Digital Commons Network^™

Measuring Api Documentation On The Web, Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a developer is just a web search away. To understand whether documentation via social media can replace or augment more traditional forms of documentation, we study the extent to which the methods of one particular API — jQuery — are documented on the Web. We analyze 1,730 search results and show that software development blogs in particular cover 87.9% …

Competitive Groups As Cognitive Communities: The Case Of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers Revisited, Joseph F. Porac, Howard Thomas, Charles Baden-Fuller

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we reflect on the contribution of our 1989 article ‘Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers’. We begin by recalling our backgrounds and motivations as collaborators on the project, and then discuss recent developments in the Scottish Borders knitwear industry. Noting that the industry has suffered continual decline in the twenty years since we published our paper, we suggest that the case still raises issues that remain open questions in the field despite the significant efforts by management researchers in recent years to understand the sources of industrial decline and revitalization. We outline …

How Important Are Earnings Announcements As An Information Source?, Sudipta Basu, Truong Xuan Duong, Stanimir Markov, Eng Joo Tan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a competitive information market, a single information source can only dominate other sources individually, not collectively. We explore whether earnings announcements constitute such a dominant source using Ball and Shivakumar's (2008) [How much new information is there in earnings?, Journal of Accounting Research, 2008, 46(5), pp. 975–1016] R ² metric: the proportion of the variation in annual returns explained by the four quarterly earnings announcement returns. We find that the earnings announcement days' R ² is 11% – higher than the corresponding R ² of days with dividend announcements, management forecasts, preannouncements, and 10-K and 10-Q filings and …

Different Means To The Same End: A Comparative Contingency Analyses Of Singapore And China’S Management Of The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) Crisis, Yan Jin, Augustine Pang, Glen T. Cameron

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

For months in 2003, the world lay under siege by a strain of virus that masqueraded as pneumonia but inflicted a far more lethal effect. By all accounts, the mystery of how the severe respiratory acute syndrome (SARS) virus came to be has remained largely unsolved (Bradsher & Altman 2003). What began as routine fever and cough in a Chinese physician, later identified as a super-carrier, rapidly spread to people who had cursory contacts with him, spiralling into a worldwide crisis that spanned Asia and the North Americas (Rosenthal 2003).

A Different Look At Why Selection Procedures Work: The Role Of Candidates' Ability To Identify Criteria, Martin Kleinmann, Pia V. Ingold, Filip Lievens, Anne Jansen, Klaus G Melchers, Cornelius J. Konig

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Personnel selection procedures such as assessment centers, structured interviews, and personality inventories are useful predictors of candidates' job performance. In addition to existing explanations for their criterion-related validity, we suggest that candidates' ability to identify the criteria used to evaluate their performance during a selection procedure contributes to the criterion-related validity of these procedures. Conceptually, the ability to identify criteria can be framed in the broader literature on peoples' ability to read situational cues. We draw on both theory and empirical research to outline the potential this ability has to account for selection results and job performance outcomes. Finally, implications …

Impact Of Sanctions And Isolation Measurement With North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Iran And Zimbabwe As Case Studies, Clara Portela

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The present study explores how the introduction of targeted sanctions has transformed the practice of international organisations, looking at the examples of North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Iran and Zimbabwe.

Although the ultimate effectiveness of the individual sanctions measures can hardly be ascertained, not least due to their co-existence with unilateral sanctions proactively enforced by the US, the analysis demonstrates that the character of sanctions measures, and the changing nature of the international system, has put the use of sanctions and isolation measures in different terms than was the case just a couple of decades ago.

While it is beyond the scope …

Accounting Quality, Stock Price Delay And Future Stock Returns, Hai Lu, Jeffrey Callen, Mozaffar Khan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

ln frictionless capital markets with complete information and rational investors, stock prices adjust to new information instantaneously and completely. However, a substantial body of research studies information imperfections such as asymmetric information and incomplete information. Information imperfections potentially hinder timely price discovery and are likely associated with delayed stock price adjustment to information. Our first research question therefore is whether the quality of accounting information (or ”accounting quality”) is one such information imperfection that is associated with cross-sectional variation in stock price delay. We define accounting quality as the precision with which financial reports convey information to equity investors about …

Distributed Model Shaping For Scaling To Decentralized Pomdps With Hundreds Of Agents, Prasanna Velagapudi, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Katia Sycara, Paul Scerri

