Business Commons^™

Personal Life Security, Nonmonetary Benefits And Executive Compensation : Evidence From Stand Your Ground Laws, Zixuan Zeng

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

People prefer an amenable location and companies have to pay a higher level of salary to their executives in a less livable place. Focusing on a particular aspect of livability, i.e. life security, we investigate whether life security condition in a region has an impact on CEOs’ compensation using the enactment of Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws in U.S. 26 states from 2003 to 2020 as an exogenous shock. SYG laws, which grant individuals the legal right to use lethal force in self-defense without the duty to retreat, have the potential to affect executives' perception of personal security and consequently, …

Issues On Selling Products Via Social Media Influencers, Zhenhao Li

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Recent years have witnessed an exponential growth of firms promoting and selling products via social media influencers. Although such practice has attracted a growing interest in academia, relevant studies are largely empirical, while analytical studies remain limited. To address this gap, we analytically investigate issues related to a firm's strategy of selling products via influencers in two studies.

In the first study, we develop a two-period model to investigate a firm's strategy for introducing a product via an influencer, where there may exist uncertainty in the influencer-product match. For the promotional campaign in the first period, the influencer exerts an …

Can Investor Communications Discipline Corporate Misconduct? Evidence From A Field Experiment, Chen Xu

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Corporate misconduct encompasses deceptive or fraudulent activities carried out by company members. Such misconduct can distort the accuracy of firm valuations and mislead investors. Researchers and regulators have worked diligently to understand the factors driving corporate misconduct and devise strategies to reduce its prevalence. However, causal evidence remains limited. In this study, we conduct a field experiment to address this issue and investigate potential methods for mitigating corporate misconduct. Recent studies have emphasized the role of investor communications in governance, as they improve transparency and decrease information asymmetry between managers and investors. This study investigates the disciplinary power of two …

Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Financing Problems In Online Operations, Dianyao Kang

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Collaboration between banks and online platforms for financial services can help small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) transform their actual transaction data into E-commerce credit, o§ering innovative solutions to their financing challenges. We consider an online system involving a bank, a platform, and a retailer who serves price-sensitive customers on the platform. The retailer receives a loan from the bank and pays a loan interest which is shared by the bank and the platform according to their negotiated allocation ratio. We examine two categories of scenarios to identify the optimal decisions and profit levels for the three firms involved in the …

Using Multiobjective Optimization To Solve Multimodal Optimization And Constrained Optimization Problems, Jingyu Ji

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Evolutionary computation is interdisciplinary research which has been widely incorporated in various disciplines from different research fields. As a result, it leads to somewhat different research focuses like multimodal optimization, constrained optimization, and expensive optimization. In this dissertation, we focus on multiobjective-based differential evolution in computer science which refers to computational intelligence and artificial intelligence.

Many NP-hard optimization problems are highly constrained and multimodal. The optimizer needs to handle constraints, minimize the objective function, and locate multiple global or local optimal solutions. Meanwhile, this kind of optimization problems is difficult to have a mathematically deterministic formulation, and in some cases, …

Essays On Comparative Statics For Choice Under Risk And Ambiguity, Tian Li

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contains three essays on choice under risk and ambiguity. In the first essay, we investigate the effects of changes in ambiguity aversion in a recursive smooth ambiguity aversion model. Wang and Li [Wang J. and Li J. (2020) Comparative Ambiguity Aversion in Intertemporal Decisions. J. Risk Insurance 87(1): 195-212] explore this topic under the assumption that the current payment increases the future expected utility conditional on any given ambiguity parameter, which limits the applicability of their conclusions. In this paper, we report that this assumption can be relaxed. We further show that, the comparative ambiguity aversion result provides …

Integrating Personality, Situational Ethical Cues And Proactive Ethical Behaviors : Implications For Work Performance And Well-Being, Yu Kou

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Organizations and society can receive multiple benefits from employees’ ethical conduct. Business ethics is primarily studied from a reactive perspective, such as considering how people react to situational cues about ethics through engaging in ethical or unethical behaviors. Previous theoretical and empirical evidence suggested the importance of exploring the role of personality on work behavior and performance. Based on theories of personality psychology, this study takes an active, forward-looking approach by examining how individuals’ proactive personality and conscientiousness relate to a set of proactive ethical behaviors, and how those in turn affect individuals’ performance and well-being. Integrating with the trait …

Two Essays On The Tax Consequences Of Auditor Litigation Risk : Evidence From Quasi-Natural Experiments, Felix Owusu

