manufacturer‐led dual‐channel supply chain. By considering the fact that online reviews and channel preferences are the important factors that influence consumer purchasing behaviors and the decision‐making of the supply chain, this paper deals with these problems through t...

The booming development of new energy vehicles has brought a continuous increase in the demand for power batteries and the amount of scrap. To reduce waste of resources and protect the environment, power battery recycling has become an important and urgent problem to be solved. To well analyze and deal with the recycling problems of used power batt...

With the rapid development of the economy, a growing number of consumers and enterprises are paying attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Meanwhile, there exist a variety of conflicts in closed-loop supply chain management. To analyse and deal with the decision problems of the manufacturer-led closed-loop supply chain with CSR, by usi...

In practical decision problems, some decision objects may enter or exit the decision system, which will affect the decision results. To deal with dynamic decision problems with uncertain information, we construct a dynamic three-way decision method by exploiting three-way decisions, grey numbers, and grey targets. In this paper, firstly, by conside...

As a universal phenomenon, conflicts exist widely in various fields such as politics, economic life, military, and culture. Group decision-making techniques that effectively identify and resolve conflict during the decision-making process will result in stronger group consensus, while existing studies rarely discuss the multi-criteria large-scale g...

As resource waste and environmental degradation become increasingly serious, closed-loop supply chains have attracted more and more attention from the public. How to effectively undertake corporate social responsibility (CSR) and alleviate the conflict of closed-loop supply chains has become an urgent task for managers and researchers to resolve. W...

Three-way decision, as opposed to conventional two-way decision-making, can more effectively reduce decision-making risks by adding a postponed decision-making. With respect to the three-way decision problem consisting of Pythagorean fuzzy information, considering the risk attitudes of decision makers(DMs), we exploit Pythagorean fuzzy sets (PFNs),...

Based on the centralized and decentralized decision‐making cases, this study constructs a dual‐channel supply chain game model that considers offline return service and online reviews, and explores the pricing decisions and benefits of supply chains under the dual influence of return service level and online reviews. The impact of return rate, retu...

There exist a variety of channel conflict problems in dual supply chain, some manufacturers and retailers often consider consumers’ reviews and adopt some measures such as rebate and revenue sharing in order to deal with these problems and expand their respective markets and gain more profits. In this paper, considering the effect of the online rev...

Sales strategies have a great impact on changes in supply and demand and a suitable sales strategy can reduce marketing costs and increase consumer purchasing preferences. Concerning the sales problems of imperfect complementary products in the two-stage supply chain consisting of two manufacturers and one retailer, by introducing the concept of co...

People will always consciously or unconsciously compare their cost or benefits of actions with those of others and make judgments about fairness. Aiming at consensus reaching process where decision makers have fairness concern behaviors, this paper proposes a limited cost consensus model with fairness concern. To do this, we define the fairness uti...

We define the group measure matrix of the alternative scheme and the ideal scheme based on the relevant factor sequence and the system characteristic behavior sequence. Furthermore, the information distances of decision makers and decision criteria are defined, respectively. According to the information distance, we obtain each scheme’s grey matrix...

There exist a variety of two-level group decision making problems with multiple constraints. Two-level group decision-making refers to decisions made when there is a decision-making relationship between the upper and lower levels in the decision-making environment. For example, the issue of Sino-US trade decision-making: Sino-US trade decision-maki...

The development of China's manufacturing industry is still facing the challenge of regional imbalance. To solve the problem of development imbalance, it is necessary to realize regional development. First, we must analyze the development characteristics of different regions. To this end, we consider the requirements of the new development era and d...

The universities’ scientific and technological activities have become the key link of science and technology and economy, and the core of promoting the national innovation capability and competitiveness. To achieve high-quality development of China’s science and technology, it is of great significance to measure the efficiency of universities’ scie...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance a novel grey variable dual precision rough set model for grey concept. Design/methodology/approach – To obtain the approximation of a grey object, the authors first define the concepts of grey rough membership degree and grey degree of approximation on the basic thinking logic of variable precision...

As a universal phenomenon, conflicts exist widely in various walks of life, such as politics, economic lives, military operations, and cultural exchanges. In order to sove more complex and uncertain-conflict problems than what is possible within the confinement of current knowledge, this paper proposes a three-way conflict analysis model and confli...

This book uses a system-based approach to decipher and organize the concepts and conclusions relevant for creating and capturing value in business. It develops a scientific theory based on systems science and logical reasoning that is commonly employed in mathematics and natural science. The resulting new theory focuses on the organizational nature...

By utilizing systems methodology and thinking logic, this paper derives a general theorem to characterize when and how a market signals for additional competition from market players. Then, it establishes conditions for when government policies actually work in real life, where firms' performances are effectively promoted no matter what offer the f...

