Digital Commons Network^™

Sequential Decision Learning For Social Good And Fairness, Dexun Li

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Sequential decision learning is one of the key research areas in artificial intelligence. Typically, a sequence of events is observed through a transformation that introduces uncertainty into the observations and based on these observations, the recognition process produces a hypothesis of the underlying events. This learning process is characterized by maximizing the sum of the reward signals. However, many real-life problems are inherently constrained by limited resources. Besides, when the learning algorithms are used to inform decisions involving human beings (e.g., Security and justice, health intervention, etc), they may inherit the potential, pre-existing bias in the dataset and exhibit similar …

Igniting Creativity In An Organisational Rainforest, Reddi Kotha, Lipika Bhattacharya, Ravi Arora

Asian Management Insights

Tata Group’s quest for Open Innovation.

1. Open Innovation advocates collaborative relationships, emphasising a dual-flow approach that integrates the best ideas within and outside of a firm.

2. Tata Group’s implementation of the Open Innovation model has created a conducive environment for innovation, enabling cross-boundary idea exchanges and establishing strategic partnerships with diverse stakeholders.

3. ‘Seekers’ and ‘ideators’ build a community-driven Open Innovation model that sustains a supportive ecosystem and innovation across a decentralised conglomerate like Tata Group.

Driving Success With Data, Aaron Tan, Singapore Management University

Asian Management Insights

Aaron Tan leveraged his computer science education with venture capital experience to build a unicorn.

Whether In The Classroom Or The Marketplace, There’S No Perfect Formula For Innovation And Entrepreneurship, Havovi Joshi

Asian Management Insights

Successful innovation is never easy, and the fine line between creating the next tech unicorn and the next failed start-up often lies in the founders’ capacity to learn from both their successes and setbacks.

Innovating Today To Build A Sustainable Tomorrow, Daryl Ng

Asian Management Insights

Daryl Ng, Deputy Chairman of Hong Kong-based real estate property developer Sino Group, speaks about his ideas and ideals on the built environment, sustainability, and how business and innovation can be a force for good.

Reeling In The Slack: An Integrative Review To Reinstate Slack As A Central Theoretical Construct For Management Research, Matthew P. Mount, Gokhan Ertug, Korcan Kavusan, Gerard George, Tengjian Zou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Slack is a prominent construct in management research, shown to be relevant for a wide range of phenomena. Yet, despite slack’s prominence and breadth of application, our review reveals a lack of clarity and consistency in the categorization, theorizing, and measurement of various types and forms of slack. This has led to differences in the characterization and treatment of seemingly identical kinds of slack, which prevents the full exploitation of the conceptual depth of the slack construct and thus the creation of robust knowledge about slack resources. Based on a review of 229 studies which explicitly theorized about slack, we …

Perceived Context Typicality And Beliefs In The Generalizability Of Management Research Findings, Przemyslaw Hensel, Adam Tatarynowicz

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite growing calls for a greater internationalization of management research, the discipline still struggles with the challenge of integrating diverse national contexts. While recent decades have seen a change toward a more equitable treatment of all national contexts, the belief that research conducted outside the United States is less generalizable remains strong. In this research note, we explore the general perceptions of what is considered a “typical” study context by associating them with authors' variable tendencies to report threats to external validity. Using a sample of 400 papers from seven top-tier management journals, we find that research based on non-US …

Price Discovery On Decentralized Exchanges, Agostino Capponi, Ruizhe Jia, Shihao Yu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) allow traders to express their willingness to pay for quick execution through a public priority fee bidding mechanism. This influences the trading strategy of informed traders and creates a distinct price discovery process on DEXs compared to centralized exchanges. We present empirical evidence that high-fee DEX trades contain more private information. Informed traders bid high fees not only to avoid execution risk from blockchain congestion, but also to compete for execution priority. Using a dataset of Ethereum mempool orders, we demonstrate that informed traders employ a ``jump bidding'' strategy, placing high initial bids to deter potential competitors.

