Search

We investigate the effects of the use of different sources of investment leverage, i.e. securities with embedded leverage and traditional margin accounts, on the portfolio performance of retail investors, recognizing that these effects may be conditional on investor attention. We find that investors who trade on margin underperform those who do not have margin accounts, but we also find that investors who trade securities with embedded leverage show an even poorer performance than investors who trade on margin. The negative effect of leverage usage decreases with greater investor attention, measured by portfolio monitoring frequency. These results suggest that more attentive investors gain more from the use of investment leverage.

We investigate the impact of asymmetric information on the investment decisions of firms and analyze the effect of asymmetric information on the over-investment and under-investment of firms. Further, we examine the effect of leverage on the investment behavior of firms and check this association in the presence of asymmetric information. We extract data from DataStream of 280 non-financial firms listed at Pakistan Stock Exchange over the period of 2000 to 2018. We apply the Fixed Effect Model to analyze the data and System Generalized Method of Moments to check the robustness of the results. We find that asymmetric information negatively affects the investment decisions of firms. Due to asymmetric information investment decreases rapidly as compared to increase in investment. Further, leverage is an important determinant of investment decisions and the presence of asymmetric information increases the adverse effect of leverage on the investment of firms.

The DoD’s artificial intelligence (AI) strategy requires the delivery of transformative and disruptive capabilities that impact the “character of the future battlefield and the pace of threats” that US forces must be prepared to handle. Candidate frameworks must also address key mission areas while enabling partnerships with the private sector, academia, and global allies. To meet these challenges, a flexible, cost-effective, and scalable computing infrastructure that incorporates cutting edge technologies and complies with stringent information assurance requirements is necessary. The DoD AI strategy mandates the agile employment of innovative AI capabilities that “rapidly and iteratively” execute experimentation with new operating concepts, and leverage lessons learned in subsequent experiments. Using cloud computing, we present a flexible approach to solve complex systems problems. Promoting “rapid experimentation” and collaboration on problems such as recursive algorithm implementation, deep learning, and inference in neural networks has enabled inherent advantages over existing computing frameworks. Leveraging the cloud to implement shared responsibility security models, serverless architectures, and high-performance virtual machines, aspects of the AI lifecycle including build, deploy, and monitor have resulted in an adaptable and scalable computing framework that is not only disruptive to the current computing paradigm but also promotes enhanced and productive collaboration.

As cities debate how to regulate Airbnb and other home-sharing services, we study the impacts of home sharing on local residential real estate markets. By accommodating transient travelers with short-term rental properties, home-sharing platforms have evolved as a major alternative channel that attracts the growing supply of residential properties. However, on the demand side of local residential markets, home-sharing platforms are not a viable option for residents. To demonstrate this dynamic between home sharing and local residential markets, we leverage a unique quasi-experiment on Airbnb—a platform policy that caps the number of properties a host can manage in a city—and find that the policy reduced rents (in the long-term rental markets) and home values (in the for-sale housing markets) by about 3% and did not affect the price-to-rent ratio. Consistent with the conjecture, we find that the policy impacts can be attributed to increased supply in local residential markets because of the policy. Quantitatively, our estimates suggest that, if the density of affected Airbnb properties is 1% higher in a market, the policy may further decrease rents and home values by about 0.03%–0.06%, which is similar across each policy-affected city. Our empirical findings add to the debate about the impacts of home sharing on local residential markets with a novel data set and a unique identification strategy. Practically speaking, our research is a timely response to the debate on regulating home sharing and has implications for various stakeholders of the residential real estate markets. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems. Funding: K. Xie thanks the University of Denver Faculty Research Fund 2017 for financial support. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4299 .

The increasing importance of integrated fulfillment concepts revitalizes bricks-and-mortar stores and puts them at the center of retail operations. So-called omnichannel (OC) concepts leverage stores to offer seamless and enhanced operations for offline and online shoppers. Stores are used to fulfill online orders, offer shorter lead times to customers, and extend the assortment across channels. The role of the store and the underlying store operations are thus impacted by profound changes. This transformation has not yet been assessed comprehensively from a practical or an Operations Research (OR) lens. This paper identifies cross-cutting store-related planning issues and develops a planning framework for OC operations. We apply industry interviews and a systematic literature analysis to derive five planning issues. Research gaps are revealed by matching the pertinent OR literature with managerial needs. The planning issues network design of fulfillment locations, assignment of customer orders, and assortment and inventory planning have been discussed in several store-related OC publications. Demand forecasting and inventory replenishment have received less coverage, and offer significant research opportunities.