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The use of distributed POMDPs for cooperative teams has been severely limited by the incredibly large joint policy- space that results from combining the policy-spaces of the individual agents. However, much of the computational cost of exploring the entire joint policy space can be avoided by observing that in many domains important interactions between agents occur in a relatively small set of scenarios, previously defined as coordination locales (CLs) [11]. Moreover, even when numerous interactions might occur, given a set of individual policies there are relatively few actual interactions. Exploiting this observation and building on an existing model shaping algorithm, …

Incremental Dcop Search Algorithms For Solving Dynamic Dcop Problems, William Yeoh, Pradeep Varakantham, Xiaoxun Sun, Sven Koenig

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) are well-suited for modeling multi-agent coordination problems. However, most research has focused on developing algorithms for solving static DCOPs. In this paper, we model dynamic DCOPs as sequences of (static) DCOPs with changes from one DCOP to the next one in the sequence. We introduce the ReuseBounds procedure, which can be used by any-space ADOPT and any-space BnB-ADOPT to find cost-minimal solutions for all DCOPs in the sequence faster than by solving each DCOP individually. This procedure allows those agents that are guaranteed to remain unaffected by a change to reuse their lower and upper …

The Business Of Art, The Art Of Business, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

Fuelled by her life-long passion for the arts, Krisstel Martin chucked aside her degree in finance and banking to open an art gallery. At a recent talk organised by SMU’s Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Martin, owner of a gallery named after herself, shares the intricacies of dealing with prospective buyers, the joys of dealing with artists, and the passion and satisfaction of immersing herself in a business that she loves.

The Liquidity Risk Of Liquid Hedge Funds, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

This paper evaluates hedge funds that grant favorable redemption terms to investors. Within this group of purportedly liquid funds, high net inflow funds subsequently outperform low net inflow funds by 4.79 percent per year after adjusting for risk. The return impact of fund flows is stronger when funds embrace liquidity risk, when market liquidity is low, and when funding liquidity, as measured by the TED spread, aggregate hedge fund flows, and prime broker stock returns, is tight. In keeping with an agency explanation, funds with strong incentives to raise capital, low manager option deltas, and no manager capital co-invested are …

Divining The Merits And Pitfalls Of Dividends, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

Capital gains on stock investments are not always a given, but many companies make it a point to give their shareholders a steady flow of returns that do not require a sell. While such payouts are not as exciting as hitting that 'multi-bagger', here’s something more certain: over time, patient shareholders have more to reap. In 'The Little Book of Big Dividends', author Charles Carlson draws readers' attention to the merits and red flags of investing for dividends.

The Liquidity Risk Of Liquid Hedge Funds, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper evaluates hedge funds that grant favorable redemption terms to investors. Within this group of purportedly liquid funds, high net inflow funds subsequently outperform low net inflow funds by 4.79% per year after adjusting for risk. The return impact of fund flows is stronger when funds embrace liquidity risk, when market liquidity is low, and when funding liquidity, as measured by the Treasury-Eurodollar spread, aggregate hedge fund flows, and prime broker stock returns, is tight. In keeping with an agency explanation, funds with strong incentives to raise capital, low manager option deltas, and no manager capital co-invested are more …

Learning Feature Dependencies For Noise Correction In Biomedical Prediction, Ghim-Eng Yap, Ah-Hwee Tan, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The presence of noise or errors in the stated feature values of biomedical data can lead to incorrect prediction. We introduce a Bayesian Network-based Noise Correction framework named BN-NC. After data preprocessing, a Bayesian Network (BN) is learned to capture the feature dependencies. Using the BN to predict each feature in turn, BN-NC estimates a feature's error rate as the deviation between its predicted and stated values in the training data, and allocates the appropriate uncertainty to its subsequent findings during prediction. BN-NC automatically generates a probabilistic rule to explain BN prediction on the class variable using the feature values …

Mkboost: A Framework Of Multiple Kernel Boosting, Hao Xia, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multiple kernel learning (MKL) has been shown as a promising machine learning technique for data mining tasks by integrating with multiple diverse kernel functions. Traditional MKL methods often formulate the problem as an optimization task of learning both optimal combination of kernels and classifiers, and attempt to resolve the challenging optimization task by various techniques. Unlike the existing MKL methods, in this paper, we investigate a boosting framework of exploring multiple kernel learning for classification tasks. In particular, we present a novel framework of Multiple Kernel Boosting (MKBoost), which applies boosting techniques for learning kernel-based classifiers with multiple kernels. Based …

Peercast: Improving Link Layer Multicast Through Cooperative Relaying, Jie Xiong, Romit Roy Choudhury

