With rapid economic and social development, increasing water demands have made water scarcity a worldwide issue. Equitable, stable, and efficient water allocation, which includes water resources management and conflicting water demand management, needs a valid resolution. This paper develops a multiobjective bilevel model with the upper level reflecting the river basin authority’s allocation principle of equity and stability and the lower level aimed at ensuring maximal economic benefit effiency for each subarea. The Gini coefficient is introduced to seek equity in the water allocation strategies, a power index is applied to ensure stability in the water allocation solutions, and an economic efficiency function is designed to maximize the economic benefit efficiency in each subarea. The proposed multiobjective bilevel water allocation model is then applied to a case study in Qujiang River Basin in China, and demonstrates that the proposed model provides reasonable and practical water allocation st...

The improvement in urban production efficiency has led to income distribution being skewed towards urban labor, thereby widening the urban–rural income gap. However, integration of the agricultural industry at the county level can accelerate the flow of production factors between industries. Therefore, this study evaluates the degree of agricultural industry integration at the county level using the entropy weight method and explores its impact on the urban–rural income gap, based on sample data from 1122 counties in China spanning from 2014 to 2021. The research findings reveal the following: (1) The fixed model demonstrates that enhancing agricultural industry integration can significantly narrow the urban–rural income gap; (2) The mediating model indicates that this narrowing effect can be achieved by improving the green total factor productivity of agriculture; (3) Regional heterogeneity analysis indicates that the impact of agricultural industry integration is more pronounced in the central region and main crop production areas; (4) The results of the spatial Durbin model demonstrate that agricultural industry integration also exhibits a significant positive spatial spillover effect on neighboring areas. The outcomes of this study contribute to enriching the research on agricultural industry integration for green and low-carbon agricultural development, further promoting the development of county-level agricultural industry integration, and providing valuable insights for other similar countries.

(1) Background: Electricity consumption data are often made up of complex, unstable series that have different fluctuation characteristics in different industries. However, electricity demand forecasting is a prerequisite for the control and scheduling of power systems. (2) Methods: As most previous research has focused on prediction accuracy rather than stability, this paper developed a decomposition-based combination forecasting model using dynamic adaptive entropy-based weighting for total electricity demand forecasting at the engineering level. (3) Results: To further illustrate the prediction accuracy and stationarity of the proposed method, a comparison analysis using an analysis of variance and an orthogonal approach to solve the least squares equations was conducted using classical individual models, a combination forecasting model, and a decomposition-based combination forecasting model. The proposed method had a very satisfactory overall performance with good verification and validation compared to autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and artificial neural-networks (ANN). (4) Conclusion: As the proposed method dynamically combines various forecast models and can decompose and adapt to various characteristic data sets, it was found to have an accurate, stable forecast performance. Therefore, it could be broadly applied to forecasting electricity demand and developing electricity generation plans and related energy policies.

Customers’ declining receptivity to conventional marketing tools has been a challenge for convenience stores. To overcome this, retailers are turning to social media as a new, potent marketing tool for creating business prospects and encouraging direct customer interaction. However, it is still unknown how social media marketing affects the shifts in customer behavior. This paper expands on the relationship of “loyalty program (LP) + virtual community experience → perceived value → customer loyalty” in the traditional convenience store scenario, refining the variables of virtual community experience, perceived value, and customer loyalty. It also compares the effectiveness of different LP design structures (reward amounts × reward time limits) and explores the mediation impact of program loyalty and the moderation effect of alternative attractiveness. The results demonstrate the superior performance of LPs with an expiry policy and differential returns and highlight the importance of enhancing members’ virtual community experiences in fostering customer perceived value and loyalty. The results also show the minor negative moderation impact of community group buying and prove that emotional value significantly impacts customer loyalty. Still, the social value does not affect program loyalty. The recommendations are offered, such as designing growing-oriented and periodical zeroing LPs, as well as using new social media marketing tools (virtual community-based marketing) to empower traditional marketing techniques (LP-based relationship marketing) and constructing a “convenience store + community group buying” model. The findings have substantial theoretical and practical implications for traditional convenience stores in properly implementing loyalty and social media marketing tactics to maximize customer value and loyalty with a limited budget.

Agricultural cooperatives have been found to effectively alleviate poverty in developing countries because of their specific socioeconomic functions that allow poor households to overcome marketing and production constraints. However, cooperative evaluations are inevitably influenced by other poverty alleviation measures and rarely consider the characteristics of specific ethnic groups. Using cross-sectional surveys in Southwest China and employing propensity score matching (PSM) and endogenous switching regression (ESR) models, this paper analyzed the participation of poor households in New-type Agricultural Cooperatives (NACs) in ethnic areas and assessed the income impacts of NAC membership by eliminating unobserved biases and group heterogeneity. This study detected heterogeneous policy perceptions and behavioral differences between the member and nonmember groups, and the PSM and ESR model results indicated that, overall, participation in the NACs had a positive effect on household income. The ESR model was found to be more plausible as it was able to reveal the significant income gaps under a counterfactual inference framework. Local policymakers need to focus on the policy perception and behavioral and earning capability differences between groups and increase the balanced policy implementation.