There is growing use of technology-enabled contact tracing, the process of identifying potentially infected COVID-19 patients by notifying all recent contacts of an infected person. Governments, technology companies, and research groups alike have been working towards releasing smartphone apps, using IoT devices, and distributing wearable technology to automatically track "close contacts" and identify prior contacts in the event an individual tests positive. However, there has been significant public discussion about the tensions between effective technology-based contact tracing and the privacy of individuals. To inform this discussion, we present the results of seven months of online surveys focused on contact tracing and privacy, each with 100 participants. Our first surveys were on April 1 and 3, before the first peak of the virus in the US, and we continued to conduct the surveys weekly for 10 weeks (through June), and then fortnightly through November, adding topical questions to reflect current discussions about contact tracing and COVID-19. Our results present the diversity of public opinion and can inform policy makers, technologists, researchers, and public health experts on whether and how to leverage technology to reduce the spread of COVID-19, while considering potential privacy concerns. We are continuing to conduct longitudinal measurements and will update this report over time; citations to this version of the report should reference Report Version 2.0, December 4, 2020., 37 pages, 11 figures. Supercedes arXiv:2005.06056

Beyond merely satisfying customers, companies are increasingly striving to build deeper and more meaningful customer relationships characterized by strong customer-company identification. However, whereas previous research has solely focused on symbolic drivers of identification, it remains unclear whether, when, and how managers can build on core functional company characteristics (i.e., quality, innovativeness, and price) to establish customer–company identification. The present study addresses these questions by developing a theoretical framework based on theoretical notions of social identity theory and the cue diagnosticity framework. Evidence from two field studies and one experimental study shows that functional company characteristics are not effective in creating customer–company identification per se, but that their influence depends on whether they match with a self-definitional need that is important to the customer (i.e., self-continuity, self-distinctiveness, or self-enhancement). The findings also reveal the underlying mechanism of this contingency by showing that a self-definitional need fosters customer–company identification because it strengthens the symbolic value of a matching functional characteristic. By identifying specific characteristic–need matches, this research offers novel insights into how managers can leverage functional company characteristics in their targeting and communication efforts to establish meaningful long-term relationships with customers.

Voyeurism violates dominant moral codes in many societies. Yet, for a number of businesses, including erotic webcam, reality television, slum tourism, and mixed martial arts, voyeurism is an import...

Despite the proactive efforts of many firms to combat gender bias within their organizations, societal prejudices still disadvantage women leaders and the firms who employ them. This external gender bias shapes outside stakeholder evaluations of women leaders’ efforts in various ways, and firms need strategies to cope with this external gender bias. We examine the conditions that might alleviate this burden of external bias and what women leaders and top executives can do to leverage these conditions—from a strategic positioning perspective—that will effectively allow female leaders to differentiate their work. To do this, we synthesize and build upon evidence that the external gender bias against women leaders diminishes when they lead in areas that are unconventional, rather than mainstream. We then propose a two-step process based on (1) identifying the likely threat of external gender bias, which is stronger in some industry contexts than others, and (2) leveraging unconventionality to circumvent male prototypical comparisons, thereby reducing the hazards of external gender bias.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed Foreign institutional actors (INAs) can act as a liaison between firms and authorities and other power players to navigate bureaucratic structures, both as resource and legitimacy providers in the host market. Building on institutional theory, this study draws from broader organizational sociological literature, to explore the structural position of INAs in a host country context, and engages with fundamental questions of legitimacy, status, and power. It responds to repeated calls that more studies in international business research are needed on the impact of institutional differences, how to obtain legitimacy, and enhance the home country support networks. To understand INAs' position, specifically within the social structure of a bureaucratic host environment, our study uses in-depth interviews with elite actors from the support networks. Japan is chosen for this study as a host market, because it is the European Union's second largest trading partner in Asia, has a strong central bureaucracy, and historically and currently remains a challenging market for Westerners due to complex market entry barriers. The findings provide a new theoretically derived empirical model demonstrating the positional leverage of these INAs, to “open-doors” into a complex environment and offer a nuanced understanding of their formal and informal structural positions of power. The findings also demonstrate a significant overlap between organizational legitimacy and the exemplary status of these INAs in the bureaucratic environment, which enhances and empowers their leverage to reach authorities, press, and other important actors in the market.

We examine the impact of ambiguity, or Knightian uncertainty, on the capital structure decision, using a static tradeoff theory model in which agents are both ambiguity and risk averse. The model confirms the well-known result that greater risk—the uncertainty over outcomes—leads firms to decrease leverage. Conversely, the model indicates that greater ambiguity—the uncertainty over the probabilities associated with the outcomes—leads firms to increase leverage. Using a theoretically based measure of ambiguity, our empirical analysis presents evidence consistent with these notions, showing that ambiguity has an important and distinct impact on capital structure. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

As valuable assets of corporations, governments and not-for-profit organizations, brands have attracted considerable research attention. We know a lot about how brands create knowledge in their target consumers’ minds, which leads to an attitude towards or relationship with the brand that translates into a number of favorable outcomes. The resultant brand equity is often associated with improved performance of the organization in reaching its objectives such as increasing market value. We know less about the dynamic nature of brand equity and, in particular, how it may interact with turbulence in the external environment in which the brand competes, both positively and negatively. We examine three key dimensions of brand equity—brands’ access to their target markets, perceived differentiation, and level of brand engagement with their target consumers—that influence the effect environmental turbulence has on diminishing equity or providing future opportunities for brand equity growth. Borrowing from the strategy literature, we suggest ways in which agile and resilient firms can use brand equity to resist environmental turbulence, recover from any damage that may result from it, and reinvent themselves to leverage opportunities created by a radically altered external environment. We close with a set of propositions intended to guide managers in anticipating and responding to environmental turbulence and inform and shape future research in this area.