Locking In Overseas Buyers Amid Geopolitical Conflicts, Di Fan, Pengcheng Ma, Lin Cui, Daphne W. Yiu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Geopolitical conflicts, particularly economic ones, introduce significant uncertainties into the global supply chain. The impact of these conflicts on cross-border buyer-supplier transactions remains underexplored, as does the capability of global suppliers to mitigate such risks by locking in their foreign buyers. Employing a combined perspective of resource dependence theory and transaction cost economics, we examine a natural experiment to investigate the effects of the 2018 U.S.-China trade war on the transactional relationships between Chinese suppliers and their U.S. buyers. Our study reveals that the trade war generally adversely affected these buyer-supplier transactional relationships, leading to a negative abnormal transaction value …

Green Bond Premiums In The Asia-Pacific And European Markets, Parath Wongaree, Chiyachantana N. Chiraphol, Kuan Yong David Ding, Wasin Siwasarit

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine green bond premiums in the primary and secondary bond markets in the Asia-Pacific and Europe. In both regions, green bond yields are significantly lower than those of conventional bonds in the primary market, indicating that a green bond premium exists. Asia-Pacific investors in the secondary market are more willing to accept lower yields than European ones. We find that green bonds have a lower risk than conventional bonds. Investment grade issuers, financial sector issuers, and local currency green bonds are associated with lower yields due to their stronger reputation, higher credit ratings, and absence of foreign exchange risk.

Business Model Choice For Heavy Equipment Manufacturer, Philippe Blaettchen, Niyazi Taneri, Sameer Hasija

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Technological advances enable new business models for heavy equipment manufacturers wherein customers access equipment without ownership. We seek to understand the profitability and environmental performance of different emerging business models in light of salient economic and operational factors. We develop a game-theoretic model to identify the optimal choice between a traditional ownership-based business model and two access-based models: servicization and peer-to-peer sharing. After-sales services, equipment characteristics, usage environments, and fuel prices affect this choice. We also provide a novel framework to analyze business models’ environmental impact, which incorporates trade-offs between economic value and environmental costs and shows that all models …

The Responsible Research In Business And Management (Rrbm) Community: Responsible Management Education And Impactful Research, Howard Thomas

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Recently there has been a noticeable ‘turning point’ in the thinking of business school leaders and their stakeholders about the impact, purpose and value of business schools in society. Evidence from faculty, students and professional organisations, such as the Aspen Institute surveys in the United States of America (US) and the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) manifesto on the future of management education, clearly suggests that there should be a much greater focus on tackling pressing societal issues, including sustainability (e.g., the UN Sustainable Development Goals), inequality, and social and financial inclusion. More balanced and holistic models of management …

Foreword, Pey Woan Lee

Singapore Law Journal (Lexicon)

No abstract provided.

Reinforcement Learning For Strategic Airport Slot Scheduling: Analysis Of State Observations And Reward Designs, Anh Nguyen-Duy, Duc-Thinh Pham, Jian-Yi Lye, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the NP-hard nature, the strategic airport slot scheduling problem is calling for exploring sub-optimal approaches, such as heuristics and learning-based approaches. Moreover, the continuous increase in air traffic demand requires approaches that can work well in new scenarios. While heuristics rely on a fixed set of rules, which limits the ability to explore new solutions, Reinforcement Learning offers a versatile framework to automate the search and generalize to unseen scenarios. Finding a suitable state observation and reward structure design is essential in using Reinforcement Learning. In this paper, we investigate the impact of providing the Reinforcement Learning agent …

Learning Topological Representations With Bidirectional Graph Attention Network For Solving Job Shop Scheduling Problem, Cong Zhang, Zhiguang Cao, Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song, Jing Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing learning-based methods for solving job shop scheduling problems (JSSP) usually use off-the-shelf GNN models tailored to undirected graphs and neglect the rich and meaningful topological structures of disjunctive graphs (DGs). This paper proposes the topology-aware bidirectional graph attention network (TBGAT), a novel GNN architecture based on the attention mechanism, to embed the DG for solving JSSP in a local search framework. Specifically, TBGAT embeds the DG from a forward and a backward view, respectively, where the messages are propagated by following the different topologies of the views and aggregated via graph attention. Then, we propose a novel operator based …

