Flooding has become the natural disaster that causes the greatest losses, with urban flooding restricting the healthy development of cities. The ability to assess a city’s resilience to flooding is very important and would contribute to improving resilience and also help to inform planning and development. The aim of this study was to determine the key urban flood resilience indicators for three different Chinese cities (Wuhan, Nanjing, and Hefei) and to prioritize these for each city. A combined interpretive structure and network analysis method (ISM-ANP) model was used to evaluate and analyze the selected evaluation indicators. A four-level urban flood resilience evaluation network model was constructed to determine the interdependence between indicators and to calculate the priorities of the flood resilience indicators for the three cities. Overall, rescue capacity was found to be extremely important and was defined as the most important index. For Wuhan, indicators related to the distribution of waters were found to be more important, while for Nanjing, spatial planning and spatial structure of land use were found to be key priorities. In Hefei, the level of investment in infrastructure and the level of public resources occupy a more important position. The framework presented in this study contributes to the understanding of urban flood resilience and has the potential to be extended to other natural hazards.

Digital products companies are increasingly adopting subscription pricing, but consumers who pay the subscription service may not be able to access all digital products sold on the sales platform. This paper explores the question of why some digital products are not in the subscription service of the sales platform. To address this problem, we develop an analytical model to examine two strategies of the firm. One is that the firm does not add the new product into the subscription service, the other is that the firm adds the new product into the subscription service. By comparing the profits under two sets, we find the condition under which the firm should add the new digital product into the subscription service. The results show that if the percentage of existing subscribers is below a certain threshold, and the subscription price is over a certain threshold, it is better for the firm to add the new product into the subscription service. We also analyze how the main variables affect the firm’s profit and the piracy rate. Our research provides useful insights for firms in choosing pricing schemes for the newly released product and offers advice for policymakers on controlling the piracy rate of digital products industry.

In this paper, we analyse the pricing strategies and the level of digital rights management (DRM) protection in a two-echelon digital product supply chain that consists of one manufacturer and one retailer. Two different market structures are considered: Manufacturer Stackelberg (MS) and Vertical Integration. We show that the manufacturer could obtain more profit than the retailer in the MS model, and the joint profits of both sides in the VI model is no less than in the MS model. Further results are obtained by comparative analysis. We also examine how the quality of the digital products and the copyright enforcement impact the development of strategies. Our analytic results can help the firms choose appropriate DRM policy and optimal pricing for their products. It is also expected that the results can give an advice for the government developing the appropriate copyright enforcement.

The e-books industry is mature, and audiobooks are becoming increasingly popular. More and more publishers are coming to realize that audiobooks could be a potential revenue driver and intend to release audiobooks. Considering that there is a certain substitutability between e-books and audiobooks, publishers need to decide how to release a book in its audible version and its e-book version into the market. In this paper, we incorporate the discount factor and the consumers’ acceptance level for audiobooks into the consumer utility by dividing consumers into two types, high-value type and low-value type, and construct two different release models: releasing the audiobook and the e-book simultaneously and releasing the audiobook after the e-book. Using an optimization tool, we investigate pricing strategies of a monopolistic publisher under two different release models. By comparing the theoretical results of the two models, we find that when the consumers’ patience exceeds a certain threshold, releasing a book in its audible version after its e-book version is better for the publisher, and the publisher should adopt a skimming (refers to decreasing markups over time) pricing strategy for the e-book in this case. Further, the publisher should set a higher price for the audiobook than the e-book, whether or not they release the audiobook after the e-book. In addition, we conduct a numerical analysis to investigate how the discount factor, the percentage of high-value consumers, and the high-value consumers’ acceptance level for audiobooks affect the consumer surplus and the social welfare. This study offers publishers some managerial insights into the complex issues involving pricing and release strategies.