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless multicast applications, such as MobiTV, web telecast, and multimedia classrooms, are gaining rapid popularity. The broadcast nature of the wireless channel is amenable to such multicasts because a single packet transmission can be received by all clients. Unfortunately, the rate of this transmission is bottlenecked by data rate of the weakest client, degrading system performance. Attempts to increase the data rate results in lower reliability and higher unfairness. This paper presents PeerCast, a wireless multicast protocol that engages clients in cooperative relaying. The main idea is simple. Instead of multicasting at the bottleneck rate, the access point transmits at …

Predicting Item Adoption Using Social Correlation, Freddy Chong-Tat Chua, Hady W. Lauw, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users face a dazzling array of choices on the Web when it comes to choosing which product to buy, which video to watch, etc. The trend of social information processing means users increasingly rely not only on their own preferences, but also on friends when making various adoption decisions. In this paper, we investigate the effects of social correlation on users’ adoption of items. Given a user-user social graph and an item-user adoption graph, we seek to answer the following questions: 1) whether the items adopted by a user correlate to items adopted by her friends, and 2) how to …

Heterogeneous Signcryption With Key Privacy, Qiong Huang, Duncan S. Wong, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A signcryption scheme allows a sender to produce a ciphertext for a receiver so that both confidentiality and non-repudiation can be ensured. It is built to be more efficient and secure, for example, supporting insider security, when compared with the conventional sign-then-encrypt approach. In this paper, we propose a new notion called heterogeneous signcryption in which the sender has an identity-based secret key while the receiver is holding a certificate-based public key pair. Heterogeneous signcryption is suitable for practical scenarios where an identity-based user, who does not have a personal certificate or a public key, wants to communicate securely with …

Touching A Teddy Bear Mitigates The Negative Effects Of Social Exclusion, Kenneth Tai, Xue Zheng, Jayanth Narayanan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

There is little empirical research to date that looks at how the deleterious effects of social exclusion can be mitigated. We examined how touching an inanimate object—a teddy bear—might impact the effect of social exclusion on prosocial behavior. Across two studies, we found that socially excluded individuals who touched a teddy bear acted more prosocially as compared to socially excluded individuals who just viewed the teddy bear from a distance. This effect was only observed for socially excluded participants and not for socially included (or control) participants. Overall, the findings suggest that touching a teddy bear mitigates the negative effects …

Weight-Based Boosting Model For Cross-Domain Relevance Ranking Adaptation, Peng Cai, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong, Aoying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adaptation techniques based on importance weighting were shown effective for RankSVM and RankNet, viz., each training instance is assigned a target weight denoting its importance to the target domain and incorporated into loss functions. In this work, we extend RankBoost using importance weighting framework for ranking adaptation. We find it non-trivial to incorporate the target weight into the boosting-based ranking algorithms because it plays a contradictory role against the innate weight of boosting, namely source weight that focuses on adjusting source-domain ranking accuracy. Our experiments show that among three variants, the additive weight-based RankBoost, which dynamically balances the two types …

Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion Strategy For On-Line Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Vivek Gopalkrishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-line portfolio selection has been attracting increasing attention from the data mining and machine learning communities. All existing on-line portfolio selection strategies focus on the first order information of a portfolio vector, though the second order information may also be beneficial to a strategy. Moreover, empirical evidences show that the stock price relatives may follow the mean reversion property, which has not been fully exploited by existing strategies. This article proposes a novel on-line portfolio selection strategy named ``Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion'' (CWMR). Inspired by the mean reversion principle in finance and confidence weighted online learning technique in machine learning, …

Asymptotic Theory For Zero Energy Functionals With Nonparametric Regression Applications, Qiying Wang, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

A local limit theorem is given for the sample mean of a zero energy function of a nonstationary time series involving twin numerical sequences that pass to infinity. The result is applicable in certain nonparametric kernel density estimation and regression problems where the relevant quantities are functions of both sample size and bandwidth. An interesting outcome of the theory in nonparametric regression is that the linear term is eliminated from the asymptotic bias. In consequence and in contrast to the stationary case, the Nadaraya-Watson estimator has the same limit distribution (to the second order including bias) as the local linear …

Efficient Topological Olap On Information Networks, Qiang Qu, Feida Zhu, Xifeng Yan, Jiawei Han, Philip Yu, Hongyan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a framework for efficient OLAP on information networks with a focus on the most interesting kind, the topological OLAP (called “T-OLAP”), which incurs topological changes in the underlying networks. T-OLAP operations generate new networks from the original ones by rolling up a subset of nodes chosen by certain constraint criteria. The key challenge is to efficiently compute measures for the newly generated networks and handle user queries with varied constraints. Two effective computational techniques, T-Distributiveness and T-Monotonicity are proposed to achieve efficient query processing and cube materialization. We also provide a T-OLAP query processing framework into which these …

