Customer experience: a systematic literature review and consumer culture theory-based conceptualisation

Management Review Quarterly - The study aims to summarise and classify the existing research and to better understand the past, present, and the future state of the theory of customer experience....     

The relationship between laissez-faire leadership and burnout: Mediation through work alienation and the moderating role of political skill

We tested the relationship between laissez-faire leadership and job burnout and the mediating role of work alienation in this relationship. We also examined the moderating role of political skill in the relationship between laissez-faire leadership and burnout. Based on time-lagged (three waves, two months apart) survey data collected from 272 employees in 92 firms operating in China, our results showed that laissez-faire leadership was positively related to burnout both directly and via work alienation. Moreover, the positive relationship between laissez-faire leadership and burnout was contingent on political skill, such that the relationship was weak when political skill was high. The study provides useful suggestions to help managers curb employees' feelings of burnout and work alienation.     

Regional and copula estimation effects on EU and US energy equity portfolios

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to investigate the regional interdependence structure of energy equities in the US and in the EU. Based on weekly stock prices of 28 big energy firms in the two regions from 2008 to 2019, we compare the efficiency of using bivariate or multivariate copulas to describe the dependence structure of energy equities. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of the choice between these two methods on the performance of energy equity portfolios. Our empirical results show that multivariate copulas, such as C-Vine, allow to better describe the dependence structure of energy equities. We also find that there is a stronger and more complex dependence structure among EU energy equities than among US energy equities. Our scenario analysis also shows that the dependence structure is stronger during the GFC while being weaker during the ESDC. More importantly, the correlation matrix obtained from the multivariate copula method allows to obtain optimal mean-CVaR portfolios with a higher performance than that from the bivariate copula method. More importantly, optimal portfolios constituted with multivariate copulas allow to reduce the portfolio’s sensitivity to oil prices.     

A scientific writing pedagogy and mixed methods assessment for engineering education using open-coding and multi-dimensional scaling

Assessments of new pedagogical practices usually rely on instructor oriented surveys and questionnaires to measure student perceptions of teaching methods; however, fixed response categories in structured questionnaires might bias results. This paper demonstrates a mixed methods approach using open and multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) for a student-oriented exploratory analysis and visualization of perceptions of teaching methods. A scientific writing and research methodology course is a required course for first year PhD students in software engineering and geo-infomatics at Wuhan University, China. PhD students attending this course came from countries whose first language is not English, and from a variety of software engineering and geo-infomatics domains. The problem therefore, was to elicit un-mediated perceptions of course assignment, reduce and generalize the resulting data for interpretation. A graphical visualization of themes emerging in student responses to two open-ended questions about an assignment provided a basis for inferring student interests and needs. In this course, an assessment of a task oriented problem-solving experience was implemented through a mixed method strategy incorporating qualitative methods, exploratory data mining techniques, and cartographic visualization. The visualization shows that participating students generally perceived the exercise as challenging, helped them understand journal requirements, and develop ways to survey texts to extract information. The results also suggested that this consensus breaks down in terms of each participant’s own goals, domain, and research interests. Unstructured questions, open coding, and MDS visualization might also prove to be helpful in the process of devising and assessing other student centered pedagogies.