Health-care waste (HCW) management is a major challenge for municipalities, particularly in the cities of developing nations. Selecting the best treatment technology for HCW can be regarded as a complex multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) issue involving a number of alternatives and multiple evaluation criteria. In addition, decision makers tend to express their personal assessments via multi-granularity linguistic term sets because of different backgrounds and knowledge, some of which may be imprecise, uncertain and incomplete. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to propose a new hybrid decision making approach combining interval 2-tuple induced distance operators with the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) for tackling HCW treatment technology selection problems with linguistic information. The proposed interval 2-tuple induced TOPSIS (ITI-TOPSIS) can not only model the uncertainty and diversity of the assessment information given by decision makers, but also reflect the complex attitudinal characters of decision makers and provide much more complete information for the selection of the optimum disposal alternative. Finally, an empirical example in Shanghai, China is provided to illustrate the proposed decision making method, and results show that the ITI-TOPSIS proposed in this paper can solve the problem of HCW treatment technology selection effectively.

The business ecosystem has provided a new paradigm for management research. Most research in the field has focused on profit-driven industries, neglecting the area of the circular economy. This research sets out to capture the mechanisms that the leading firm in the circular economy uses to govern its business ecosystem. The research strategy adopted is a longitudinal case study of the largest glass recycling company in Taiwan, Spring Pool Glass. Our findings illustrate that continuous value capture is the key to governing a sustainable business ecosystem in the glass recycling industry. The mechanisms include continuous value capture to enter new markets, using stakeholder networks to enlarge the business ecosystem, brand image and corporate social responsibility, company capabilities and research and development in the recycling process, and reacting to government policy.

China has emerged as the second largest economy in the world during the globalization in the last forty years. However, in the last decade, Chinese manufacturing has also demonstrated its dark side causing wide range of concerns globally and directly jeopardize people’s health because of serious pollutions. How could the world keep its industrialization yet without damages to the natural environment? The paper proposes a new framework entitled ‘IE³’ by integrating three domains of knowledge—Industrial Entrepreneurship, Industrial Engineering and Industrial Ecology. The IE³ model provides a potential answer to the future development pathway for industrialization, changing from pursuit of quantity to quality via considering resources efficiency and ecology efficiency. The novelty of the research lies in incorporating three originally separated theories into a comprehensive system.

Value-informed pricing strategy, which focuses on determining the price level of products based on consumer value perception, is especially suitable to be applied in digital products rather than industrial ones. By carrying out 65 in-depth interviews with people involved in the Chinese Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) industry, this article explores the process through which a value-informed pricing strategy is applied to determine the price level of virtual in-game accessories—exploring pricing preference through interacting with game players, swaying pricing alternatives through managing the competitive environment, and manipulating value perception through shaping the virtual marketplace. Furthermore, this article constructs a theoretical framework of value-informed pricing, including the above process, and deciphers the linkage mechanism between different segments. The findings not only enrich the theory of value-informed pricing under the application context of virtual digital products but also have implications for the practitioners in the MMORPG industry.

The minimum volume enclosing ellipsoid (MVEE) is a basic convex optimization problem. This paper describes some new properties such as “algorithmic coordinate-wise smoothness” of this model and proposes a steepest descent type algorithm, the coordinate gradient descent (CGD) algorithm, to address the MVEE problem. We prove that the CGD algorithm is sublinearly convergent. Moreover, it is shown to converge in a linear rate locally, and slightly faster than the FW type algorithms, especially in the cases of large dimensions. At last, we compare our algorithm with the random coordinate descent (RCD) method and show that the RCD algorithm is less efficient than the CGD algorithm in computing the MVEE. The numerical tests support our theoretical results.