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Article History

Received: 19 August 2024

Accepted: 23 April 2025

First Online: 5 May 2025

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: This study was conducted in accordance with the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki. Ethical approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the City University of Macau (Reference No.: 2024-RE-47) on November 3, 2023. The approval encompasses the implementation of behavioral experiments involving Chinese employees and the statistical analysis of the data collected.

: All participants provided oral informed consent prior to participation. Written consent was waived due to the following reasons: (1) Requiring written signatures could compromise participants’ anonymity, as the study recruited serving public officials and business professionals, and signed documents might inadvertently reveal their identities; (2) The research involved low-risk simulated innovation tasks with no collection of sensitive personal data. Participants’ responses were anonymized, and no identifiable information was linked to their task outputs. The consent process was conducted via face-to-face dialog between experimenters and participants on November 11, 2023. A standardized oral consent script (SI) was used to explain the study purpose, voluntary participation, data anonymity, and the right to withdraw at any time. Audio recordings of consent dialogs were made for participants. All data were anonymized and stored on an encrypted server accessible only to the research team.