Clean development mechanism implementation: External and organizational factors drives expected business benefits

This study aims to deal with the challenge of rationalizing and testing the interrelationships assumptions of external and organizational factors in the case of clean development mechanism implementation. Prior studies are lacking to introduce the expected business benefits as a mediator between external factors and clean development mechanism implementation. The moderating effect of environmental resources was rationalized and evaluated. The data were collected from 130 ISO 14001 certified manufacturing firms and analyzed using the partial least squares technique. The results revealed that expected business benefits mediate the impacts of all considered external factors and cause an insignificant direct association between market pressure and mechanism implementation. Organizational resources moderate positively the impact of competitor pressure on mechanism implementation. The findings extend the literature by illustrating the dependency of external factors and organizational factors and challenging the results of the studies, which have been driven by independence assumption. The findings are enabling policy-makers and managers to effectively modify the strategies for enhancing the extent of mechanism implementation.     

A feasibility study of stateful automaton packet inspection for streaming application detection systems

The rapid development of the internet has brought huge benefits and social impacts; however, internet security has also become a great problem for users, since traditional approaches to packet classification cannot achieve satisfactory detection performance due to their low accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, a new stateful packet inspection method is introduced, which can be embedded in the network gateway and used by a streaming application detection system. This new detection method leverages the inexact automaton approach, using part of the header field and part of the application layer data of a packet. Based on this approach, an advanced detection system is proposed for streaming applications. The workflow of the system involves two stages: the training stage and the detection stage. In the training stage, the system initially captures characteristic patterns from a set of application packet flows. After this training is completed, the detection stage allows the user to detect the target application by capturing new application flows. This new detection approach is also evaluated using experimental analysis; the results of this analysis show that this new approach not only simplifies the management of the state detection system, but also improves the accuracy of data flow detection, making it feasible for real-world network applications.     

Measuring technical and allocative efficiencies for banks in the transition countries using the Fourier flexible cost function

The transition economies are known to have quite different market structures from the market economies. State-owned banks accounts for a major part of the financial sector in East European countries before the transition period. Since the input prices of the sector are frequently under the control of those governments, the misallocated resources may incur the loss of economic efficiency. This paper attempts to gauge the technical and allocative efficiency using unbalanced panel data of 340 banks from 14 transition countries under the framework of the Fourier flexible shadow cost function. Accommodating technical and allocative efficiencies simultaneously, as suggested by Atkinson and Cornwell (Int Econ Rev 35:231–243, 1994a) and Kumbhakar and Wang (J Econom 134:317–340, 2006a), avoids potential specification errors and leads to consistent parameter estimates. The average total cost savings resulting from greater technical and allocative efficiency are around 28.31 and 7.13%, respectively. Foreign-owned banks are found to be the most economically efficient. The enforcement of financial liberalization does gradually improve upon the sample banks’ technical efficiency. The allocative inefficiency arises from over capitalization and excess funds. Scale diseconomies appear to prevail in the sample states with a few exceptions.     

Combining value averaging and Bollinger Band for an ETF trading strategy

The decision-making of investors is highly influenced by their feelings. According to behavioural finance, investor greed and fear would form irrational behaviour and affect their portfolio allocation. Although well-known mechanical investment strategy of dollar cost averaging (DCA) and value averaging (VA) could eliminate the problems of when to purchase, there are still some disadvantages to consider. For example, using a DCA strategy may be able to decrease volatility in portfolio so as to not effect investment decision, but it gives no rule for selling and may increase the opportunity cost of time if investors start deducted at peak prices. On the other hand, VA gives more aggressive sell signals to control the value of the portfolio to the level desired, but the investor may not have enough money purchase of a large number of shares in sharp decline period. Therefore, we use VA as main strategy and Bollinger Band as assist indicator for check for volatility for entry or exit. Through analysis and simulation, the new strategy we design does improve the performance during both bull and bear market periods.     

Do Hispanic immigrants spend less on medical care? Implications of the Hispanic health paradox

ABSTRACT

The literature of the Hispanic heath paradox has found that in the U.S. Hispanic immigrants have better health than U.S. natives, even though they tend to have lower socioeconomic status. The main objective of the current study is to investigate whether Hispanic immigrants also use less medical care goods and services. Main contributions of the article include using a data set of older Americans from the Health and Retirement Study covering the period from 1992 to 2012 as well as using three new measures of health, rather than the more common use of morbidity or mortality. We estimate the impact of relevant factors including health, race, and immigrant status upon five different measures of healthcare usage. Even though Hispanic immigrants do have lower mean levels of most measures of healthcare usage, when controlling for other factors in our regressions we find some evidence of increased healthcare usage for Hispanic immigrants. Increased health care utilization may be one explanation for the Hispanic health paradox.     

Combining conjoint analysis,scenario analysis,the Delphi method,and the innovation diffusion model to analyze the development of innovative products in Taiwan's TV market

In science and technology industries, innovative products are launched rapidly, making the lifecycle of new products ever shorter. Thus, it is important that companies understand consumers' needs and consider expert opinion when analyzing the development of a new technology. However, no studies have combined these two perspectives with regard to the development of a new product. Therefore, this research combined conjoint analysis, scenario analysis, and the Delphi method with the innovative diffusion model to analyze the development of Taiwan's TV market over the next 10 years. The results show that the outlook for demand for light-emitting diode (LED) TVs in Taiwan is very optimistic; sales of LED TVs will surpass sales of liquid crystal display TVs in 2015 in the optimistic scenario and in 2017 in the most likely scenario.