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AbstractThe accelerated degradation test (ADT) is an efficient tool for assessing the lifetime information of highly reliable products. However, conducting an ADT is very expensive. Therefore, how to conduct a cost‐constrained ADT plan is a great challenging issue for reliability analysts. By taking the experimental cost into consideration, this paper proposes a semi‐analytical procedure to determine the total sample size, testing stress levels, the measurement frequencies, and the number of measurements (within a degradation path) globally under a class of exponential dispersion degradation models. The proposed method is also extended to determine the global planning of a three‐level compromise plan. The advantage of the proposed method not only provides better design insights for conducting an ADT plan, but also provides an efficient algorithm to obtain a cost‐constrained ADT plan, compared with conventional optimal plans by grid search algorithms.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explain the difference of national intellectual capital from the perspective of national culture and to illustrate how national leaders or policy-makers increase their country's national intellectual capital.Design/methodology/approachThe study conducts a descriptive analysis combining the research outcome of Lin and Edvinsson's (2011) national intellectual capital with Hofstede's (2001) national culture. The research findings and results of these two studies were compared before running at-test to determine whether countries with relatively high national intellectual capital have a higher level of certain national culture.FindingsBased on the matching data of 26 countries, the study proposed that countries with certain national culture possess lower intellectual capital. Countries with high intellectual capital tend to exhibit a common culture of low power distance, weak uncertainty avoidance, and individualism.Practical implicationsThe study suggests that for a country to enhance its overall intellectual capital, it should strive for a culture of equality, freedom and safety, and an active competitive environment, while avoiding social class distance in order to eliminate insecurity. The study proposes some suggestions to advance the countries' national intellectual capital. In addition to admit the weakness of their intellectual capital due to cultural reasons, these countries could go a step further to increase their own national intellectual capital by increasing or enhancing certain national cultures if possible.Originality/valueThe study compares national intellectual capital and national culture and finds the relationship between these two sets of constructs. This study proves that national culture not only influences the strategies or behaviors of business level but also the competitiveness of national levels.

Previous studies have not sufficiently investigated how supervisors can improve employees' intention to help their colleagues. Therefore, research regarding this issue is required. Social exchange theory and the appraisal-coping model were adopted herein to hypothesize that supervisor-employee guanxi—informal interpersonal connections that involve the exchange of favors—and a supervisor's negative mood are associated with employees' intention to help their colleagues. The findings indicate that employees' intention to help their colleagues is negatively related to their supervisor's negative mood but positively related to employee agreeableness. Furthermore, for employees who have weak guanxi with their supervisors, the negative mood of the supervisors is negatively related to the employees' intention to help colleagues, but this relationship does not apply to employees who have strong guanxi with their supervisors. The findings suggest that supervisors should manage their negative moods and strengthen their guanxi with employees to improve their employees' intention to help colleagues.