Digital Commons Network^™

Salary Negotiation: Myths Busted, Abhijeet K. Vadera, Karyn Thye

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A negotiation expert and a compensation geek came together to answer some of the toughest salary negotiation questions from the Master of Human Capital Leadership (MHCL) 2020 graduate cohort. We hope that our combined experiences in this field would help shed some light on the complex world of salary negotiations.

How Do Monetary Incentives Influence Prosocial Fundraising? An Empirical Investigation Of Matching Subsidies On Crowdfunding, Zhiyuan Gao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Monetary incentives, such as matching subsidies, are widely used in traditional fundraising and crowdfunding platforms to boost funding activities and improve funding outcomes. However, its effectiveness on prosocial fundraising is still unclear from both theoretical (Bénabou and Tirole, 2006; Frey, 1997; Meier, 2007a) and empirical studies (Ariely et al., 2009; Karlan and List, 2007; Rondeau and List, 2008). This dissertation aims to examine the effectiveness of matching subsidies on prosocial fundraising in the crowdfunding context. Specifically, I study how the presence of matching subsidies affects overall funding outcomes and funding dynamics in the online prosocial crowdfunding environment.

The first essay …

Vision-Based Analytics For Improved Ai-Driven Iot Applications, Amit Sharma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor systems, primarily driven by cheaper embedded hardware platforms and wide availability of light-weight software platforms, has opened up doors for large-scale data collection opportunities. The availability of massive amount of data has in-turn given way to rapidly growing machine learning models e.g. You Only Look Once (YOLO), Single-Shot-Detectors (SSD) and so on. There has been a growing trend of applying machine learning techniques, e.g., object detection, image classification, face detection etc., on data collected from camera sensors and therefore enabling plethora of vision-sensing applications namely self-driving cars, automatic crowd monitoring, traffic-flow analysis, occupancy …

The Convergence Of Water, Electricity And Gas Industries: Implications For Ppp Design And Regulation, Sock Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In several countries that have privatised their utilities, power and water are separate industries regulated by sector-specific regulators. In a parallel development, desalination has become an important source of water supply in countries where there is a shortage of cheap and clean freshwater. Where the energy source is gas, the use of gas-fired power plants to supply electricity for desalination links the water, electricity and gas industries. We use the case of the financial collapse of an integrated water and power project to illustrate the problems that can arise from such convergence, and to draw lessons for firms, Public-Private Partnerships …

Differential Privacy Protection Over Deep Learning: An Investigation Of Its Impacted Factors, Ying Lin, Ling-Yan Bao, Ze-Minghui Li, Shu-Sheng Si, Chao-Hsien Chu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning (DL) has been widely applied to achieve promising results in many fields, but it still exists various privacy concerns and issues. Applying differential privacy (DP) to DL models is an effective way to ensure privacy-preserving training and classification. In this paper, we revisit the DP stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) method, which has been used by several algorithms and systems and achieved good privacy protection. However, several factors, such as the sequence of adding noise, the models used etc., may impact its performance with various degrees. We empirically show that adding noise first and clipping second will not only …

Human Capital Leadership Insights: Solving Human Capital Challenges From The Business Perspective, Singapore Management University

Student Publications

In 2016, the Lee Kong Chian School of Business launched the Master of Human Capital Leadership (“MHCL”) program with the strategic objective of growing leaders to champion evidence-based human capital practices. The 2019 MHCL cohort took this a step further with their quest to share insights gained from studies and projects with industry stakeholders. This goal resonates with our mission -- to create and disseminate knowledge.

Local Dominance, Emiliano Catonini, Jingyi Xue

SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series

We define a local notion of weak dominance that speaks to the true choice problems among actions in a game tree and does not necessarily require to plan optimally for the future. A strategy is (globally) weakly dominant if and only if it prescribes a locally weakly dominant action at every decision node it reaches, and in this case local weak dominance is characterized by a (wishful-thinking) condition that requires no forward planning. From this local perspective, we identify form of contingent reasoning that are particularly natural, despite the absence of an obviously dominant strategy (Li, 2017). Following this approach, …

Decomposing Duration Dependence: Skill Depreciation Vs. Statistical Discrimination, Ismail Baydur, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops a random matching model with unobserved worker heterogeneity and learning about worker types from unemployment duration. The model features negative duration dependence that stems from unobserved heterogeneity as well as statistical discrimination and skill depreciation. We estimate our model using micro-level data from Current Population Survey (CPS) and we decompose the contribution of each channel to job finding rates by duration. We find that shutting down statistical discrimination substantially increases the job finding rates of the long-term unemployed while skill depreciation mainly affects the medium-term unemployed.

