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There is limited information concerning the experiences and career decision-making processes of male sex workers in South Korea. The aim of this study was to understand the motivations, career decisions, and decision-making processes of a group of male university students and graduates who decided to join the sex work profession in South Korea as part of their career development. Qualitative research design and snowball strategies were employed in 2021 with nine male sex workers. Interview sessions, online focus group activity, remarkable items sharing, and member-checking interview sessions were undertaken to collect rich stories and promote understanding of male sex workers who are completing or have completed their bachelor's degrees in South Korea. Based on the social cognitive career and motivation theory, three main themes were highlighted: (1) financial consideration, (2) personal interest in sexual activities, and (3) limited career opportunities for the younger generation. The findings illustrate the motivations of a group of educated male sex workers and the social issues for sex workers in South Korea. Government bodies, policymakers, and non-profit organizations may use this study as a reference for policy development and human resources schemes.

Purpose – This paper investigates how past performance changes, prior CEO replacements and changes in the chairperson impact CEO turnover in public and large private businesses. Design/methodology/approach – We analyze 1,679 CEO replacements documented in a sample of 1,493 Spanish public and private firms during 1998–2004 by computing dynamic binary choice models that control for endogeneity in CEO turnovers. Findings – The results reveal that different performance horizons (short- and long-term) explain the dissimilar rate of CEO turnover between public and private firms. Private firms exercise monitoring patience and path dependency characterizes the evaluation of CEOs, while public companies' short-termism leads to higher CEO turnover rates as a reaction to poor short-term economic results, and alternative controls—ownership and changes in the chairperson—improve the monitoring of management. Originality/value – Our results show the importance of controlling for path dependency to examine more accurately top executives' performance. The findings confirm that exposure to market controls affects the functioning of internal controls in evaluating CEOs and shows a short-term performance horizon that could be behind the recent moves of public firms going private or restraining shareholders' power.

a previsão de demanda é uma metodologia da administração de empresas para estimar um valor futuro de uma grandeza de interesse. Realizar previsões de demanda significa reconhecer padrões de comportamento em séries históricas e predizer o comportamento futuro ou, ainda, identificar fatores causais que afetam o comportamento e extrapolá-lo. Este artigo tem por objetivo realizar uma revisão da literatura dos métodos de previsão de demanda com o propósito de reunir os métodos e os modelos disponíveis acerca dos conceitos utilizados atualmente na administração de empresas relacionados ao consumo e à produção de produtos e serviços. A metodologia utilizada é a revisão da literatura com abordagem qualitativa, com o propósito de dar uma visão descritiva geral dos métodos dominantes utilizados em previsão de demanda. Foi realizado o mapeamento da literatura para identificar o estado da ciência por meio da produção científica disponível nos bancos de dados Scopus e Google Scholar. Os métodos qualitativos e os causais estão mais bem associados a previsões de médio e longo prazos. A análise de séries temporais bem como os métodos dos diversos tipos de médias e de suavização exponencial são indicados como os mais adequados para previsões de curto prazo. Um recurso utilizado em diversas realidades é a construção de um modelo próprio de previsão de demanda, o qual utilize técnicas, aspectos, conceitos e características de diferentes métodos e modelos. É fundamental monitorar o modelo adotado, manter os dados de campo e de previsão sob controle e, se houver desvios, corrigir o modelo.

This paper analyzes the relationship between networking capabilities and the motives behind SMEs taking part in collaborative relationships with firms within the same sector. Specifically, we analyzed inter-firm collaborations for new product development and the decision(s) to outsource. The main contribution of this paper is focused on identifying the existence of the mediating effect that Hybrid growth strategy has, connected to these relations. It is argued that the Hybrid growth strategy mediates the relationship between networking capabilities and the different collaborative modes with firms within the same sector. The results, obtained through a binomial logit model, supported these arguments by using a database formed by 450 face-to-face surveys, from which 296 took part in an inter-firm collaboration between 2012-2014. The surveys were given to CEOs from SMEs that participated in collaborative activities with other firms in the Electronic, Technology, Information, and Communications sector (ETICS) in Mexico.

