Journal of Industrial Integration and Management

This study analyzes how social media affects bank loan contracting. Using a sample of 642 US bank loan contracts, we hypothesize that social media can enhance information dissemination and mitigate the information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that borrowers that receive positive social media user opinion on social media enjoy more favorable price of bank loan contracts. Additional analyses indicate that the relations among social media user opinion and bank loan price vary with the firm size, loan structure and availability of public information of borrowers. Overall, this research provides evidence that social media reduces cost of bank loans by decreasing information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders in the capital markets.

It is generally considered that economic feasibility of a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is only attainable if the system is defined to be reconfigurable at the outset of its design. In this work, we consider the potential exception to this perception, in the context of a common industrial scenario where a specialized and expensive manufacturing machine or system will otherwise be rendered useless due to the loss of business of the particular product being manufactured. Specific guidelines to convert from a fixed to a reconfigurable system are proposed, and evaluated through a case study. It is shown that under certain conditions, RMSs may be economically feasible even if they are developed through the modification of pre-existing dedicated systems.

In a conventional view, customers just purchase the goods or services created by companies. But the role of customers has changed. Now customers are seeking to practice their influence in every part of the business system as a co-creator. What is co-creation? Is it like customization? The answer is yes and no. The difference between co-creation and customization depends on the degree of involvement of the customer in the business. Generally, the customer plays a much more active role in co-creation than customization. Co-creation refers to almost every part of a business, but customization is restricted to the end stage of production. Co-creation can happen in the process of sales support, which can ultimately improve sales performance. This paper illustrates the relationships among co-creation, sales support and sales performance, and designs an experiment to test.

In this paper, a reliability model for evaporation system in sugar industry is developed to accomplish performance evolution. This system consists of three subsystems, namely evaporator, syrup sulphitor and sulphited syrup. These subsystems are working in series. Failure time distribution of subsystems is exponential, whereas repair time distribution of subsystems is arbitrary. The differential difference equations associated with state changeover model of the system are developed by using supplementary variable technique and solved to get state probabilities of the system model. The results for some measures (availability and profit) of system performance are obtained in steady state. A particular case is also considered to show the behavior of availability and profit analysis of the evaporation system.