International Tax Competition And Foreign Direct Investment In The Asia-Pacific Region: A Panel Data Analysis, Chengwei Xu, Alfred M. Wu

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how a country's competitive tax policy influences its inward foreign direct investments (FDI) in the Asia–Pacific region, even when given particular constraints (e.g., population, public governance, skilled labor, and so on) exist. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses the system GMM estimation approach to test the hypothesis. Data on FDI, corporate income tax, and various confounding factors were drawn from Ernst and Young's worldwide corporate tax guide, the World Bank, and other sources to create a panel of 28 economies over the period 2000–2016. Findings: The present research confirms the negative association between …

What's On Job Seekers' Social Media Sites? A Content Analysis And Effects Of Structure On Recruiter Judgments And Predictive Validity, Liwen Zhang, Chad H. Van Iddekinge, John D. Arnold, Philip L. Roth, Filip Lievens, Stephen E. Lanivich, Samantha L. Jordan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many organizational representatives review social media (SM) information (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) when recruiting and assessing job applicants. Despite this, very little empirical data exist concerning the SM information available to organizations or whether assessments of such information are a valid predictor of work outcomes. This multi-study investigation examines several critical issues in this emerging area. In Study 1, we conducted a content analysis of job seekers’ Facebook sites (n = 266) and found that these sites often provide demographic variables that U.S. employment laws typically prohibit organizations from using when making personnel decisions (e.g., age, ethnicity, religion), as well as …

End-User Perceptions Of Success And Failure: Narratives From A Natural Laboratory Of Rural Electrification Projects In Malaysian Borneo, Terry Van Gevelt, T. Zaman, F. George, M.M Bennett, S.D. Fam, J.E. Kim

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Located deep in the Kelabit Highlands in Malaysian Borneo, the remote town of Bario offers us a natural laboratory of rural electrification projects through which to understand end-user perceptions of success and failure, and the factors that contribute to these perceptions. We use a case-study based approach and focus on three off-grid energy projects: a 110 kW mini-hydro power plant; a 12 kW wind turbine system; and a 1.59 MW solar-diesel hybrid system. We find that end-users primarily see the success or failure of a project in technical terms, but that this narrow conceptualization masks important interactions between technical, economic …

Motivation Purity Bias: Expression Of Extrinsic Motivation Undermines Perceived Intrinsic Motivation And Engenders Bias In Selection Decisions, Rellie Derfler-Rozin, Marko Pitesa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Organizational selection decisions often involve an exchange of information between candidates and decision makers as to why candidates are motivated to work in the given position. Drawing on popular management myths as our overarching framework, we theorize that candidates’ expressions of extrinsic motivation lead decision makers to infer that the candidate is less intrinsically motivated, leading to bias against such candidates. We term this effect motivation purity bias, and argue that it emerges despite ample evidence, which we review, showing that penalizing expressed extrinsic motivation is not only unfair to candidates but also counterproductive from the standpoint of maximizing future …

Public Relations Education In Singapore: Educating The Next Generation Of Practitioners On Ethics, Eugene Yong Sheng Woon, Augustine Pang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study examines if PR education adequately prepares students for the workplace, particularly in the practice of ethics in the context of Singapore, which has been described as one of “Asia’s economic tigers” (BBC, 2018). This study, thus, aims to first, elucidate the state of PR education specifically in relation to how PR ethics is taught in Singapore. Second, it examines how ethics education prepares students for the workplace in Singapore. Data comes from examining the syllabi of 14 universities in Singapore, both local and international, and interviews with 20 academics and practitioners. Findings suggest there are varying degrees in …

A Two-Stage Parallel Network Dea Model For Analyzing The Operational Capability Of Container Terminals, Jaehun Park, Byung Kwon Lee, Joyce M. W. Low

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study proposes a systematical approach to evaluate the operational capability of container terminals and discusses the effect of resource usages on operational performances. Two inter-dependent processes (i.e. the loading-discharging (L&D) and the delivery-receiving (D&R) operational processes) with shared/non-shared resources and common/separate productions are examined and characterized as a two-stage parallel network. An evaluation model is developed upon the principles of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the operational capability of the terminals. Using the real-world dataset of 9 container terminals at Port of Busan, comparative performance results are obtained for 5 years spanning across 2014–2018. The proposed model demonstrates …

Stay Mindful And Carry On: Mindfulness Neutralizes Covid-19 Stressors On Work Engagement Via Sleep Duration, Michelle Xue Zheng, Theodore Charles Masters-Waage, Jingxian Yao, Yichen Lu, Noriko Tan, Jayanth Narayanan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine whether mindfulness can neutralize the negative impact of COVID-19 stressors on employees' sleep duration and work engagement. In Study 1, we conducted a field experiment in Wuhan, China during the lockdown between February 20, 2020, and March 2, 2020, in which we induced state mindfulness by randomly assigning participants to either a daily mindfulness practice or a daily mind-wandering practice. Results showed that the sleep duration of participants in the mindfulness condition, compared with the control condition, was less impacted by COVID-19 stressors (i.e., the increase of infections in the community). In Study 2, in a 10-day daily …

