External pressure or internal culture? An innovation diffusion theory account of small retail businesses’ social media use

COVID-19 put unprecedented external pressure on small businesses to adopt or increase use of social media while not all small businesses are internally ready for this rapid change. This study investigated the roles of external pressures and organizational culture of openness and learning in driving small retail business owners'/managers' social media use decisions by impacting their perceived usefulness and barriers, based on the innovation-decision process model from the diffusion of innovations theory and the theory of reasoned action. An online survey with structured measurements was administered to 411 U.S. small retail business owners/managers. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that external pressures positively influenced small business owners'/managers’ perceived usefulness and barriers and social media use intention. In addition, the culture of openness and learning positively influenced the perceived usefulness while mitigating the perceived barriers, thereby directly and indirectly influencing the social media use intention. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Non-rating revenue and conflicts of interest

Rating agencies produce ratings used by investors, but obtain most of their revenue from issuers, leading to a conflict of interest. We employ a unique data set on the use of non-rating services, and the associated payments, in India, to test if this conflict affects ratings quality. Agencies rate issuers that pay them for non-rating services higher (than agencies not hired for such services). Such issuers also have higher default rates. Both effects are increasing in the amount paid. These results suggest that issuers which hire agencies for non-rating services receive higher ratings despite having higher default risk.     

Deep learning for modeling the collection rate for third-party buyers

This study evaluates a wide range of machine learning techniques such as deep learning, boosting, and support vector regression to predict the collection rate of more than 65,000 defaulted consumer credits from the telecommunications sector that were bought by a German third-party company. Weighted performance measures were defined based on the value of exposure at default for comparing collection rate models. The approach proposed in this paper is useful for a third-party company in managing the risk of a portfolio of defaulted credit that it purchases. The main finding is that one of the machine learning models we investigate, the deep learning model, performs significantly better out-of-sample than all other methods that can be used by an acquirer of defaulted credits based on weighted-performance measures. By using unweighted performance measures, deep learning and boosting perform similarly. Moreover, we find that using a training set with a larger proportion of the dataset does not improve prediction accuracy significantly when deep learning is used. The general conclusion is that deep learning is a potentially performance-enhancing tool for credit risk management.     

Uncertainty,story-telling and transformative learning: An instructor’s experience of TEFI’s Walking Workshop in Nepal

ABSTRACT

This article recounts three stories from TEFI’s walking workshop in Nepal: the construction of a road through what was once a trekking path; a dance-floor encounter at a Himalayan party; and the arrival of one participant, fatigued by jet lag and disoriented by the new surroundings. These stories of confusion, discomfort and fear are linked by one common theme: the potential of uncertainty to foster deep reflection and nuanced conclusions. The premise that uncertainty is to be valued and even cultivated has been explored in educational theory, spiritual traditions, and research on transformative learning. These sources affirm the role of uncertainty in the process of knowledge creation. However, accepting this role can be challenging for educators because it requires they assume a new identity, one which they may perceive as being at odds with their status as “teacher” the identity of learner. One way for the educator to address this challenge may be through recounting their own stories of uncertainty. Stories of being immersed in unfamiliar situations that challenge, confuse and even frighten – stories, in other words of being a tourist – can foster reflection on an intellectual, emotional and spiritual level, engaging the “whole” person, and thus initiating the educator/learner’s transformative journey.     

Crowdsourcing-based semantic relation recognition for natural language questions over RDF data

ABSTRACT

Natural language query systems over RDF data need to rely on the semantic relations in query. First, we propose the new crowdsourcing model that used to produce semantic relations dataset. The model not only inherits completeness of the iterative model and accuracy of the parallel model, but also saves human resources. Second, we mine the rules of semantic relation recognition from the correlations between dependency structures and semantic relations. Third, we propose an algorithm of semantic relation recognition for natural language query over RDF data, and experiments demonstrate that it can recognize more semantic relations than existing methods.     

Firm-specific assets and the internationalization–performance relationship in the U.S. movie studio industry

We study the role that firm-specific assets (FSAs) play in the processes underlying the internationalization–performance relationship. International business scholars have begun studying the interrelationship between FSAs, internationalization, and performance; however, this research is still emergent, and has produced inconclusive results. We believe that this may be due, in part, to research designs involving the same FSAs across many industries, even though individual industries may rely on different FSAs in their internationalization strategies. We address this issue in a single industry study of U.S. movie studios, which typically rely on blockbuster production capabilities as FSAs in their internationalization efforts. We show how these FSAs co-evolve with firms’ degree of internationalization, and how each factor mediates the positive effect of the other on performance. Our results highlight the importance of studying specific industries and their salient FSAs when assessing their role of such resources in the internationalization–performance relationship.     

On the Current Situation and Problems of High Education Institutes Digital Libraries Development

The paper discusses the necessity and objective of digital library system, and analyzes the current situation of the high education institute digital libraries in China as well as some potential problems. Development plan is proposed for the digital library system for universities.     

The Right Choice at the Right Time: A Herding Experiment in Endogenous Time

Herding describes the phenomenon in decision-making where an economic agent disregards his own private information to follow the actions of his predecessors as in Banerjee (1992). With later decision-makers simply copying earlier decisions their private information cannot be inferred by other decision-makers and will be forever lost. There is some experimental evidence on simple sequential herding of this type in the literature, notably Anderson and Holt (1997). This paper differs by allowing subjects to delay their decision-making in order to benefit from observing others' actions as in more recent herding models such as Chamley and Gale (1994). The results in this paper suggest that subjects will indeed delay when their private information is not sufficiently strong. Despite this ability to wait, as predicted in the theoretical literature, cascades remained ubiquitous and more worrying still, reverse-cascades occurred in which incorrect decisions made by early decision-makers produced informational cascades on the wrong action. In an alternative design, informing subjects that they had made incorrect choices only made matters worse as subjects moved further away from rational behavior.     

Smart work and hard work: explicating a learning orientation in strategic management accounting

This paper examines the skills and aptitudes necessary to undertake a strategic management accounting project. It argues that individuals involved in such projects are required to work both smart and hard. This argument is developed theoretically by reference to the work of educational psychologists who have identified two different types of goal orientation which people pursue in achievement situations: the learning orientation and the performance orientation. Evidence that strategic management accounting requires a learning orientation is provided by means of a case study which describes its use in a competitive tendering situation. This is followed by a discussion of the potentially symbiotic relationship of strategic management accounting and organizational learning. The discussion leads to the specification of a research agenda that may have significant implications for the practice and learning of management accounting.