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, auditors have legal liability to third parties under federal securities law and state common laws, which vary in the degree of liability. Whereas auditors are liable to security traders for fraud under the federal securities law, they are liable for ordinary negligence under common law. Using a sample of company-year observations from 1982 to 2015, I examine the implications of the adoption of common law statutes on audit client tax outcomes. My thesis consists of two essays. The first one examines how the staggered adoption of these common law principles that increased third-party auditor legal liability …

Using A Literature Based Discovery Approach To Study Moderating Effects And Preventive Mechanisms Of Online Game Addiction Problems Among Gamers, Ananya Sinha Choudhury

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

This research makes use of a hypothesis generation technique known as Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) to study certain under-researched topics related to online game addiction problems in our society. This research work tries to primarily address two problems related to game addiction which have been under-studied according to the literature available on this topic. In the first problem, we try to identify certain moderating factors of massively multiplayer games which weakens the relationship between the psychological flow state and game addiction. In this data-driven approach, we studied 2829 abstracts to generate a list of keywords that suggest potential moderating factors for …

Public Sector Unions And Government Financing, Qian He

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Unions play a significant role in the U.S. public sector. Most studies focus on unions in the private sector, but their role in the public sector is much more significant. According to the latest Current Population Survey (CPS) by the U.S. Census Bureau, more than one-third of public sector employees are union members, whereas private sector union membership is around 6%. In this paper, we examine the impact of public sector unions on the financing costs of government because the cost of financing is one of the major concerns of governments.

We employ an exogenous shock induced by the Supreme …

Essays On The Consequences Of Auditor Regulatory Oversight : Evidence From Pcaob International Inspections, Solomon Wise Dodzidenu Adza

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) was created in 2002 in response to widespread perceived audit failures with the mandate to oversee and inspect all auditors of SEC-registered firms. Though the PCAOB inspection is for the benefit of US-listed firms, it also has consequences for non-US-listed firms. Using a sample of firm-year observations from 35 countries that allow PCAOB international inspections, I examine the implications of the PCAOB international inspections for non-US auditors and non-US-listed firms. The dissertation consists of two chapters. The first chapter examines the effect of the PCAOB international inspections on industry specialization for inspected non-US …

The Effects Of Online Reviews And Promotional Messages On Product Performance : Review Helpfulness And The Power Of Language, Ziru Bao

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contains two essays. For Essay One, previous studies on review helpfulness focus on what makes a review helpful and how to predict review helpfulness. In so doing, researchers hope to identify the most helpful reviews for consumers and improve the recommendation system. However, little is known about the effect of these helpful reviews on product performance. Thus, this paper investigates how helpful reviews or the helpfulness votes influence product sales. Since product sales are only available at the group (product) level, estimating the effect of helpfulness votes presents a challenging multilevel problem. This research considers both the disaggregating …

An Information-Theoretic Analysis Of Generative Adversarial Networks For Image Restoration In Physics-Based Vision, Xudong Kang

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Image restoration in physics-based vision (such as image denoising, dehazing, and deraining) are fundamental tasks in computer vision that attach great significance to the processing of visual data as well as subsequent applications in different fields. Existing methods mainly focus on exploring the physical properties and mechanisms of the imaging process, and tend to use a deconstructive idea in describing how the visual degradations (like noise, haze, and rain) are integrated with the background scenes. This idea, however, relies heavily on manually engineered features and handcrafted composition models, which can be theories only in ideal conditions or hypothetical models that …

Experimental Studies On Prosocial, Divisive And Discriminatory Behavior, Chen Zhang

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

My PhD thesis contains three experiments: two of them studying prosocial and divisive behavior, guided by Tirole’s (2021) models, and the third studying discriminatory behavior. The first study investigates how people's prosociality changes as public spheres expand. Utilizing the advancement of information technologies, states have begun to introduce social scores to rate and publicize some behaviors in social interactions. With social scores, social interactions are thus divided into a public sphere, which is publicly observable, and a private sphere, which is not. Guided by Tirole’s (2021) model, we experimentally investigate whether social scores promote cooperation in a population with repeated, …

Common Auditor And Supplier’S Performance, Lei Zhuang

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

I examine the effect of a common auditor in supply chain on supplier’s performance. A common auditor in supply chain is defined as the same audit firm that provides auditing services to both the supplier and the customer. As the common third party, the common auditor could transfer information between supplier and customer, which might benefit the performance of the supplier. I find that a common auditor can increase supplier’s ROA and this effect is driven by the reduction of supplier’s production cost. I also find that a common auditor can reduce supplier’s receivables conversion periods. This finding gives evidence …

Data Security And M&A, Yuan Sun

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Motivated by the increasing importance of data in recent business models, we examine whether data security is an important driver of mergers and acquisitions in the era of big data. To do this, we exploit the staggered adoption of laws that require mandatory disclosure of data breaches across U.S. states. Our empirical strategy exploits two sources of variations: (a) changes in the intensity of M&As in a state before and after the adoption of data breach laws, and (b) differences between industries operating with varying degrees of cyber risks. We find that the intensity and likelihood of M&As increase (decrease) …