Security Analysis Of Permission Re-Delegation Vulnerabilities In Android Apps, Biniam Fisseha Demissie, Mariano Ceccato, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Android platform facilitates reuse of app functionalities by allowing an app to request an action from another app through inter-process communication mechanism. This feature is one of the reasons for the popularity of Android, but it also poses security risks to the end users because malicious, unprivileged apps could exploit this feature to make privileged apps perform privileged actions on behalf of them. In this paper, we investigate the hybrid use of program analysis, genetic algorithm based test generation, natural language processing, machine learning techniques for precise detection of permission re-delegation vulnerabilities in Android apps. Our approach first groups …

Enabling Collaborative Video Sensing At The Edge Through Convolutional Sharing, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Wanniarachchige Dhanuja Tharith Wanniarachchi, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While Deep Neural Network (DNN) models have provided remarkable advances in machine vision capabilities, their high computational complexity and model sizes present a formidable roadblock to deployment in AIoT-based sensing applications. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm by which peer nodes in a network can collaborate to improve their accuracy on person detection, an exemplar machine vision task. The proposed methodology requires no re-training of the DNNs and incurs minimal processing latency as it extracts scene summaries from the collaborators and injects back into DNNs of the reference cameras, on-the-fly. Early results show promise with improvements in recall …

Smartfuzz: An Automated Smart Fuzzing Approach For Testing Smartthings Apps, Lwin Khin Shar, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo, Wei Minn, Kiah Yong Glenn Yeo, Eugene Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As IoT ecosystem has been fast-growing recently, there have been various security concerns of this new computing paradigm. Malicious IoT apps gaining access to IoT devices and capabilities to execute sensitive operations (sinks), e.g., controlling door locks and switches, may cause serious security and safety issues. Unlike traditional mobile/web apps, IoT apps highly interact with a wide variety of physical IoT devices and respond to environmental events, in addition to user inputs. It is therefore important to conduct comprehensive testing of IoT apps to identify possible anomalous behaviours. On the other hand, it is also important to optimize the number …

Testing For Structural Changes In Factor Models Via A Nonparametric Regression, Liangjun Su, Xia Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a model-free test for structural changes in factor models. The basic idea is to regress the data on commonly estimated factors by local smoothing and compare the fitted values of time-varying factor loadings with those of time-invariant factor loadings estimated via principal component analysis. By construction, the test is designed to be powerful against both smooth structural changes and sudden structural breaks with a possibly unknown number of breaks and unknown break dates in the factor loadings. No restrictions on the form of alternatives or trimming of boundary regions near the beginning or end of the sample period …

Students Can Still Assimilate Different Cultures Via Virtual Learning, Yuanto Kusnadi, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The year 2020 has been unique and exceptional. The Covid-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges to economies and societies across the world. Universities too had to pivot and adapt, with lessons and examinations moved online, for example. One of the challenges faced by universities is how to equip their students with the relevant skillset of gaining exposure to different cultures through internships and exchanges when international borders are largely closed. To overcome the constraint posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, a recent initiative by the Singapore Management University (SMU), called SMU-X Overseas (virtual), has allowed students to work on real-world projects …

Assessment And Student Motivations Through The Lens Of Agency Theory, Prasart Jongjaroenkamol

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Assessment is used to evaluate student learning and to motivate students to learn. Instructors generally have the option of using individual assessment, team assessment, or a combination of both. Using a principal-agent model, this study analytically examines how individual assessment and team assessment affect students' incentives to learn when their abilities vary. Relative to individual assessment, team assessment imposes more uncertainties on students, but it also encourages strong students to cooperate with weak students to help them learn. Depending on the strengths of these two forces, it can be optimal for the instructor to use individual assessment only or a …

Quasi-Bayesian Inference For Production Frontiers, Xiaobin Liu, Thomas Tao Yang, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a quasi-Bayesian method to conduct inference for the production frontier. This approach combines multiple first-stage extreme quantile estimates by the quasi-Bayesian method to produce the point estimate and confidence interval for the production frontier. We show the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator and the validity of the inference procedure. The finite sample performance of our method is illustrated through simulations and an empirical application.

