With the quick growth of social media, influencer-owned DTC brands have emerged as a new business form, which differs from the traditional influencer who endorses third-party brands. Taking MrBeast's Feastables Chocolate as a single case, based on Source Credibility Theory and Parasocial Interaction Theory, and relying on multiple public secondary data sources, including the official Feastables website, open‑access YouTube videos and social‑media public metrics, industry analysis reports, and mainstream news‑media coverage, to explore the brand promotion mechanism, performance, benefit, and potential risks of influencer-owned DTC brands. The results show that influencers' credibility and parasocial emotional role can help brands achieve remarkable cold‑start brand awareness in beginner. However, this IP transfer also faces a lot of risks, such as influencer reputation, which means some negative events involving an influencer will directly affect the brand's reputation, over‑reliance on personal IP, and so on, and thus lead to the brand being unable to transform or extend.

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Cashless payments are commonly evaluated in terms of speed, convenience and technical risk, but these criteria do not explain why the public regards some financial institutions as credible and others as untrustworthy. This paper argues that cashlessness does not eliminate trust; it transfers trust from a tangible instrument and bilateral exchange to banks, payment platforms, clearing systems and regulators. To analyse that transfer, the paper defines trust costs as the verification, monitoring, privacy, redress and switching or exclusion burdens that users bear when relying on institutions they cannot fully observe. It then proposes a Public Financial Credibility Framework with six dimensions: operational reliability, integrity and accountability, transparency and data stewardship, fairness and inclusion, redress and contestability, and resilience and public backstops. The framework is applied to loyalty points, algorithmic credit and buy now pay later, financial exclusion, central bank digital currency and payment failures. Existing theory, official data and regulatory evidence provide preliminary theoretical and content validity. However, the framework is presented as a testable research programme rather than an empirically validated index. Future validation should combine survey measures, behavioural outcomes and event studies of outages, data breaches and redress decisions.

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Although sporting events are widely studied, sub-national multi-sport events remain largely neglected in the literature. To address this gap, this study uses a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) design based on an unbalanced panel of approximately 280 prefecture-level cities from 2003 to 2020, to estimate the economic impact of China's provincial games on host cities, supplemented by stacked DID and event-study analyses. Results indicate that hosting provincial games raises fixed-asset investment by roughly 8-10%, social retail sales by about 4.5%, and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by approximately 4%. These effects are mostly seen in the first two to three years after the event, and no statistically significant effects are found for GDP growth, industrial structure, local fiscal revenue, or employment. Findings suggest that the stimulus mainly works through the infrastructure-investment channel and is stronger in eastern and central regions, in small and medium-sized cities, as well as resource-based cities. Overall, provincial games mostly serve as a short-term demand injection and investment catalyst rather than an engine of sustained growth.

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FinTech refers to the new business model, application, process and product formed after digital technology enters the financial services sector. This article distinguishes between the external shock caused by the entry of FinTech enterprises into traditional financial markets and the internal transformation carried out by commercial banks through the application of digital technology. It examines the impact of FinTech on the operations of commercial banks from three aspects: profitability, risk-taking and business structure, and analyzes three transmission mechanisms: information asymmetry, market competition and liquidity creation. The research shows that the external development of FinTech will divert bank deposits, payment services and credit customers, putting pressure on traditional income; after banks apply digital technology to customer identification, credit approval and internal operations, they can reduce information processing costs and expand service scope. FinTech helps to reduce the credit risk of individual banks, while deposit competition, profit constraints, model convergence and enhanced inter-bank connections may increase risk-taking or expand systemic risks. These impacts vary with bank size, property rights and business model, as well as the level of digital infrastructure and technology application in the region. Regulatory authorities need to implement classified supervision based on the source of technology, bank type and risk level, while commercial banks should choose a transformation path that is compatible with their customer base and technical capabilities.

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