This study investigates how retailers can leverage their brand to shape customers’ satisfaction with service encounters. It develops and tests hypotheses about how brand, store, and consumer factors moderate customer responses to experience clues during retail service encounters. Six meta-regression analyses synthesize and compare results from 842 satisfaction equations describing customers’ encounters with a global retailer operating 400 stores in 32 countries. The results show how customers weigh their perceptions of service encounters differently depending on brand, store, and consumer factors. In markets where customers believe the retailer has high holistic brand quality, they place less weight on experience clues within the store. In markets where customers believe the retailer’s service brand promise, they place more weight on in-store experience clues. In markets where the retailer promises utilitarian value, customers weigh functional experience clues more heavily. In markets with an online purchasing channel, the effect of experience clues common to offline and online store environments is magnified, and unique clues are diminished. In addition, customers heavily weigh experience clues that fit their goals. In general, retail success factors include high brand quality (which makes customers more forgiving), a service brand promise that is mirrored in the store image (which makes customers attend to the experience clues aligned with them), and the careful monitoring and managing of retail touchpoints (to customize experience clues to each market). In this way, retailers can use customer-based strategies to effectively design and manage their global retail brand in different markets.

Should you decide to launch a nano-satellite today in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), the cost of renting ground station communication infrastructure is likely to significantly exceed your launch costs. While space launch costs have lowered significantly with innovative launch vehicles, private players, and smaller payloads, access to ground infrastructure remains a luxury. This is especially true for smaller LEO satellites that are only visible at any location for a few tens of minutes a day and whose signals are extremely weak, necessitating bulky and expensive ground station infrastructure. In this paper, we present a community-driven distributed reception paradigm for LEO satellite signals where signals received on many tiny handheld receivers (not necessarily deployed on rooftops but also indoors) are coherently combined to recover the desired signal. This is made possible by employing new synchronization and receiver orientation techniques that study satellite trajectories and leverage the presence of other ambient signals. We compare our results with a large commercial receiver deployed on a rooftop and show a 8 dB SNR increase both indoors and outdoors using 8 receivers, costing $38 per RF frontend.

In the contemporary business reality, marked by unemployment and loose labor markets, workplace abuse is likely to climb as organizations and managers wield increased leverage in the employment relationship. We explore the organizational phenomenon of worker abuse and examine workplace blog accounts from abused workers to uncover shared insights from abused workers. Based on these findings we offer research-based suggestions, implications for practice, and resources for organizations, managers, and workers. Specifically, we advance an A.B.U.S.E. Mitigation Model as a holistic management system for identifying and dealing with workplace abuse.

Covid-19 has drawn renewed focus to the importance of resilience, both among practitioners and in academia, as companies struggle to cope with the rapid swings, changing patterns, and disruptions in supply and demand. This article identifies and delineates a way forward for companies to support resilience, particularly by companies recognizing the wider communities they are nested in and resources that exist there. To identify such productive resources, known as ‘capitals’, we provide a novel and actionable Integrated Capitals Framework. This framework integrates ten existing frameworks drawn from both practice and academia, and is comprised of nine different forms of capital: financial, physical, social, natural, human, cultural, public, political, and, crucially, health. Businesses can leverage and contribute to these resources to support resilience. We provide insights into how businesses can use this framework in practice, providing a way for companies to achieve resilience through this useful, yet underutilized, path.

Based on the Upper Echelon Theory, this paper examined the relationship of CEO education and experience with the dynamic capital structure (DCS) using the target leverage and speed of adjustment (SOA) models. This study applied the system generalised method of moments (SYS-GMM) to the target leverage model and Ordinary Least Squares bootstrapped standard errors to the speed of adjustment model. Using the 100 Indonesian firms, two notable findings were obtained. First, the target leverage model with the inclusion of CEO characteristics yielded a 22% of the SOA towards target leverage. Both variables showed a positive relationship with the target leverage. Second, the result revealed that the improvement of CEO education and experience by one standard deviation led to an increase in the SOA by 3.37% and 0.17%. Thus, the results were consistent with the theory whereby the education and experience of the CEOs were potential determinants the DCS.

ISP networks have become a critical infrastructure in our society. Traffic in these networks is growing and is increasingly dominated by a small number of large CDNs connecting at multiple locations. Simultaneously, the networks are becoming more flexible, in terms of routing, CDN user mapping, and also regarding the IP topology: emerging optical technologies allow to flexibly reconfigure the network. This paper studies the potential gains of these reconfiguration flexibilities. The idea is to make CDN-ISP infrastructure demand-aware, that is, to re-optimize it towards the changing end-user demands over time. We present an optimization framework and conduct an extensive evaluation using data from a large European ISP. We find that such a reconfigurable infrastructure has indeed a high potential: by leveraging spatial and diurnal traffic patterns, the efficiency of ISP networks and CDNs is improved significantly. Specifically, the required backbone capacity is reduced by 15% while reducing path lengths by 30%, on average and during the critical peak hour. Moreover, such infrastructures can leverage re-optimizations during specific events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and under link failures. We optimistically assume a cooperative environment of ISPs and CDNs, and we conclude by discussing trends that foster the identified benefits in practice.