Robust, Fine-Grained Occupancy Estimation Via Combined Camera & Wifi Indoor Localization, Anuradha Ravi, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe the development of a robust, accurate and practically-validated technique for estimating the occupancy count in indoor spaces, based on a combination of WiFi & video sensing. While fusing these two sensing-based inputs is conceptually straightforward, the paper demonstrates and tackles the complexity that arises from several practical artefacts, such as (i) over-counting when a single individual uses multiple WiFi devices and under-counting when the individual has no such device; (ii) corresponding errors in image analysis due to real-world artefacts, such as occlusion, and (iii) the variable errors in mapping image bounding boxes (which can include multiple possible types …

Understanding Continuance Intention Toward Crowdsourcing Games: A Longitudinal Investigation, Xiaohui Wang, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given the increasing popularity of gamified crowdsourcing, the study reported here involved examining determinants of users' continuance intention toward crowdsourcing games, both with longitudinal data and reference to a revised unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). At three time points, data were collected from an online survey about playing crowdsourcing games. Time-lagged regression, cross-temporal correlation, and structural equation modeling were performed to examine determinants of the acceptance of crowdsourcing games. Results indicate that the revised UTAUT2 is applicable to explaining the acceptance of crowdsourcing games. Not only did effort expectancy, hedonic motivation, and social influence directly affect …

$14 Million Ian R. Taylor Memorial Fund Fosters Talent Development At Smu, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

Past and present staff of Vitol Asia have come together to make an endowed gift of $14 million to set up the Ian R. Taylor Memorial Fund (IRT-MF) at the Singapore Management University (SMU) in honour and memory of the late Mr Ian Roper Taylor (7 February 1956 – 8 June 2020). Mr Taylor was the former chief executive and chairman of the Vitol Group who transformed the small Dutch fuel merchant into the global commodities powerhouse that it is today.

The Role Of Employee Proactive Behaviors In Influencing Supervisors’ Trust In Employees, Ngai Meng Ho

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In organizations, proactive employees make things happen. They anticipate, initiate, and drive meaningful changes for a better future. Such proactive behaviors can be manifested in different forms. Initiating work improvements and voicing for changes are examples of the different proactive behaviors commonly demonstrated by employees.

Empirical studies have associated proactive behaviors at work with a range of positive workplace outcomes. However, only limited research has examined how proactive behaviors might be related to one particularly important outcome, trust, i.e., whether an employee’s proactive behaviors will influence the supervisor’s trust toward the employee. Accordingly, in this present research, I conducted two …

Unmaking California’S Central Valley, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

IN THIS YEAR of heat records and fire tornadoes, California faces another potential crisis: drought. In November 2020, more than 80 percent of the state’s land mass was classified as somewhere between “abnormally dry” and “extreme drought” by the United States Drought Monitor. The chances of the winter offering relief look slim, given what’s called a “La Niña climate pattern,” which is associated with arid conditions in much of California. The months ahead are, in general, far more likely to bring water worries than happy surprises.To longtime California residents, such fears are familiar. The state’s most recent drought began in …

Staying Connected: The Importance Of Social Integration On The Well-Being Of Older Adults, Paulin T. Straughan, Vincent Chua, Stephen Hoskins, Frosch Quek

ROSA Research Briefs

It has been about a year since COVID-19 first emerged and reshaped the daily lives of people around the globe, including Singaporeans. Since moving past the circuit breaker in June, Singapore has gradually re-opened and relaxed its restrictions in different phases. As Singapore prepares for Phase 3- the final and least restrictive phase, it is important to examine how Singaporeans have coped and responded with the circuit breaker (7 April 2020) and its gradual easing of restriction in Phase 1 (2nd June 2020) and Phase 2 (19 June 2020), and identify the groups which have fallen through the gaps in …

Walls Have Ears: Eavesdropping User Behaviors Via Graphics-Interrupt-Based Side Channel, Haoyu Ma, Jianwen Tian, Debin Gao, Jia Chunfu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are now playing a vital role in many devices and systems including computing devices, data centers, and clouds, making them the next target of side-channel attacks. Unlike those targeting CPUs, existing side-channel attacks on GPUs exploited vulnerabilities exposed by application interfaces like OpenGL and CUDA, which can be easily mitigated with software patches. In this paper, we investigate the lower-level and native interface between GPUs and CPUs, i.e., the graphics interrupts, and evaluate the side channel they expose. Being an intrinsic profile in the communication between a GPU and a CPU, the pattern of graphics interrupts …

The Use Of Similar Fact In Criminal Proceedings: An Updated Framework, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

When confronted with the question of whether to admit similiar fact for criminal cases, courts in Singapore are often faced with balancing potentially competing norms in the form of evidential expediency and fairness to the accused. Specifically, although similiar fact may help establish the ingredients of an offence, there existis a real risk that any resulting conviction of the accused and this potential weakness in inferential reasoning through indirect proof will - to use the word in its broadest sense - predjudice the accused.