Mvmoe: Multi-Task Vehicle Routing Solver With Mixture-Of-Experts, Jianan Zhou, Zhiguang Cao, Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song, Yining Ma, Jie Zhang, Chi Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning to solve vehicle routing problems (VRPs) has garnered much attention. However, most neural solvers are only structured and trained independently on a specific problem, making them less generic and practical. In this paper, we aim to develop a unified neural solver that can cope with a range of VRP variants simultaneously. Specifically, we propose a multi-task vehicle routing solver with mixture-of-experts (MVMoE), which greatly enhances the model capacity without a proportional increase in computation. We further develop a hierarchical gating mechanism for the MVMoE, delivering a good trade-off between empirical performance and computational complexity. Experimentally, our method significantly promotes …

Unveiling The Dynamics Of Crisis Events: Sentiment And Emotion Analysis Via Multi-Task Learning With Attention Mechanism And Subject-Based Intent Prediction, Phyo Yi Win Myint, Siaw Ling Lo, Yuhao Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the age of rapid internet expansion, social media platforms like Twitter have become crucial for sharing information, expressing emotions, and revealing intentions during crisis situations. They offer crisis responders a means to assess public sentiment, attitudes, intentions, and emotional shifts by monitoring crisis-related tweets. To enhance sentiment and emotion classification, we adopt a transformer-based multi-task learning (MTL) approach with attention mechanism, enabling simultaneous handling of both tasks, and capitalizing on task interdependencies. Incorporating attention mechanism allows the model to concentrate on important words that strongly convey sentiment and emotion. We compare three baseline models, and our findings show that …

How People Prompt Generative Ai To Create Interactive Vr Scenes, Setareh Aghel Manesh, Tianyi Zhang, Yuki Onishi, Kotaro Hara, Scott Bateman, Jiannan Li, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Generative AI tools can provide people with the ability to create virtual environments and scenes with natural language prompts. Yet, how people will formulate such prompts is unclear---particularly when they inhabit the environment that they are designing. For instance, it is likely that a person might say, "Put a chair here,'' while pointing at a location. If such linguistic and embodied features are common to people's prompts, we need to tune models to accommodate them. In this work, we present a Wizard of Oz elicitation study with 22 participants, where we studied people's implicit expectations when verbally prompting such programming …

The Information Content Of Financial Statement Fraud Risk: An Ensemble Learning Approach, Wei Duan, Nan Hu, Fujing Xue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study aims to assess the financial statement fraud risk ex ante and empirically explore its information content to help improve decision-making and daily operations. We propose an ex-ante fraud risk index by adopting an ensemble learning approach and a theoretically grounded framework. Our ensemble learning model systematically examines the fraud process and deals effectively with the unique challenges in the financial fraud setting, which yields superior prediction performance. More importantly, we empirically examine the information content of our estimated ex-ante fraud risk from the perspective of operational efficiency. Our empirical results find that the estimated ex-ante fraud risk is …

Topic Modeling On Document Networks With Dirichlet Optimal Transport Barycenter (Extended Abstract), Ce Zhang, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Texts are often interconnected in a network structure, e.g., academic papers via citations. On the one hand, though Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising ability to derive effective embeddings for networked documents, they do not assume latent topics, resulting in uninterpretahle embeddings. On the other hand, topic models can infer interpretable document representations. However, most topic models focus on plain text and fail to leverage network structure across documents. In this paper, we propose a GNN-based topic model that both captures network connection and derives semantically interpretable text representations. For network modeling, we build our model with Optimal Transport …

Key Cooperative Attribute-Based Encryption, Luqi Huang, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Fuchun Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is an important technology in building access control systems with precise control and scalability. In an ABE system, there exists a private key generator (PKG) that issues all private keys. The PKG has a significant drawback referred to as the huge key management burden in large-scale user systems. To overcome this limitation, we propose a more flexible system that offers users the choice to utilize decryption keys either from the PKG or from trusted users to decrypt the ciphertext, reducing the workload of the PKG. Unfortunately, users are restricted to only receiving private keys from the PKG …

