How website information decreases intangibility and influences donation

The purpose of this article is to understand how online marketing communications influence donors. This article postulates, in the online arena, by taking the intangible and making it real, definite, solid, or easily grasped, one can positively impact donation. The data were collected in a lab where respondents from a university in the southwest United States explored a well-known nonprofit website. Following the exploration, they responded to a series of survey questions. The findings show that a well-designed website decreases perceptions of intangibility and increases donation. For inexperienced donors, the affective aspects of the site are more influential in determining donation. Our study is one of the first to focus on how specific information on a nonprofit website may influence donation with regards to intangibility. Our work was limited by the use of students and hypothetical situations. By utilizing cognitively and affectively laden website characteristics effectively, nonprofits can influence decision making and subsequent donation through organizational perceptions of intangibility.     

An assessment framework for public urban land management intervention

The ability to manage land effectively depends on the availability of accurate and up to date information on it. Many cities, particularly those in the developing world, lack the means to generate the information needed to support land management. This paper proposes the use of assessment studies as a mechanism to generate information for land management. A model of the public land management system and a framework of steps and issues for carrying out an assessment study are presented. The paper also presents an overview of the common problems of land management in the developing world and a case study to illustrate the utility of the proposed framework.     

A Multiagent Approach for Collective Decision Making in Knowledge Management

In this paper we propose an argumentative multiagent model based on a mediator agent in order to automate the resolution of conflicts between decision makers for identifying knowledge that need to be capitalized and that we call “crucial knowledge”. We follow both an argumentative approach and a multi-agent system based on a mediator agent. This new approach allows the mediator agent to elicit preference of decision makers which can be different or even contradictory while exploiting and managing their multiple points of view to identify crucial knowledge. Concrete experiments have been conducted on real data from an automotive company and on randomly generated data. We have observed that a non-argumentative approach is more sensitive to the variation of the number of knowledge than an argumentative one. Indeed, the classification results using the multiagent system are consistent with classifications of human decision makers in nearly 80% of studied cases.     

Ethical Foundations of the Islamic Financial Industry

Journal of Business Ethics - This paper examines the ethical foundations of the Islamic financial industry which is strongly criticized for its similarity with conventional finance. In this paper,...     

Applying evolutionary psychology in understanding the representation of women in advertisements

One of the most ubiquitous creative copy decisions in advertising is to use young attractive women in decorative roles. Contrary to the mantra chanted by some staunch feminists, advertisers are not involved in a patriarchal white‐male‐dominated conspiracy to derogate, exploit, subjugate, and dominate women. Advertisers are concerned with providing messages that are maximally effective to their relevant target audience. Accordingly, they are well aware that in certain situations the use of decorative female models will appeal to a particular group of their constituency. Using evolutionary psychology as the explicative framework, it is argued that the greater use of young and attractive women in decorative roles in advertising is steeped in the differential mating strategies of the two sexes. An analysis of several content‐analytic studies demonstrates that the more frequent use of women as young and attractive decorative models is longitudinally stable and culturally invariant further attesting to the Darwinian roots of this phenomenon. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Idiosyncratic risk and expected returns in frontier markets: Evidence from GCC

We investigate the pricing of idiosyncratic volatility of seven frontier markets in six GCC countries. We find a significant (marginal) negative relationship between expected returns and lagged idiosyncratic volatility for individual stocks in Saudi Arabia (Qatar) but none in Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. However, when we estimate conditional idiosyncratic volatility either by EGARCH or AR Models, the relationship turns positive. Introducing unexpected idiosyncratic volatility as an explanatory variable to control for any unexpected returns uncovers the true relationship between expected idiosyncratic volatility and expected returns. The evidence turns out to be robust for return reversals and other control variables. Moreover, the pricing of idiosyncratic risk is less evident in higher country governance and seems to be unrelated to the degree of financial development.     

ISLAMIC BANKING,COSTLY RELIGIOSITY,AND COMPETITION

In this article we explain how Islamic banks (IBs) maximize profitability in the presence of costly religiosity. Because of strong competition between IBs and conventional banks (CBs), a unique equilibrium emerges that affects the IB pricing structure. We propose a new model that identifies the optimal rate on the asset and liability sides of IBs. It shows that the financial products offered by IBs are not an exogenous function of religiosity; instead, they are endogenously determined by the nature of market forces in which IBs are operating. We show that in the presence of costly religiosity and competition, the rates of both converge. Moreover, the competitive pricing mechanism induces IBs to structure their asset- and liability-side financial products (particularly Murabaha) with a risk profile similar to that of the CB loan system. This article empirically supports the theoretical propositions by using data from 17 Muslim majority countries where both IBs and CBs coexist from 2000 to 2015. We find that, holding other factors of bank returns constant, competition significantly affects IB asset- and liability-side returns. The analysis also reveals that because of increasing competition between IBs and CBs, the market power of IBs has significantly declined over time.     

Sustainable Supplier Selection in Megaprojects: Grey Ordinal Priority Approach

Due to mounting environmental and social challenges, supplier selection has become one of the most critical tasks of project-oriented organizations. Because supplier selection can affect the long-term success and profitability of the organizations and their projects, directly, embracing sustainability can add value in the equation. Considering sustainability measures can positively guide project managers in making better decisions for the projects in the long term. Therefore, the current study attempts to provide a conceptual model for selecting the best supplier based on a sustainability framework in megaprojects. Meanwhile, decision-making methods can be employed as a proper tool to find the best supplier. Ordinal priority approach (OPA) is a recent development in multiple criteria decision making (MCDM), while it has many benefits compared with other methods like analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). However, this method cannot consider multiple ranks during the decision-making process, and using an uncertainty approach feels strongly. Grey systems theory (GST) can consider uncertainties with no need for large sample or proposing membership function. Hence, the current study employed the GST to consider multiple ranks for criteria and alternatives in the OPA method. This is the first time that a sustainable supplier selection framework has been presented for megaprojects with the aid of the Grey OPA (OPA-G) method. Finally, a case study has been examined to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed approach can be used in real-world situations and it has acceptable performance under uncertainty conditions.