Historically, a policy of enforcement in internationalisation processes is still seen by many as an approach to solve certain economic crises. However, Portugal's solution for this problem is part of a greater problem, namely trying to solve a European problem that has recently worsened and is largely uncontrolled. This paper aims to contribute, firstly by mentioning the Portuguese economic context and also possible ways of internationalisation and, secondly, by measuring a set of variables/factors that should support the development of the Portuguese economy. The results of the interviews which supported this study's methodological basis show that the Portuguese economy's poor dynamism and low demand by alternate markets are the two critical variables for the country's weak competitiveness. The suggestions of those surveyed propose that the Portuguese economy's dynamics should be characterised by a hybrid model, joining factors connected to the Nordic school's behavioural model, Dunning's eclectic paradigm (1997), and Buckley and Casson's model of internationalisation theory (1976).

This paper responds to the need for a greater integration of energy and environment themes in the higher education curriculum. We explore the practical implications of empowering students towards the implementation of individual action research projects focused on investigating and addressing insufficient or wasteful energy consumption among households and businesses. The paper scrutinizes a series of teaching and assessment activities within this domain, undertaken during 6 consecutive academic years--between 2008 and 2013--within a third-level undergraduate course unit at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Using questionnaire surveys, assessed projects and interviews with the students, we have found evidence to suggest that the action research projects contributed to the emergence of constructive alignment in the entire teaching process, while opening the space for informal action learning "sets" leading to the generation of new problem-solving skills useful in the job market.

The reasons for the strong rise in the securitization phenomenon up until the start of the “subprime crisis” need to be analysed. According to many authors, they mainly stem from its offering the possibility of generating fixed yield securities with the highest rating and a low risk premium, thanks to the issues being structured in differentiated bond series, so that certain series absorb most of the risk, thus facilitating the safer or “senior” tranches having a higher rating. Accordingly, this paper reviews the literature on the factors underlying the generation of differentiated tranches in this type of issues and regarding the determining factors of the yield offered by securitization issues. It concludes that the search for more complete markets, along with the reducing of problems associated to the moral hazard, are the main reasons for the multi-tranche structuring. And given the strong influence of the number of tranches on the yield offered by the issues, the paper likewise concludes that the multitranche structures has been an efficient tool to place securitization issues with more competitive yields.

Ricardo Salinas Pliego was the CEO of Grupo Salinas, one of the largest business groups in Mexico, and in 2009 he faced a challenge. Two years earlier, he had negotiated with the Chinese car company FAW to import Chinese cars into Mexico as an initial step towards their manufacturing. However, the global crisis of 2008 made him question the viability of the project and he had to decide whether to close the operation or continue in the hope of a quick recovery. This was a difficult decision because the group had sold several thousand cars and established a network of car dealers. Closing the operation would mean not only losing the investment in the network while having to continue servicing the cars, but would also result in a blow to the reputation of the group. He was pondering what the best option would be.

Este artículo analiza los determinantes de la rentabilidad primaria de los bonos de titulización hipotecaria (conocidos en la literatura como mortgage backed securities, o MBS) emitidos en España durante el periodo 1993-2011, periodo en el que el mercado español llegó a convertirse en el más importante de Europa continental. Los resultados obtenidos sobre el análisis de la población completa de MBS emitidos (262 tramos configurados sobre 94 fondos de titulización) indican que la estructuración multitramo de los MBS ha ayudado a reducir el riesgo percibido global de las emisiones de MBS, mediante la generación de mercados más completos y la reducción de los problemas derivados de la existencia de asimetrías informativas implícitas en el proceso de selección de los activos transmitidos por parte de la entidad cedente. Esta reducción del riesgo percibido ha tenido un efecto directo sobre la rentabilidad ofrecida por los bonos de titulización emitidos. Además, no se encuentran evidencias de que la emisión de MBS persiga la transmisión efectiva de riesgos, más bien al contrario. Las entidades de crédito, por lo general, han retenido los tramos de primeras pérdidas, lo que ha contribuido a mantener en niveles muy bajos (por debajo de la rentabilidad de la deuda soberana) la rentabilidad ofrecida por los MBS. Precisamente, el escaso diferencial ofrecido por los bonos de titulización se debe a que los tramos retenidos no han ofrecido primas de rentabilidad ajustadas al riesgo inherente.