Formulaic Writing Advice: A False Panacea, James Edward Martin

Research Collection Centre for English Communication

Over the past decade, as the long institutionalized process writing pedagogy has been increasingly questioned, many teachers have found it a challenge to create viable classroom teaching philosophies and practices. As Richard Fulkerson (2005) has noted, there is currently a wide lack of consensus about how to teach writing. In this environment, it is not surprising that teachers sometimes tend to rely on commonsensical formulae to ground their instruction. In fact, this tendency toward formulaic teaching has been common in the field of writing instruction for a very long time, although it may have taken different forms. To give an …

Pairwise Correlations, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal, Qing Tong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Pairwise stock correlations increase by 27% on average when stock returns are negative. It is trading activity in small stocks that leads to higher correlations when returns are negative. We provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that co-ordinated selling by retail investors drives this asymmetry in correlations. The co-ordinated selling activity by retail investors is triggered by negative market returns.

Calibrating Mba Job Preferences For The 21st Century, David B. Montgomery, Catherine A. Ramus

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Our research studies what MBAs in the 21st century care about during their job searches. We update the MBA job preference literature by using adaptive conjoint analysis to calibrate the relative importance of a variety of job factors found in previous research in disparate fields (management, applied psychology, corporate social performance, ethics, and marketing). Our results show the relative importance of organizational reputation related to caring for employees, ethical products/practices, and social and environmental responsibility, compared to factors such as financial package, job challenge, etc., to a sample of 759 MBAs graduating from 11 business schools–8 in North America and …

The Effects Of Decision Aid Structural Restrictiveness On Decision-Making Outcomes, Poh Sun Seow

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Decision aids are often designed to direct decision-makers' attention to potential problems or solutions prompted by the decision aid; but in most instances, it is impossible to prompt all possible issues that should be considered in making a decision. Decision aids can induce decision-making biases whereby users focus only on the issues identified by the decision aid and fail to adequately consider other issues that are not identified by the decision aid. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether restricting how users interact with computerized decision aids affects their performance by limiting their ability to consider other possible …

Do Management Eps Forecasts Allow Returns To Reflect Future Earnings? Implications For The Continuation Of Management’S Quarterly Earnings Guidance, Jong-Hag Choi, Linda Myers, Yoonseok Zang, Dave Ziebart

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using 18,253 firm-year observations from 1998 through 2003, we build on literature suggesting that more informative disclosures allow returns to better reflect future earnings, and test whether management earnings per share forecasts and their characteristics influence the future earnings response coefficient (FERC). We find that FERCs are greater for forecasting firms and when forecasts are more frequent or precise. We suggest that more frequent and more precise forecasts assist investors in better predicting future earnings. Importantly, we find that quarterly and short-term forecasts incrementally increase the association between returns and future earnings beyond annual and long-term forecasts; thus, even short-term, …

Strongly Secure Certificateless Key Exchange Without Pairing, Guomin Yang, Chik How Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In certificateless cryptography, a user secret key is derived from two partial secrets: one is the identity-based secret key (corresponding to the user identity) generated by a Key Generation Center (KGC), and the other is the user selfgenerated secret key (corresponding to a user self-generated and uncertified public key). Two types of adversaries are considered for certificateless cryptography: a Type-I adversary who can replace the user self-generated public key (in transmission or in a public directory), and a Type-II adversary who is an honest-but-curious KGC. In this paper, we present a formal study on certificateless key exchange (CLKE). We show …

Certificateless Public Key Encryption: A New Generic Construction And Two Pairing-Free Schemes, Guomin Yang, Chik How Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The certificateless encryption (CLE) scheme proposed by Baek, Safavi-Naini and Susilo is computation-friendly since it does not require any pairing operation. Unfortunately, an error was later discovered in their security proof and so far the provable security of the scheme remains unknown. Recently, Fiore, Gennaro and Smart showed a generic way (referred to as the FGS transformation) to transform identity-based key agreement protocols to certificateless key encapsulation mechanisms (CL-KEMs). As a typical example, they showed that the pairing-free CL-KEM underlying Baek et al.’s CLE can be “generated” by applying their transformation to the Fiore–Gennaro (FG) identity-based key agreement (IB-KA) protocol.In …