The SDGs are a universal agenda to address the world’s most pressing societal, environmental and economic challenges. The supply of timely, relevant and reliable data is essential in guiding policies and decisions for successful implementation of the SDGs. Yet official statistics cannot provide all of the data needed to populate the SDG indicator framework. Citizen science offers a novel solution and an untapped opportunity to complement traditional sources of data, such as household surveys, for monitoring progress towards the SDGs, while at the same time mobilizing action and raising awareness for their achievement. This paper presents the potential offered by one specific citizen science tool, Picture Pile, to complement and enhance official statistics to monitor several SDGs and targets. Designed to be a generic and flexible tool, Picture Pile is a web-based and mobile application for ingesting imagery from satellites, orthophotos, unmanned aerial vehicles or geotagged photographs that can then be rapidly classified by volunteers. The results show that Picture Pile could contribute to the monitoring of fifteen SDG indicators under goals 1, 2, 11, 13, 14 and 15 based on the Picture Pile campaigns undertaken to date. Picture Pile could also be modified to support other SDGs and indicators in the areas of ecosystem health, eutrophication and built-up areas, among others. In order to leverage this particular tool for SDG monitoring, its potential must be showcased through the development of use cases in collaboration with governments, NSOs and relevant custodian agencies. Additionally, mutual trust needs to be built among key stakeholders to agree on common goals that would facilitate the use of Picture Pile or other citizen science tools and data for SDG monitoring and impact.

The COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced many ethical challenges for nurse leaders who need the courage, ability, and support to make the right decisions. This paper discusses 3 ethical challenges: workforce shortages, staff assignments, and moral distress. It also offers strategies to leverage our code of ethics to navigate these situations.

Motivation: The question of what combination of attributes drives the adoption of a particular software technology is critical to developers. It determines both those technologies that receive wide support from the community and those which may be abandoned, thus rendering developers' investments worthless. Aim and Context: We model software technology adoption by developers and provide insights on specific technology attributes that are associated with better visibility among alternative technologies. Thus, our findings have practical value for developers seeking to increase the adoption rate of their products. Approach: We leverage social contagion theory and statistical modeling to identify, define, and test empirically measures that are likely to affect software adoption. More specifically, we leverage a large collection of open source repositories to construct a software dependency chain for a specific set of R language source-code files. We formulate logistic regression models, where developers' software library choices are modeled, to investigate the combination of technological attributes that drive adoption among competing data frame (a core concept for a data science languages) implementations in the R language: tidy and data.table. To describe each technology, we quantify key project attributes that might affect adoption (e.g., response times to raised issues, overall deployments, number of open defects, knowledge base) and also characteristics of developers making the selection (performance needs, scale, and their social network). Results: We find that a quick response to raised issues, a larger number of overall deployments, and a larger number of high-score StackExchange questions are associated with higher adoption. Decision makers tend to adopt the technology that is closer to them in the technical dependency network and in author collaborations networks while meeting their performance needs. To gauge the generalizability of the proposed methodology, we investigate the spread of two popular web JavaScript frameworks Angular and React, and discuss the results. Future work: We hope that our methodology encompassing social contagion that captures both rational and irrational preferences and the elucidation of key measures from large collections of version control data provides a general path toward increasing visibility, driving better informed decisions, and producing more sustainable and widely adopted software.

The identity of sustainable entrepreneurs progresses and is primed by certain identity dimensions, including society, community, or competition as their frames of references, their social motivation, and their self-evaluation. Because sustainable entrepreneurs aim to achieve the goals of generating profit and create social and/or ecological value at the same time, they experience two types of tensions: one that concerns social and ecological and the other with an extension of economic aspects. To leverage these, we find identity shifts dependent on the tension sustainable entrepreneurs’ experience, activating a certain combination of identity dimension. Building on 29 case studies with European sustainable entrepreneurs, the study investigates the dynamic role of entrepreneurial identity, thereby informing about fluid hybrid identity conflict management strategies. This adds to theory on entrepreneurial identity that has widely found multiple, yet coherent entrepreneurial identities and conflict management strategies.

Objective The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for surgical residency programs to rethink their methods of evaluating and recruiting candidates. However, the past year has not been seamless, with a soaring number of applications, reports of programs and applicants having difficulty evaluating each other, and an increasingly uneven distribution of interviews among applicants. Consequently, many have called for national changes to the residency application process to address these longstanding concerns. Results Here, we review the evolving literature and advocate for the permanent adoption of visiting rotations, virtual interviews with a universal release date and data-driven attendance limits, and opportunities for in-person applicant visits. Conclusions We believe these changes leverage the strengths of each format, allow for satisfactory bidirectional evaluation, and promote principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Although prior studies draw upon natural resource-based views, environmental strategy permits competitive advantages, and as such, gains financial performance. However, empirical results are mixed. To shed light on this issue, this study proposes that environmental performance mediates the link between environmental strategy and financial performance. Data were collected from 175 third-party logistic providers currently operating in Vietnam to test the hypotheses. Partial least square structural equation modeling was borrowed to test the data. The results reveal environmental performance partially mediates the link between environmental strategy and financial performance. By considering the mediating effect, this study contributes to the literature by addressing the intervening mechanism of environmental performance on the inconclusive relationship between environmental strategy and financial performance. Besides, this study also extends prior studies by borrowing a concept of environmental strategy, which captures the extent of organizations pursuing this strategy, to explain how and why pursuing this strategy permits environmental and financial performance.

Quantum computers leverage quantum mechanics to enable complex processing power enabling computation within a finite timeframe. As the industry reaches a peak of uncertainties in classical computing, researchers see an opportunity in quantum computing to resolve these uncertainties by unraveling the quantum mechanism that quantum physicists built for over a century. Organizations and academics have been working in tandem to conceptualize the quantum world through quantum computers. This article evaluates the tipping points of the quantum computers in the organization, the barrier of adoption, and a mitigation strategy. The article involves an extensive literature review of the current state and future application expectations from quantum computers. As part of this article, the authors interviewed senior industry technology experts to explore quantum computers’ introduction in the industry, and discussed the barriers to adopting quantum computing.