Personalization technology has become an important topic in e-commerce, fostered by the emergence of the relationship-marketing paradigm. But teaching e-commerce personalization technology is a challenging task, since it requires a balance between marketing and management and technical implementation issues that must be calibrated according to the student's background, all of this without losing a holistic perspective of the subject. In this paper, we describe the result of our experiences in teaching personalization, sketching both a conceptual framework and a set of curricular objectives that provide a balanced and comprehensive view of the field in its current state. The conceptual framework for the topic area puts in relationship technical and business issues as part of marketing in e-business strategy. The main categories are the topics related to "partner interaction", including adaptive hypermedia and filtering of information, and "relationship maintenance", including user profiling and modeling along with common market segmentation techniques as related to the paradigm of relationship marketing. Concepts of human-computer interaction are required to aid in understanding the assessment techniques of personalization techniques, and privacy and legal issues should also be considered. The concept of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems crosscuts interaction and relationship maintenance issues, and could be used as a criteria for curriculum organization in some cases. Seven general curricular goals are identified as key aspects of the curriculum in personalization technology, including foundations of relationship marketing, user profiling and modeling, hypermedia and adaptive hypermedia concepts, the use of personalization as a tool in marketing strategy, CRM, privacy and legal issues and mass customization. The four first aspects are considered as the core of the curriculum, and they should be addressed to some extent depending on the background and interest of the students. The content of each particular course can then be tuned to diverse student profiles by putting more emphasis in some of the goals, without losing the global view of personalization as a component of a global e-marketing strategy. Rule-base personalization systems represent an appropriate case for introducing the technical content of personalization, and marketing oriented content should be approached from a clear concept of relationship value, as the key concept from which marketing tactics and techniques are derived. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

Churn management is a concern for businesses, particularly in the digital economy. A customer relationship framework is proposed to help deal with churn issues. The model integrates the electronic channel and involves four tools for enhancing data collection, data treatment, data analysis and data integration in the decision-making process. Explains the adequacy of data mining for alleviating churn issues. (Author/AEF)

In a study of library use and research behavior, 91 undergraduate and 68 graduate business students at California State University San Marcos were surveyed and observed for query formulation and task assignments, prereference process expectations, and postreference process responses. Findings support past research by pointing to user impatience and minimal student effort in search tasks. (PEN)

RESUMEN Uno de los temas que ha generado fuerza y actualidad con la apertura comercial y la política Neoliberal es el del desarrollo tecnológico y la política que pueda conducir a él. Quien dice apertura comercial dice modernización económica y actualización tecnológica. Ahora que la economía nacional ha quedado expuesta más que nunca a los rigores de la competencia internacional tiene que armarse, de la única herramienta que hace viable la consolidación de una capacidad competitiva: la tecnología en todas sus formas, desde la maquinaria y el equipo hasta los esquemas organizacionales y las prácticas de postventa. En el siguiente artículo vamos a aproximarnos al tema mediante algunas reflexiones (por lo pronto fragmentarias) entorno a cinco interrogantes.

Given the increasing importance of the wastewater sector in terms of energy usage, the understanding of the level of energy efficiency of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is useful to both the industry itself as well as policy makers. Here, based on economic foundations, we apply a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) approach for energy demand modelling to estimate energy efficiency in the wastewater sector. Using specific SFA models and panel data from 183 Swiss WWTPs over the period 2001 to 2015, the paper illustrates that distinguishing between persistent and transient inefficiency is essential to deduce appropriate energy efficiency diagnosis in WWTPs. In this respect, persistent energy inefficiency is found to be more severe than transient energy inefficiency. Furthermore, it is shown that the age of the equipment influences the demand for energy and the energy savings due to technological innovation are quantified. Finally, economies of output density and scale are estimated demonstrating that for plants operating below optimal scale significant energy savings can be achieved if plants would be operated at higher size. Moreover, our analysis reveals also that for plants larger than 100,000 Population Equivalent, at least from an energy efficiency point of view, it would be no more beneficial to increase their scale. Keywords: Stochastic frontier analysis, Energy efficiency, Energy demand, Benchmarking, Wastewater treatment, Water diagnosis, 1. INTRODUCTION Energy used to supply water to consumers is a source of demand that is set to grow rapidly over the coming decades. At European level, the data show [...]

ABSTRACT Surface dust mass concentrations, extracted from filters collected at Miami, Florida, and Ragged Point, Barbados, since 1974 and 1973, respectively, provide a rare, unusual, and important metric of the [...]

Abstract. We show that firms with chief executive officers (CEOs) who gain general managerial skills over their lifetime of work experience produce more patents. We address the potential endogenous CEO-firm [...]