Certified Robust Accuracy Of Neural Networks Are Bounded Due To Bayes Errors, Ruihan Zhang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adversarial examples pose a security threat to many critical systems built on neural networks. While certified training improves robustness, it also decreases accuracy noticeably. Despite various proposals for addressing this issue, the significant accuracy drop remains. More importantly, it is not clear whether there is a certain fundamental limit on achieving robustness whilst maintaining accuracy. In this work, we offer a novel perspective based on Bayes errors. By adopting Bayes error to robustness analysis, we investigate the limit of certified robust accuracy, taking into account data distribution uncertainties. We first show that the accuracy inevitably decreases in the pursuit of …

Is There A Space In Landslide Susceptibility Modelling: A Case Study Of Valtellina Valley, Northern Italy, Min Naing Khant, Mei Yi Victoria Grace Ann, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Landslides pose significant and ever-threatening risks to human life and infrastructure worldwide. Landslide susceptibility modelling is an emerging field of research seeking to determine contributing factors of these events. Yet, previous studies rarely explored the spatial variation of different landslide factors. Hence, this study aims to demonstrate the potential contribution of spatial nonstationarity in landslide susceptibility modelling using Global Logistic Regression (GLR) and Geographically Weighted Logistic Regression (GWLR). The second objective of this study is to demonstrate the important role of data preparation, data sampling, variable sensing, and variable selections in landslide susceptibility modelling. Using Valtellina Valley in Northern Italy …

Supplier-Complementor Alliances: Enhancing Value Creation For The Ecosystem, Liang Chen

Asian Management Insights

1. Suppliers can better protect their positions in an ecosystem by building stronger relationships with ‘complementors’, which are businesses that offer products or services that enhance the value of the core product. Such supplier-complementor alliances (SCAs) can enhance the value of the entire ecosystem, including that of the leader.

2. SCAs such as Nvidia-Adobe drive innovation by encouraging suppliers to develop products that cater to broader needs beyond the ecosystem leader’s specific demands. This strategic alignment between suppliers and complementors also ensures that suppliers build a more resilient and diversified business model.

3. SCAs present both opportunities and challenges within …

Entrepreneurial (Re)Vision, Patricia Lui, Jovina Ang, Lipika Bhattacharya

Asian Management Insights

Transforming DMK footwear for the next-gen market.

The Growth Of Southeast Asia’S Msmes, Shoeb Kagda

Asian Management Insights

Funding winter presents opportunities to reboot for the future.

Setting Up The Right Guardrails, Vijaya Sunder, Ram Nidumolu, Milind Sohoni, Siddhartha Modukuri

Asian Management Insights

1. Emerging economies need public-private partnerships (PPPs) to deliver much-needed large-scale infrastructural projects.

2. An ‘orientation precedes strategy’ approach to partnerships generates wider societal acceptance and financial viability for stakeholders.

3. The stakeholder-orientation framework improves decision-making by promoting adaptability and inclusive engagement, as illustrated by the success of India’s Hyderabad Metro Rail Project.

Cognitive Technologies, Tom Davenport

Asian Management Insights

AI and the revolution of work.

Professor Tom Davenport, the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, speaks about how companies can integrate generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into their operations while ensuring workforce adaptation and skills development.

Staging Singapore’S Cultural Economy, Buck Song Koh

Asian Management Insights

Growing and cultivating soft power is the name of the game.

Nurturing Entrepreneurship And Growing Entrepreneurs, Sun Sun Lim, Abdullah Khurshid, Dexter Ye Kai Tan, Gabrielle Lay Khim Tan

Asian Management Insights

How Southeast Asia’s universities can pave the way.

Universities in Southeast Asia:

1. Can unlock the potential of changemakers in driving economic growth through entrepreneurship education.

2. Accelerate the growth of the ASEAN start-up ecosystem by facilitating technology commercialisation, leveraging regional networks for mentorship and funding, and fostering cross-border collaborations.

3. Have birthed at least five of Southeast Asia's unicorns and are set to lead the way in producing more.