Social media empowers small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in engaging with their stakeholders economically and effectively. Social media use affects SMEs operation and knowledge sharing which creates innovation opportunities, speeds time to market, satisfies firm's customers, and improves business performance. Current research aims to explore the impact of social media use on the market entry agility, product innovativeness, reducing the market entry time for the SME and improving the firm performance. Cross-sectional survey-based data was collected from the jewelry crafting SMEs in Bali, Indonesia. The data was analyzed with the covariance-based statistical analysis technique with the SPSS based AMOS 23. The study results identify that social media use and market entry agility significantly impact firm performance. However, product innovativeness insignificantly influences firm performance. Furthermore, the market entry agility mediates for the firm performance so, SMEs need to leverage social media use, and market entry agility enables the dynamic capacity to enhance firm performance. Firms’ level innovativeness capability should be considered as a mediating role but should support another variable to leverage firm performance. The study limitation and future research options are reported at the end.

Modern forecasting algorithms use the wisdom of crowds to produce forecasts better than those of the best identifiable expert. However, these algorithms may be inaccurate when crowds are systematically biased or when expertise varies substantially across forecasters. Recent work has shown that meta-predictions—a forecast of the average forecasts of others—can be used to correct for biases even when no external information, such as forecasters’ past performance, is available. We explore whether meta-predictions can also be used to improve forecasts by identifying and leveraging the expertise of forecasters. We develop a confidence-based version of the Surprisingly Popular algorithm proposed by Prelec, Seung, and McCoy. As with the original algorithm, our new algorithm is robust to bias. However, unlike the original algorithm, our version is predicted to always weight forecasters with more informative private signals more than forecasters with less informative ones. In a series of experiments, we find that the modified algorithm does a better job in weighting informed forecasters than the original algorithm and show that individuals who are correct more often on similar decision problems contribute more to the final decision than other forecasters. Empirically, the modified algorithm outperforms the original algorithm for a set of 500 decision problems. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

In recent years, crowdfunding has gained a lot of popularity as it helps to leverage the power of the crowd in the development and commercialization of new products. Thus, scholars are encouraged to explore factors that could enhance the success of these crowdfunding projects. This article investigates the impact of social interaction (i.e., proactively updating the potential funders and seeking their feedback) on the success of the crowdfunding project among technology ventures. Moreover, we examine the moderating role of the product characteristics, i.e., product development stage and product innovativeness, on the relationship between social interaction and crowdfunding success. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two studies. For the first study, we collected and analyzed data from 203 Kickstarter projects from the mobile apps technology category. For the second study, we designed two short experiments with four hypothetical mobile apps technology projects each and collected data from 132 crowdfunders about their likelihood of supporting the projects. Both studies clearly highlight that social interaction has a significant positive impact on project success in terms of receiving funding and feedback among technological ventures. This article also suggest that products in the ideation stage benefit more from social interaction than products in the commercialization stage. Moreover, in contrast to our assumption, our findings indicate that the positive relationship between social interaction and project success is stronger for products with incremental innovativeness than radical innovativeness. Our study adds to the existing literature in crowdfunding by highlighting ways by which entrepreneurs can improve the success of their crowdfunding projects.

Islands have the potential to be precursors in the transition to clean energy, by adopting new technologies and applying innovative solutions that can serve as showcases at an international level. This paper is a contribution towards understating the importance of community engagement on energy transition processes. It covers multiple aspects of a green transition process, including technical, environmental, social, and economic issues. Starting by a participatory diagnosis process, the community of a small island located in Portugal (Culatra Island, Algarve), was challenged to lead the transition process and define different pillars of energy transition. The process brought together local authorities, academia, citizens and companies. Using practical examples, it is shown how the community is succeeding in tailoring new technological solutions for a green transition, according with the specific needs of the island, as expressed by the islanders themselves, including batteries, electric vehicles, retrofitting of homes, or heat pumps, which, when combined, could lay the foundations for the creation of a Renewable Energy Community and leverage socioeconomic benefits. info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

Metaphors are language phenomena commonly used as tools of persuasion, as evident in different kinds of public discourses, most notably in political addresses. They are particularly potent in this respect because they function on the principle of connecting the logical with the emotional. This persuasive role has also been attested in media reports, usually employed for the purposes of framing and the creation of a specific narrative. The purpose of this paper is to outline a theoretical and methodological account of metaphor choices related to sustainability and restoration, as issues related to climate change, made by the contemporary media and the perceptions formed by repetition and reinforcements of certain kinds of imagery present in their choice. An additional purpose is to understand which information sources, and possible instances of influence and leverage, could be of importance in terms of the media reporting on sustainability-related issues. Therefore, the paper offers novel conceptual and analytical guidelines for future research in the field of sustainability communication.