The research and development (R&D) of industrial generic technologies (IGTs) is a collaborative innovation involving many stakeholders. The key to ensure the R&D success of IGT is how to effectively mobilize various stakeholders to take a more active approach to increase the degree of joint efforts and cooperation. Considering that the degree of ef...

This paper investigates how a consumer’s utility and consequent optimization are determined by his/her natural endowments – self-awareness, imagination, conscience and free will. It focuses on such general utility that is a function in the dollar value of consumption, the number of hours spent on waged work and a particular value-belief system. For...

Cross‐efficiency evaluation in data envelopment analysis is an effective way to rank decision‐making units (DMUs). However, different cross‐efficiency evaluation models derived from different perspectives generate different cross‐efficiency rankings. The information resulting from the various perspectives may be valuable and should not be ignored....

Continuing the effort of the previous chapter to develop a theoretically rigorous and practically useful theory of customer value propositions (CVP), as called for repeatedly by the extant literature, this chapter, mainly based on (Forrest et al., 2021, Studies in Business and Economics Journal, 16(2)), establishes eight generally true facts that d...

This chapter, which is mainly based on (Forrest et al., to appear, Market-sensing capabilities, profitability within stagnant industries and crafting of customer value propositions), studies the concept of market-sensing capability and its impact on a company from the perspective of market competition. Then it looks at, as a case analysis, sources...

This and the previous chapter, which are mainly based on Wajda et al. (to appear, The inclusiveness dimension of human cognition and categorization paradigm), jointly investigate how people with different focuses of attention tend to mobilize unlike areas of their cognitive systems; such different focuses naturally lead to dissimilar categorization...

As the title suggests, this chapter introduces the reader to the exciting journey this book is about to embark on by outlining how this volume contributes to the existent knowledge on value creation and capture. It describes important gaps that exist in the knowledge of value and deficiencies the commonly and widely employed methods of analysis and...

This chapter, which is mainly based on Forrest et al. (to appear, The role government policy and supports play to stimulate economic growth), studies the following three issues: (1) why policy tools of the government might work in real life; (2) when they do work, what the underlying mechanism is through which implemented policies play their roles;...

This chapter, which is mainly based on (Forrest et al., 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Conference of Decision Sciences Institute (pp. 2061–2080)), investigates issues related to the following questions: (1) how can producer-side synergies be created by employing the strategy of economies of scope? And (2) how can demand-side synergies be deve...

This chapter, which is mainly based on (Forrest et al., 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 annual conference of decision sciences institute, New Orleans, LA), investigates holistically such a business system that consists of market invitations, the ecosystem of a focal firm’s supply chain, the firm’s innovative recognition of the market signals, and cha...

Based on the theoretical studies in Chap. 3, this chapter, which is mainly based on (Forrest et al., to appear, Market competition and economic effects of government policies), investigates conditions under which government policies can be expected to improve the economic performance of firms through their market offers that can be either physical...

Resource-based theory or resource-based view of the firm has been in recent decades widely applied by scholars in areas of marketing and management in their studies of various topics. Because of the implicit power of this view, relevant studies are able to establish useful explanations and predictions about competitive advantages and outcomes of fi...

This chapter, based mainly on (Forrest et al., 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 Annual meeting of National Association of business, Economics and Technology (pp. 83–100)), studies holistically the supply-chain ecosystem of a focal firm, when the firm innovatively deciphers a market invitation. It employs the thinking logic and methodology of systems s...

Customer value proposition (CVP) is the key for a startup to be launched and foundation for a company to direct its business efforts. However, as of the present day, no systematic theory exists regarding how an effective CVP can be potentially formulated and strategically employed in real life. As a matter of fact, the very concept of CVP is still...

Along with the development of modern technology, there have appeared unprecedented kinds of markets participated by traditional and nontraditional players. These new markets have simultaneously bought forward unparalleled challenges to the academic world and decision-making managers and entrepreneurs. To meet these challenges, this chapter, which i...

This chapter investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) may impact technological innovation. It first defines what technological innovation entails, and then it establishes 10 general propositions. At the end, this chapter empirically validates some of these results by using provincial panel data of China from 2003 to 2015.

Riding on the increasing importance of the resource-based theory or the resource-based view of the firm of the past decades in the research of management and marketing, this chapter, which is mainly based on (Forrest, et al., 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 annual conference of Pennsylvania Economic Association), continues what has been started in th...

Because the systems research and systemic reasoning employed herein are not commonly used by the scholars who work in areas this book touches, this chapter introduces the relevant basics in order to make this volume self-contained. On the other hand, for those readers who are not mathematically oriented, those of the following sections that are hea...

