Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of inventory leanness on productivity. In particular, the authors explore the moderating role of environmental complexity and the mediating role of risk taking. Design/methodology/approach In the mediated moderation analysis of the relationship among inventory leanness, risk taking, environmental complexity and productivity, the authors adopt the instrumental variable method to test the hypotheses based on data collected from 1,709 Chinese listed manufacturing firms. Findings The results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between inventory leanness and productivity. The authors then demonstrate the role of risk taking in mediating this relationship. Furthermore, the authors find that environmental complexity not only negatively moderates the relationship between inventory leanness and productivity, but also negatively moderates the relationship between risk taking and productivity. Practical implications Managers should not be excessively pursuing inventory leanness improvements, so as not to damage the ability to increase productivity. Originality/value This paper may be the first study to empirically demonstrate the moderating effect of environmental complexity and the mediating effect of risk taking on the inverted U-shaped relationship between inventory leanness and productivity.

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Parents in many cultures invest significant proportions of household incomes in the so-called shadow education system of private supplementary tutoring. Parts of the literature attribute intensive tutoring to East Asian cultural traditions and to so-called tiger parenting. Based on a mixed-methods study in Shanghai, this article examines tiger parenting through a socio-economic lens to show the roles of shadow education in achieving parental goals. The study shows that

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The organic and mineral components in two coals and resulting high-temperature ashes with high silicon content were characterized by second-derivative infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The infrared spectra of raw coals show weak organic functional groups bands but strong kaolinite bands because of the relatively high silicates content. In contrast, the Raman spectra of raw coals show strong disordered carbon bands but no mineral bands since Raman spectroscopy is highly sensitive to carbonaceous phases. The overlapping bands of mineral components (e.g., calcite, feldspar, and muscovite) were successfully resolved by the method of second-derivative infrared spectroscopy. The results of infrared spectra indicate the presence of metakaolinite in coal ashes, suggesting the thermal transformation of kaolinite during ashing. Intense quartz bands were shown in both infrared and Raman spectra of coal ashes. In addition, Raman spectra of coal ashes show a very strong characteristic band of anatase (149 cm–1), although the titanium oxides content is very low. Combined use of second-derivative infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy provides valuable insight into the analyses of mineralogical composition. The XRD results generally agree with those of FTIR and Raman spectroscopic analyses.

In this paper, we propose a fast proximal gradient algorithm for multiobjective optimization, it is proved that the convergence rate of the accelerated algorithm for multiobjective optimization developed by Tanabe et al. can be improved from O(1/k 2 ) to o(1/k 2 ) by introducing different extrapolation term k−1 k+α−1 with α > 3. Further, we establish the inexact version of the proposed algorithm when the error term is additive, which owns the same convergence rate. At last, the efficiency of the proposed algorithm is verified on some numerical experiments.

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