The article examines the role of the Cyprus issue in the bilateral relations between Greece and the USSR in 1956-1960. It is based on primal archival research realised at the Constantine Karamanlis Archive (AKK) and at the Diplomatic and Historical Archive of the Greek Foreign Ministry (DIAYE) in Athens. The analysis of the recently declassified documents relate to the events which took place in 1954, when the Soviet Union supported the Greek claims for self-determination of the Cypriot people in the United Nations on the basis of the anti-colonial principles. This contributed to the impressive increase in trade between Greece and the USSR, especially after the unofficial visit of the Soviet Foreign Minister D.T. Shepilov to Athens in 1956. Against the backdrop of the deterioration of the international situation in 1957, Kremlin heavily criticized NATOs decision to deploy the US Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) in Europe and applied diplomatic pressures to NATO member-states including Greece. The shift from tensions to a peaceful offensive strategy, characteristic of the Soviet diplomacy towards Greece, proved to be a double-edged sword for Moscow in the long term. The author concludes that both countries exploited the Cyprus issue for their benefit. Thus, Moscow managed to take advantage of the Greek discontent with the NATO allies as a means of increasing its own prestige in the region, while the Greek governments capitalized on the Soviet tactics in order to increase its political leverage in confronting NATO on Cyprus.

National audience; This paper studies an economy where demand spillovers make firms’ production decisions strategic complements. Firms choose their operating leverage trading off higher fixed costs for lower variable costs. Operating leverage governs firms’ exposures to an aggregate labor productivity shock. In equilibrium, firms exhibit excessive operating leverage as they do not internalize that an economy with higher aggregate operating leverage is more likely to fall into a recession following a negative productivity shock. Welfare losses coming from firms’ failure to coordinate production are amplified by suboptimal risk-taking, which magnifies the impact of productivity shocks onto aggregate output.

Digitization is receiving a lot of interest in recent servitization research, but the use of platform-based Industry 4.0 technologies to boost product-service innovation (PSI) is less covered. This study aims to explore how companies successfully leverage platforms for servitization in an Industry 4.0 context. Building on theories of PSI, platform leverage and business model adaptation (BMA), we use longitudinal and interpretive research methods to conduct an exploratory study of the servitization pathways of four Chinese textile and apparel manufacturing companies. Results reveal companies’ roadmaps in undertaking digital and smart servitization strategies enabled by platform leveraging, and show the implementation approaches for related BMA. Further analysis identifies platform-based servitization destinations and pathway dynamics. This study constructs a theoretical basis and a typology for explaining platform-based servitization.

Sea areas where need special attention for the protection of the marine environment from various pollutants are widely distributed throughout the European Regions. In the meantime, the EU has adopted various directives to implement International Maritime Organization (IMO) instruments effectively and uniformly over foreign vessels in European waters so as to ensure ships’ safety and prevent vessel-source pollution. These EU regulatory regimes are conducive to maximizing the legal effect for the implementation of IMO instruments. In addition, the EU has exerted a great influence on the decision-making process of the IMO in adopting regulatory instruments for the prevention of vessel-source marine pollution due to the region’s strong commercial leverage in the global shipping industry. The study of the EU regulatory instruments over the prevention of vessel-source marine pollution will give the states that needs regional cooperative regimes a good example such as how they can establish regional cooperation to effectively prevent vessel-source pollution in sharing sea areas.

This study examines effect of financial distress, debt default, audit delay and leverage on going concern audit opinions on Textile and Garment Subsector Manufacturing Companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange for the 2017-2019 period. This research uses descriptive quantitative research. The sample of this research is 51 samples. Data processing using logistic regression analysis. The results of the research show that financial distress, debt default, audit delay and leverage have no effect on going concern audit opinions on Textile and Garment Subsector Manufacturing Companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange for the 2017-2019 period. Keywords: Financial Distress, Debt Default, Audit Delay, Leverage, Going Concern Audit Opinions.

This article documents how one Teacher Preparation Program (TPP) at a medium-sized public university in the northeast responded to the needs of their urban partners during the global COVID-19 pandemic. The adaptation of this school-university partnership involved improving relationships where the TPP is more responsive to the needs of this urban school district. This article showcases how two colleagues created pandemic pivots in their graduate courses for in-service teachers. These pedagogical examples, or pandemic pivots, knit together technology and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and create a more inclusive and more equitable new normal. Moreover, these pandemic pivots leverage programmatic mechanisms to sustain this new normal. The sustainability and success of this partnership makes use of stakeholder feedback loops which are both programmatic and interpersonal. Through institutionalizing these feedback loops, we create programmatic sustainability with the ability to dynamically meet the needs of our partners. The integration of SEL and technology pedagogical practices illustrated here are the result of programmatic structural changes driven by the voice of our partners, showcasing the design of our TPP.

In the wake of Covid-19, a flurry of surveys in education were conducted. These revealed alarming statistics about most learners losing half of the academic year, parents’ angst about sending children to school, and a small fraction of higher education institutions being able to leverage affordances of technology for effective online teaching and learning. As our right to breathe, eat and learn became suffocated, we were urged to re-imagine possibilities for resurrection, for mitigating current and future education “losses”. Deafened by the varied cacophony from teacher and student unions, school governing body representatives, scientists and education experts, the government with its departments of education decided to close education institutions and this coincided with the hard lockdown. Against this background, we use the lens of critical policy analysis (CPA), to explore the decision-making of education departments. In this qualitative study, a critical lens was used to reveal the magnification of the fault lines of educational iniquity and inequity as departments of education made decisions to close and reopen institutions. Multiple data generation methods included a key informant interview with a senior official from the Department of Education, a survey among school personnel, and document analysis. The findings revealed a tension between expectations of producers of policy and recipients of policy, within unequal school settings. A repositioning, by peering through the lens of the dispossessed to inform future policy, is recommended.