This and the next chapter, which are mainly based on Wajda et al. (to appear, The inclusiveness dimension of human cognition and categorization paradigm), form a two-part sequel of a recent study on how people dissimilarly categorize a given set of stimulus targets by mobilizing different areas of their cognitive systems. In particular, this curren...

By employing a systemic approach, which is completely dissimilar to those used in the literature, this chapter, which is mainly based on (Forrest et al., 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 annual meeting of national association of business, economics and technology (pp. 101–121)), scrutinizes issues related to the following problems: (1) What are the mo...

At the present time, the world is expecting the arrival of another new era of industrial development. To position themselves appropriately in order to either maintain or acquire their leadership in the world, some nations, either developed or developing, have introduced and adopted their individually different plans on how to transform their curren...

The mainstream developmental economics has conventionally provided inconsistent lists of factors considered crucial for kick-starting a lasting economic growth (e.g., Lipton, 1977, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in Developing Countries. London: Temple Smith; Rostow, 1960, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto. Cambridge, U...

With the emergence of new kinds of markets, there have also appeared nontraditional players in the marketplace. These new kinds of markets and players have created unparalleled challenges to the world of learning and business decision-making, while scholars recognized that Porter’s (1985, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Perf...

Internet of things (IoT) in Wuxi city has grown energetically and boomingly with a series of remarkable development achievements. In this chapter, development path of the IoT industry in Wuxi has been analyzed. Then, the development experience and implications of the IoT industry are summarized. At the same time, existing problems in the developmen...

The development of the sustainable economy has gradually become a consensus, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the key to achieving the sustainable development. However due to the implementation of CSR will increase the cost burden of enterprises, some companies are even unwilling to fulfill CSR. At this time, the government often encour...

Group consensus decision-making refers to achieving a consensus result accepted by more decision makers with a certain stability. The consensus stability is mainly affected by game conflicts among decision makers. Therefore, considering super conflict analysis as the ideological basis and the minimum cost consensus model as the method basis, this p...

Three-way decision provides a new research perspective for solving multi-criteria decision-making problems. Under grey environment and grey decision idea, this paper proposes a novel grey multi-criteria three-way decisions model based on grey incidence analysis and TOPSIS. The model realizes the effective fusion of three-way decision and grey syste...

At the present time, various ambitious nations laid out their plans for maintaining or acquiring their leadership in the world by emphasizing innovations and by focusing on the manufacturing sector. To understand this phenomenon theoretically, this paper addresses the importance of the manufacturing sector in the overall development of a nation's e...

Purpose This paper aims to deal with the coordination problem of the supply chain through cost sharing of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and government subsidy. Design/methodology/approach With respect to the coordination problem of the supply chain with CSR, this paper constructs a three-stage game model consisting of a dominant retailer,...

Online consumer comments can reduce the uncertainty of consumers' purchasing behaviors and provide much more important reference for consumers to make purchasing decisions, and some online consumer comments have the positive and negative effects, and then some online retailers often take different actions to respond to consumers' online comments. T...

Waste electrical and electronic equipment have the potential environmental risks and resource value simultaneously. So the product recycling is very important. This paper studies on recycling problems of WEEE under the third-party recycling in a closed-loop supply chain. We take the following measures. Firstly, based on classifying the WEEE, we con...

With improving capability of providing online comments, more and more e-business firms have been developing their online platforms that enable consumers to offer their comments and user experiences. However, there might be conflicting information contained in initial and additional consumer comments, and that information have different value percep...

Incidences of holdouts, as group events, have appeared most frequently in many countries. The underlying cause of these occurrences of high frequency has been closely related to multiple objectives or various conflicts of interest of stakeholders. Each negotiation of holdout demolition represents a typical group consensus problem with the outcome g...

To promote social responsibilities of transnational corporation within the present world where such necessary corporation is seriously missing, this paper explores issues of decision-making and coordination of such a two-echelon supply chain that consists of a contract supplier and a dominant manufacturer. Considering the main reasons behind the la...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is an attempt to design a proper incentive coordination mechanism to deal with the channel conflicts between the traditional sales and online direct sales. Design/methodology/approach With respect to the problems of channel conflicts between the traditional sales and online direct sales, to optimize the sale syste...

To deal with coordination problem of a supply chain consisting of two competitive suppliers and a dominant retailer, considering these factors such as cooperation effort degrees and competition on the supply chain members, we establish a two-stage model considering cooperation effort degrees and competition of the suppliers from the perspectives of...

The selection of renewable energy storage technology has important significance for maintaining the supply and demand balance of renewable energy, reducing the application cost of new energy and accelerating the pace of the new energy revolution. Different from the existing research which regards the selection of energy storage technology as a mult...

Background: Performance of urinary cytology is recommended as the part of a standard diagnostic workup and base surveillance regimens in upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC). However, the effect of positive voided urine cytology (VUC) on UTUC prognosis, compared with negative VUC, has not been fully demonstrated. This study aimed to evaluate the...

