Raising and Rising Voices in Social Media

Emerging cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to empirically study such movements in complex online environments. Using the Al-Huwaider online campaign as a case to illustrate our methodology, this contribution attempts to establish a rigorous and fundamental analysis that explains CSMs. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns capturing multi-cultural aspects for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling CSMs by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational social network analysis. This article contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. The proposed methodology provides a rigorous tool to understand the complexity and dynamics of CSMs. Such methodology also assists us in observing the transcending nature of CSMs with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Our study addresses the lack of fundamental research on the formation of CSMs. This research contributes novel methodologies that can be applied to many settings including business, marketing and many others, beyond the exemplary setting chosen here for illustrative purposes.     

Understanding perceived retail crowding: A critical review and research agenda

Perceived retail crowding is an important, but under-researched construct in marketing research. It has been found to influence a number of retail outcomes. However, the limited empirical studies in this area have not just produced seemingly contradictory results, but have also used different conceptualizations of the construct. This paper provides an explanation of the construct of perceived retail crowding and reviews the empirical studies in the area so as to integrate the knowledge that may help in understanding of consumer behavior in crowded retail settings. The paper also presents directions for future research and managerial implications.     

Ridge regression estimation of the Rotterdam model

The best guesses of unknown coefficients specified in Theil's model of introspection are like predictions and not like de Finetti's prevision and therefore not the values taken by random variables. Constrained least squares procedures can be formulated which are free of these difficulties. The ridge estimator is a simple version of a constrained least squares estimator which can be made operational even when little prior information is available. Our operational ridge estimators are nearly minimax and are not less stable than least squares in the presence of high multicollinearity. Finally, we have presented the ridge estimates for the Rotterdam demand model.     

Industry globalization and the performance of emerging market firms: Evidence from China

In this study, we explore the extent to which industry globalization affects the performance of firms in China, an emerging market. We focus on the period between 1996 and 2001 and track the globalization levels for six different Chinese industries as well as the performance of 166 public listed firms in these industries. The results validate our major premise: high levels of industry globalization positively impact the performance of Chinese firms. We also find that when their industries globalize, firms with slack resources experience greater performance improvement than other firms without these resources.     

Internationalization and performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the degree of internationalization (DOI) and performance which represents a central issue in the international business literature. We argue that the substantial literature addressing this relationship is hampered by problematic measures for the key constructs (DOI and firm performance) and inconclusive results. Drawing from the internationalization process and location theories, we propose new measures for DOI (based on the dispersion of sales across geographic regions) and deploy a perceptual, multi-item measure of performance. Based on analyses of 94 survey responses provided by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore, we find that that DOI positively impacts performance.     

Utility and entropy

Summary. In this paper we study an astonishing similarity between the utility representation problem in economics and the entropy representation problem in thermodynamics. Received: May 17, 1999; revised version: October 16, 2000     

A remark on a utility representation theorem of Rader

Summary In this note we consider some problems involved in proving the existence of a continuous real-valued utility function representing a preference relation. We claim that there is an error in the classical Rader proof of the existence of an upper semicontinuous utility function. We also pose some open questions regarding some problems in utility theory.The work for this paper was begun while I was visiting the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge in 1992. I thank the Department for its hospitality. I should also like to thank A. F. Beardon for some extremely valuable discussions about the general nature of utility functions.