The territoriality principle stipulates that minority communities in a given territory should be linguistically accommodated. What are the economic effects of this principle? In this paper, we argue that the recognition of multiple languages confers respect on the minority group; it allows people to engage and participate meaningfully in society – thereby facilitating economic well-being. There is, however, a caveat: when recognition happens in areas where the minority is the overwhelming majority, there is a risk that the near-exclusive use of the minority language cuts the community off from the larger national state, which in turn stunts development. To test this, we focus on Transylvania, Romania. We leverage a legal stipulation that recognizes minority languages in areas where the minority constitutes more than 20% of the population. Using data at the municipal level, we find that recognition increases economic well-being in general – but not in areas where the minority are numerically dominant. Our results are normatively welcoming, but they also caution governments not simply to recognize minority languages but also to protect them adequately.

Purpose Combining a conceptual framework with empirical evidence, this study aims to offer insights into why small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the business-to-business beauty sector switch suppliers, due to pricing considerations. Design/methodology/approach Data gathered from 475 telephone surveys of Spanish hairdressers provide the input for discrete choice models for testing the proposed hypotheses. Findings The SMEs that change suppliers tend to be sensitive to promotions, express less satisfaction with a current supplier’s offerings and serve fewer customers who buy professional products for their in-home use. If SMEs are satisfied with the supplier’s services though, they are less likely to change and more prone to negotiate with that supplier. Research limitations/implications This study does not address why dissatisfied SMEs might remain with their current suppliers. Further research might replicate this study using additional pricing data from suppliers. Practical implications Suppliers in business-to-business (B2B) sectors can leverage these findings to allocate their marketing budgets optimally and establish service strategies that will enable them to retain buyers and reduce their switching risk. Originality/value As an extension of extant literature, this study specifies switching drivers for SMEs in the B2B beauty sector. The findings should apply throughout this worldwide service sector, as well as to similar markets such as health, beauty and personal care and well-being services.

This article aims to investigate the impact of the international network and social capital on the effectiveness of Muhammadiyah’s emergency response in the 2006 Bantul earthquake. Despite paying more attention to religious and spiritual issues, Muhammadiyah, an Islamic-based social movement, plays a significant role in humanitarian issues. The 2006 earthquake in Bantul devastated public amenities, claimed thousands of people, and caused economic loss. The local government and private sectors of Bantul could not cope with the disaster. The most disaster-affected districts in Bantul Regency were Pundong, Bambanglipuro, and Jetis. Then, Muhammadiyah made an immediate emergency response to help those affected districts. In collaboration with overseas counterparts, Muhammadiyah collected humanitarian assistance. Muhammadiyah might not complete its humanitarian mission without the support of existing local Muhammadiyah in those districts. In other words, Muhammadiyah’s social capital is influential for humanitarian missions. This paper utilized two concepts to elaborate on the effectiveness of Muhammadiyah’s emergency response, namely transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and social capital. Then, this article argues that the higher level of TANs and social capital Muhammadiyah has, the more emergency response it can complete effectively. This paper discovered that three districts had different levels of TANs and social capital. In Pundong, the level of leverage politics (TANs) was higher than social capital. However, both Bambanglipuro and Jetis had a high level of social capital, whereas their leverage politics were low.

The taxi aggregator services leverage advantages of digital technologies that connect the provider and consumer. The mobile applications facilitate this online connectivity. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted consumption of the taxi aggregator services in India due to the lockdown. However, the demand would be increasing as the relaxation would progress. Furthermore, the duopolistic Indian taxi aggregator market is highly competitive. The players would try hard to fulfill the demand for recovery and progress. This exercise would focus on brand loyalty intention for formulating customer retention strategies. Therefore, this study examined role of Efficiency, Privacy, and Contact (E-service Quality) constructs as antecedents to brand loyalty intention. A structured questionnaire was circulated online for collecting the data required for empirical validation of proposed model. Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for analyzing 288 responses. The results indicated that Efficiency, Privacy, and Contact influence the brand loyalty intention. Therefore, strategies emphasizing on efficiency, contact, and privacy would help both short-term and long-term customer retention. These strategies would act as a remedy for post-COVID recovery of taxi aggregator service providers.

Knowledge is widely considered a key ingredient for effective and sustainable water governance. In the Colorado River basin, collaborative programs have been established over the past 50 years to inform decision-making in the basin on a range of concerns from water quality to endangered species recovery and ecosystem restoration. We embrace a knowledge governance perspective to examine the institutional arrangements underpinning the production and use of knowledge in the basin’s collaborative programs. Through a review of programmatic documents and targeted interviews with program participants, we find a recurrent emphasis on science-based decision-making to address specific resource challenges across the programs. Our unpacking of the institutional design of the knowledge governance processes highlights two key challenges: (1) the institutional design has created a federal agency–advisory committee–technical committee triad structure that limits the saliency and legitimacy of diverse interests, as well as credibility of diverse ways of knowing and formalized learning processes and (2) a focus on the river in discrete, fragmented units that hinders a broader view of the river as a system and neglects cross-programmatic learning. These findings question if certain institutional design elements may serve to limit the ability of these programs to address new challenges facing the basin. We outline some potential steps to address these challenges with the aim of building more impactful, collaborative knowledge systems that leverage learning to not only lend saliency, credibility, and legitimacy to broad, inclusive, and diverse ways of knowing but also promote adaptiveness in a rapidly evolving socio-environmental system.

