National culture, networks and ethnic entrepreneurship: A comparison of the Indian and Chinese immigrants in the US

This paper uses a combination of national cultural frameworks and social capital theory to explain the formation and management of entrepreneurial ventures among immigrant communities. The varying rates of venture formation and performance among different ethnic groups points to the role that the different dimensions of culture play in how immigrants use their social networks to start such firms. We use the specific example of the Indian and Chinese communities in the US to demonstrate this effect and explain how businesses created by members of these communities could have potentially different ways of starting and operating that can be directly traced to the differences in cultural orientation of their owners. What emerges can be summarized as: (a) different immigrant communities have different ways of accumulating and using social capital in starting and managing their ethnic ventures; (b) these dissimilarities manifest themselves in variations in the motives for forming these ventures, human resource practices and termination rates; and (c) that these variations can partly be explained by the differences in their respective national cultures.     

Dynamic capabilities in entrepreneurial firms: A case study approach

Three entrepreneurial case studies in Canada show that changes in the environment??such as changes in customers?? needs and changes in competitive products??are the major sources of opportunities. To recognize and exploit these opportunities, the firm needs entrepreneurial capabilities. At the same time, to gain long-run competitive advantage, the firm needs dynamic capabilities. The case findings show that entrepreneurial capabilities have circular and iterative relationship with dynamic capabilities??each reinforces the other. The more often the iteration takes place, the stronger entrepreneurial capabilities and dynamic capabilities are. Further, the study builds on the extant literature and develops a new method to capture dynamic capabilities through capturing changes in ordinary capabilities.     

Social Planner’s Solution for the Caspian Sea Conflict

This paper evaluates the proposed alternatives for sharing the Caspian Sea from the social planner’s or systems-level perspective with respect to the stakeholders’ utilities from the oil and natural gas resources of the sea. Different multi-criteria decision-making methods, namely dominance, maximin, lexicography, simple additive weighting, and TOPSIS are applied to determine the social planner’s ranking of these alternatives. Results suggest the Condominium governance regime as the most promising division method. Bankruptcy rules and cooperative game theory methods can be considered as the other socially optimal resolutions to the conflict over sharing the Caspian Sea energy resources among its five littoral countries. Consideration of these methods in negotiations may help with resolving the existing deadlock, which has been in place for two decades.     

Debt, growth and inflation in large European economies: a vector auto-regression analysis

This paper attempts to empirically test the hypothesis that whether debt matters in the EU. This has been performed by examining the potential adverse effects of debt in large European economies on investment, inflation and growth. Using the hybrid cointegration and vector autoregressive models, the findings, based on the period 1970–97, suggest that debt causes significant adverse effects on investment, but its impact on growth is not clear-cut. Moreover, debt appears to be inflationary in most cases in the long run, though produces no clear short run pattern on inflation.     

Social capital and entrepreneurial process

The paper examines the relationship between social capital and entrepreneurial engagement of individuals in 35 nations from Europe and Asia. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical research that attempts to investigate the influence of three-dimensional social capital concept – trust, networks and norms – on three stages of entrepreneurial process – preference, trial and success – using such large and comprehensive cross-sectional micro data. In general, we find that all three dimensions of social capital matter in the entrepreneurship context, albeit differently. They become beneficial in different ways and at different stages of entrepreneurial involvement. For example, among trust variables, institutional trust in general, and trust in business-oriented and business-supporting actors in particular, exert significant positive effect on entrepreneurial process. Individuals with formal membership in professional associations are more likely to perceive entrepreneurial opportunities, while some close or strong-tie networks might prevent them from progressing in the entrepreneurship ladder. Finally, individual level civic norms appear to be negatively associated with early-stage entrepreneurship, while the success in becoming an entrepreneur is not found to be bound by people’s civic norms.     

Developing a Group Decision Support System for Advertising Media Evaluation: A Case in the Middle East

The importance of advertising media evaluation as a multifaceted problem is well known by both academics and practitioners. Although previous studies tried to optimize media evaluation, there still are some gaps and problems to address, particularly in areas of flexibility of models/frameworks, decision making quality, tension management, and agility of the evaluation process. Most of previous studies are based on inflexible models/frameworks that have limitations on number of criteria/alternatives they can consider and type of data they can process. A great volume of the work used arbitrary decision making; arbitrary decision making regarding criteria and media importance may reduce effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Furthermore, the academic literature offers little guidance on group decision aggregation, and tension management during decision making is neglected. Media evaluation is a time taking process and any acceleration will reduce pre-campaign costs. The main aim of this paper is to illustrate how a group decision support system (GDSS) can assist media planners to overcome mentioned problems more systematically. For this purpose, we developed a GDSS that is an integration of three well-known multi-criteria decision making techniques. With a real world case study, we illustrate the performance of the proposed GDSS. Results of our quantitative assessments indicate that the GDSS is flexible, allows decision makers to express their opinions, reduces tension among decision makers, and saves time.     

The mean residual of record values at the level of previous records

In the study of reliability of the technical systems, records model plays an important role. Suppose that a technical system is subject to shocks, e.g. peaks of voltages or stresses. The successive large shocks may be viewed as realizations of records from a sequence of identically independent voltages. Assume that the lower limit value of the mth record voltage (stress) is v > 0. Under these conditions, we propose a mean residual of records (MRR’s) for the future records. We study several properties of MRR. We show that the proposed MRR uniquely characterizes the distribution function that generated the sequence of records. It is proved that when the model under study has an increasing hazard rate the corresponding MRR is decreasing. We also compare between two record systems based on their MRR’s when these systems are ordered in terms of their hazard rates.     

Policy Uncertainty and the Demand for Money in Korea: An Asymmetry Analysis

Previous studies included money supply volatility as well as output volatility as measures of uncertainty in estimating the demand for money. However, a more comprehensive measure of uncertainty is now constructed for many countries and is known as policy uncertainty. When we included this new measure in the formulation of the demand for money in Korea and relied upon a nonlinear specification of the money demand which allows us to assess the asymmetric effects of changes in the policy uncertainty measure, we found asymmetric long-run effects of policy uncertainty on the demand for cash in Korea. Our conjecture is that increased uncertainty induces Koreans to hold less cash in favor of safer assets and decreased uncertainty has opposite effects, though at different rate.