I use random fluctuations in hourly wind and solar generation in California to estimate how much they reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. These offsets depend on the direct displacement of high-cost natural gas generators, and on the hydropower reallocation that occurs to the hours with the lowest increase in renewable generation. Solar power daily intermittency shifts hydro from the afternoon to the evening, which increases its emissions offsets since the gas generators displaced in the evening are dirtier than those kept running in the afternoon. In contrast, wind offsets are less sensitive to hydropower reallocation, since it leads to a substitution of generators with similar emissions intensities. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for interactions between wind, solar, and hydro capacity in assessing their environmental benefits. Similar lessons will apply to electric grids with storage capacity. Keywords: Wind and solar power, Hydropower, Dynamics, Emissions offsets, 1. INTRODUCTION In order to achieve carbon dioxide and local pollutants abatement goals, an electric grid powered by a significant share of renewable energy is one of the proposed alternatives [...]

Abstract. This paper investigates the effect of performance measurement on the optimal effort allocation by salespeople when firms are concerned about retention of salespeople with higher abilities. It shows that [...]

We partner with a major multinational telecommunications provider to analyze the effect of subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services on digital piracy. For a period of 45 consecutive days, a group of randomly selected households who used BitTorrent in the past were gifted with a bundle of TV channels with movies and TV shows that could be streamed as in SVoD. We find that, on average, households that received the gift increased overall TV consumption by 4.6% and reduced Internet downloads and uploads by 4.2% and 4.5%, respectively. However, and also on average, treated households did not change their likelihood of using BitTorrent during the experiment. Our findings are heterogeneous across households and are mediated by the fit between the preferences of households in our sample for movies and the content available as part of the gifted channels. Households with preferences aligned with the gifted content reduced their probability of using BitTorrent during the experiment by 18% and decreased their amount of upload traffic by 45%. We also show using simulation that the size of the SVoD catalog and licensing window restrictions limit significantly the ability of content providers to match SVoD offerings to the preferences of BitTorrent users. Finally, we estimate that households in our sample are willing to pay at most $3.25 USD per month to access a SVoD catalog as large as Netflix's in the United States. Together, our results show that, as a stand-alone strategy, using legal SVoD to curtail piracy will require, at the minimum, offering content much earlier and at much lower prices than those currently offered in the marketplace, changes that are likely to reduce industry revenue and that may damage overall incentives to produce new content while, at the same time, curbing only a small share of piracy. History: Accepted by Chris Forman, information systems. Funding: This research was partially funded by the Carnegie Mellon University Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics (IDEA), which receives unrestricted (gift) funding from the Motion Picture Association of America. This research was conducted independently without any oversight or editorial control. M. Godinho de Matos was supported by the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology [Grant UID/GES/00407/2013], Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2875. Keywords: randomized experiment * digital piracy * movies * BitTorrent * downloads * Internet, 1. Introduction Digitization is transforming the entertainment industries: books, music, and video. On the supply side, digitization reduced the fixed cost of content creation (Waldfogel 2012) as well as the [...]

We propose a new medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) model with endogenous uncertainty in the casualty delivery times. The goal is to provide timely evacuation and medical treatment to injured soldiers. The model enforces the 'Golden Hour' evacuation doctrine, attempts to maximize the expected number of severely injured soldiers evacuated within one hour without delay, and represents the availability of air ambulances as an endogenous source of uncertainty. The MEDEVAC model is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem whose continuous relaxation is in general nonconvex and for which we develop an algorithmic method articulated around (i) new bounding techniques obtained through the solution of restriction and relaxation problems and (ii) a spatial branch-and-bound algorithm solving conic mixed-integer programs at each node. The computational study, based on data from Operation Enduring Freedom, reveals that the bounding problems can be quickly solved regardless of problem size, the bounds are tight, and the spatial branch-and-bound dominates the CPLEX and BARON solvers in terms of computational time and robustness. Compared to the MEDEVAC myopic policy, our approach increases the number of casualties treated timely and can contribute to reducing the number of deaths on the battlefield. The benefits increase as the MEDEVAC resources become tighter and the combats intensify. The model can be used at the strategic level to design an efficient MEDEVAC system and at the tactical level for intelligent tasking and dispatching. History: Accepted by Yinyu Ye, optimization. Funding: M. Lejeune acknowledges the support of the Office of Naval Research [Grant N000141712420], Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2894. Keywords: MEDEVAC * military trauma care * endogenous uncertainty * mixed-integer nonlinear programming * spatial branch-and-bound algorithm * relaxation and restriction problems, 1. Introduction The medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) of injured soldiers is paramount for every armed force. It is fundamental that every soldier injured on the battlefield has the maximal chance for [...]