Background: Performance of urinary cytology is recommended as the part of a standard diagnostic workup and base surveillance regimens in upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC). However, the effect of positive voided urine cytology (VUC) on UTUC prognosis, compared with negative VUC, has not been fully demonstrated. This study aimed to evaluate the...

Background: Performance of urinary cytology is recommended as the part of a standard diagnostic workup and base surveillance regimens in upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC). However, the effect of positive voided urine cytology (VUC) on UTUC prognosis, compared with negative VUC, has not been fully demonstrated. This study aimed to evaluate the...

Background: Performance of urinary cytology is recommended as the part of a standard diagnostic workup and base surveillance regimens in upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC). However, the effect of positive voided urine cytology (VUC) on UTUC prognosis, compared with negative VUC, has not been fully demonstrated. This study aimed to evaluate the...

Background: Performance of urinary cytology is recommended as the part of a standard diagnostic workup and base surveillance regimens in upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC). However, the effect of positive voided urine cytology (VUC) on UTUC prognosis, compared with negative VUC, has not been fully demonstrated. This study aimed to evaluate the...

Purpose This paper attempts to analyze the relationship between the complementarity degrees of imperfect complementary products and sales strategies and give appropriate sales strategies for a two-stage supply chain. Design/methodology/approach With respect to two-stage supply chain consisting of two manufacturers who produce imperfect complementa...

The interest conflict is an important factor affecting the supply chain (SC) performance, so it is very important to set up a reasonable coordination mechanism to eliminate the SC conflicts. Considering the fact that suppliers' effort performance level and fairness concern behavior are important factors affecting SC performance, we can develop SC m...

The "two skin" problem between universities’technology and economic development is generally more prominent, so that how to extract the important factors on R&D performance of universities and measure their time lag has a great significance for generating the "deep knowledge" to guide or assist the decision and promote the transformation of science...

With the significant economic shift, water pollution treatment has gradually become a key problem which needs to be deeply investigated for the sustainable development of China. In the face of specific water pollution incidents, multiple alternatives are often required to work together in order to achieve better results. However, due to the limitat...

Pricing problems are the core content of product management and supply chain management, so that how to make rational price for different products under a dual-channel supply chain has been an urgent problem to be solved. With respect to the pricing problem of two differentiated products in a dual-channel supply chain consisting of a dominant manuf...

The consumers pay more and more attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has been a new competitiveness for the enterprises. This paper constructs a supply chain consisting of a dominated retailer, a socially responsible supplier and a non‐socially responsible supplier (compared with the socially responsible supplier), consider the...

We investigate holistically a business system, consisting of market invitations, a firm’s supply chain ecosystem, innovative recognition of market signals, and consequent challenges the ecosystem faces. We show that a firm’s upstream component and downstream complement challenges place respectively a cap on the ‘value’ the firm can create and captu...

This paper studies holistically the supply-chain ecosystem of a focal firm, when the firm innovatively deciphers a market invitation. It employs the thinking logic and methodology of systems science to establish a series of generally true conclusions regarding the challenges facing either the suppliers or the complementors. In particular, this pape...

The research and development (R&D) of general purpose technologies (GPTs) is a collaborative effort of innovation involving multiple stakeholders, which has received extensive attention worldwide. Considering the characteristics of China's R&D of Nano-GPT, this research mainly makes two contributions: (1) Based on the theory of conflict analysis, a...

In recent years, China has constantly strengthened environmental regulation (ER) to force the manufacturing industry to upgrade. This study theoretically analyzes interaction mechanism of ER on the upgrading of manufacturing industry through foreign direct investment (FDI) and technological innovation (TI) and carries out empirical verification by...

Clustering analysis is a common problem in decision-making, and its process often changes with the environment. Grey incidence is a theoretical method of effective classification, which uses the degree of incidence between objects to determine the classes. However, it is difficult to obtain the clustering threshold value and analyze the dynamic cha...

Purpose This paper aims to establish a novel three-way decisions-based grey incidence analysis clustering approach and exploit it to extract information and rules implied in panel data. Design/methodology/approach Because of taking on the spatiotemporal characteristics, panel data can well-describe and depict the systematic and dynamic of the deci...

Risk is an important factor affecting the success of complex equipment research and manufacturing, so how to deal with the risk properly has become the key to risk management of complex equipment cooperative research and manufacturing. In view of this, considering that the choice of risk response schemes for complex equipment research and manufactu...

Air pollution has caused huge losses of life and property. So, how to choose a practically effective scheme to m.itigate air pollution is of great significance. However, such a selection problem of treatment schemes represents really a group negotiation process of many decision makers (DMs), involving a variety of fuzzy information and preferences....