MMP2, a Zn2+-dependent metalloproteinase, is related to cancer and angiogenesis. Inhibition of this enzyme might result in a potential antimetastatic drug to leverage the anticancer drug armory. In silico or computer-aided ligand-based drug design is a method of rational drug design that takes multiple chemometrics (i.e., multi-quantitative structure–activity relationship methods) into account for virtually selecting or developing a series of probable selective MMP2 inhibitors. Though existing matrix metalloproteinase inhibitors have shown plausible pan-matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activity, they have resulted in various adverse effects leading to their being rescinded in later phases of clinical trials. Therefore a review of the ligand-based designing methods of MMP2 inhibitors would result in an explicit route map toward successfully designing and synthesizing novel and selective MMP2 inhibitors.

Summary Expanding urbanization affects food biodiversity and broader agrobiodiversity, which are essential nutrition and ecosystem resources for sustainable development but are threatened globally. The increasingly influential nexus of urbanization-agrobiodiversity interactions has not been systematically researched. Here we design an interdisciplinary perspective to identify and understand the bidirectional interactions of agrobiodiversity in four major linkages: urban and peri-urban land use, urban food supply chains, urban food access, and urban food retailing. Agrobiodiversity is evident to varying degrees amid urbanization globally, rather than the previously assumed blanket incompatibility or unspecified partial compatibility. A proposed conceptual framework is used to hypothesize how these linkages create configurations of combined conditions that support agrobiodiversity amid expanding urbanization. These key conditions contain leverage points of the urbanization-agrobiodiversity nexus for policies to address nutrition insecurity and vital environmental functions. We conclude that the urbanization-agrobiodiversity nexus is a crucial new focus of interdisciplinary research to strengthen sustainable development and food systems.

Beach tourism and seaside settlements are perennially popular. Nature's potential as well as the coast's characteristic hybrid art may always entice visitors. The settlements at the foot of the mountain, on the other hand, have their own unique environmental, gastronomic, and cultural identities. Bedugul village (Indonesia), Albarracin village (Spain), Reine village (Norway), Wengen village (Switzerland), Panglipuran village (Indonesia), Hallstatt village (Austria), Patiangan village (Indonesia), and Ora village (Indonesia) are some of the names given to the villages in Indonesia (Greece). They're all mountain communities that have successfully marketed themselves as tourist destinations at the foot of the mountain. The goal of this research is to come up with a viable approach for village branding at the foot of the mountain. This study is a hybrid of action research and development research, with a focus on tourism village acceleration. The Benjor village residents, Benjor village administrators, and a sample of potential visitors were polled for information. The community around Benjor village, the Malang Regency community, and persons outside the Malang Regency were all surveyed for potential visitors. Individual interviews or focus groups, environmental observations, and archives of village office records and Malang Regency government documents were used to gather data. The purpose of this study is to understand the tourism village process before and after therapy. Mining potential excavation yields eleven environmental assets in the form of waterfalls, five culinary assets in the form of chilli sauce, grilled rice, and other similar dishes, and three cultural assets in the form of hadrah, jaranan, and dancing. The development research yielded seven goods that Benjor villagers found to be the most effective in terms of branding. For mountain slope communities, the greatest method is to combine branded items that showcase their artistic, natural, and gastronomic potential.

This research aims to determine the effects of Intellectual Capital, Leverage, and Liquidity on Firm Performance. Sample are secondary sector companies on the Indonesia Stock Exchange and used panel data regression for analysis; this research found that Intellectual Capital and Liquidity had a significant positive effect on Firm Performance, and Leverage did not have a considerable impact.

In this article, we leverage ideas from the theory of coevolutionary computation to analyze interactions of students with problems. We introduce the idea of informatively easy or hard concepts. Our approach is different from more traditional analyses of problem difficulty such as item analysis in the sense that we consider Pareto dominance relationships within the multidimensional structure of student–problem performance data rather than average performance measures. This method allows us to uncover not just the problems on which students are struggling but also the variety of difficulties different students face. Our approach is to apply methods from the Dimension Extraction Coevolutionary Algorithm to analyze problem-solving logs of students generated when they use an online software tutoring suite for introductory computer programming called problets . The results of our analysis not only have implications for how to scale up and improve adaptive tutoring software but also have the promise of contributing to the identification of common misconceptions held by students and thus, eventually, to the construction of a concept inventory for introductory programming.

This study aims to determine how the influence of working capital management and leverage on firm value with profitability as a moderating variable. The research method used is quantitative data method. 1) Working Capital Management variable has a positive and significant effect on Firm Value. 2) Leverage variable has no significant effect on firm value. 3) Working Capital Management and Leverage variables have no simultaneous significant effect on Firm Value. 4)Profitability variable is a moderator variable that affects the relationship between Working Capital Management and Firm Value. 5) Profitability variable is not a moderator variable that can moderate the relationship between Leverage and Firm Value.Company value can be used as the basis for making investment decisions because this aspect measures the ability of the company's assets to generate a return on investment made in the company's asset instruments.