Promoting sustainable consumption and circular economy:the intention of Vietnamese youth consumers to purchase products made from recycled plastics

Recycling is viewed as a key component in a circular economy and serves as an ideal solution for promoting sustainability.During the global plastic crisis,plastic recycling practices have been adopted worldwide,leading to the production of various products made from recycled plastics(PRP).Nevertheless,a gap persists between consumption and demand for such products,which is primarily attributed to a lack of comprehension from the consumer perspective.Given the pivotal role consumers play in the adoption of these products,this study explores consumers’intentions to purchase PRP.This is particularly significant in Vietnam,which is an emerging economy aspiring to achieve the objectives of a circular economy and sustainable development.Utilizing an integrated cognitive-emotional framework comprising the Valence Theory and the Norm Activation Model,data from 564 Vietnamese students were gathered and analyzed using structural equation modeling.The results show that awareness of consequences is a major driver of consumer purchase intentions,followed by perceived ease of application and monetary incentives.The results also indicate that health concerns have the strongest effect on purchase intention and in the negative side,meaning that the health-related risk is the primary concern for consumers during the decision-making process.This research holds substantial value for academics and managers,as it aids in the theoretical exploration and the formulation of strategies to improve consumer acceptance of PRP.

Application of Norms Models with Vectoral System in Construction Projects

Normization, i.e., the system of norms is a structure that defines the group of elements containing the norm values for the requirements of a certain resource. Resources comprise of materials, machines and labor. All the requirements of the measure units of the resources are given statically and with the discrete data. Thus, every slight change in the expense list item reference causes a change in norm and our norm is not flexible and features a discrepancy with the real life situations. In order to achieve a higher level of preciseness and to speed up the technological processes of planning and norming the engines of a company that lead to the regulation of the system, the discrete elements of the working （time-related） norms should be replaced by the dynamic ones. This is made possible through setting up norms models that in turn can be presented by formulae in the vectoral system. The use and implementation of the new technologies in terms of production, computer science and cybernetics provides for upgrading the norm requirements. New working tasks in turn require a new norm standardization, which can be applied to the hydrodemolition of concrete constructions by means of water robots that use high pressure water jets.

Degrees of freedom in low rank matrix estimation

The objective of this paper is to quantify the complexity of rank and nuclear norm constrained methods for low rank matrix estimation problems. Specifically, we derive analytic forms of the degrees of freedom for these types of estimators in several common settings. These results provide efficient ways of comparing different estimators and eliciting tuning parameters. Moreover, our analyses reveal new insights on the behavior of these low rank matrix estimators. These observations are of great theoretical and practical importance. In particular, they suggest that, contrary to conventional wisdom, for rank constrained estimators the total number of free parameters underestimates the degrees of freedom, whereas for nuclear norm penalization, it overestimates the degrees of freedom. In addition, when using most model selection criteria to choose the tuning parameter for nuclear norm penalization, it oftentimes suffices to entertain a finite number of candidates as opposed to a continuum of choices. Numerical examples are also presented to illustrate the practical implications of our results.