Gender, Risk-Taking And Organization Form : Evidence From The U.S. Property-Casualty Insurance Industry, Jing Li

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, we investigate the impact of female CEOs on firm’s risk-taking for U.S. property-casualty insurance companies with differing organizational forms. We analyse the three principal organizational form types in the industry—publicly traded stocks, closely held stocks, and mutuals. Less is known about the role of female CEOs in firms with organizational forms other than publicly traded stock firms. Various ownership structures are associated with varying agency costs between owners and managers. We posit that varying firm ownership structures affect the impact of female CEOs on firm risk-taking. We do not find direct evidence of female CEOs on firm …

Effects Of Management And Media Disclosures Of Corporate Tax Evasion On Investor Judgments, Ming Wei Gabriel Chua

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

This study examines investor reactions to disclosures of corporate tax evasion by company management and the media. We were particularly interested in the issue of whether investors value corporate tax compliance from a moral perspective. We conducted an experiment in which we manipulate management disclosure strategies (no disclosure, symbolic disclosure, substantive disclosure) and the presence/absence of media disclosures in a 3 x 2 between-subjects design. Participants provided judgments of a hypothetical company’s short-term and long-term financial prospects and their willingness to maintain their investment in the company.

Media disclosure of tax evasion had a significant effect on all judgments. In …

Integrating A Liberal Arts Approach Into An Undergraduate Business Programme : Lessons From A University In Hong Kong, Richard S. Simmons, Paul Whitla

Hong Kong Institute of Business Studies Working Paper Series

Universities are under pressure to provide graduates with qualities that will enhance their long-term employability in today’s fast-changing business world. Accordingly, the integration of liberal arts into business education is nowadays becoming increasingly recognised and appreciated. However, doubts remain as to whether business education can ever be compatible with a liberal arts perspective, indeed whether business education should even take place in a liberal arts education institution.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to this debate, and perhaps help lessen these doubts, by presenting a case study showing how a liberal arts based approach has been recently infused …

Being An Employee And An Entrepreneur Simultaneously : Two Essays On Hybrid Entrepreneurs’ Wage Work And Entrepreneurial Work Outcomes, Eric Adom Asante

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the effects of venturing activities on hybrid entrepreneurs’ wage work and venture work outcomes through the development of two inter-related empirical essays. In Essay 1, I examine how different levels and congruence of hybrid entrepreneurs’ wage work and entrepreneurial identities influence their effort and subsequent performance in both wage work and entrepreneurial work roles. Specifically, I examine how wage work and entrepreneurial work effort are affected when one identity is higher than the other as well as how they are affected when both wage work and entrepreneurial identities are high versus when they are low. …

To Self-Enhance Or Self-Verify? How Choice Difficulty Influences Product Preference For Low Self-Esteem Consumer, Hoi Ching Chan

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

One of the core stones in marketing is that consumers use different products to build and manage their self-images. Traditional view in marketing suggests that consumers want to increase positivity of their self-images; therefore, they are attached to products associated with favorable user image and avoid consuming products connected with unfavorable user images. Notably, a recent paper from Stuppy and her colleagues (2020) suggested that the mentioned self-enhancing motivation should only be applicable to consumers with high self-esteem, whereas those with low self-esteem would rather pursue the self-verification motivation and prefers inferior product, symbolizing a less positive consumer image, to …

Examining The Perceived Meanings, Motivations, Benefits And Mechanisms For Creating Shared Value (Csv) By Asian Firms, Hamid Khurshid

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Creating Shared Value (CSV) is a fairly new concept that emerged in the last decade. CSV was originally conceptualized by Porter & Kramer (2011) as a “hybrid” business model that seeks to create economic value in tandem with social value creation and environmental sustainability. The notion of CSV gained traction with business practitioners worldwide and many Western/US companies now claim to have incorporated CSV within their business models. Notwithstanding the popularity of CSV among business practitioners around the world, CSV has been heavily criticized by some management and business scholars, who have expressed concerns about its novelty, theorization and lack …

State-Contingent Overconfidence : Application To Bank Loans, Sze Nam Chan

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Overconfidence (arrogance or overestimation of one’s ability) has often been viewed in the finance literature as a character trait that is stable over time. This paper, however, provides a first attempt to show that overconfidence can be state-contingent, that is, the level of overconfidence among overconfident individuals could be influenced by an external shock such as a financial crisis and a change in regulation, for example, the adoption of Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Both our experimental (based on psychological approach on over-precision) and empirical results using more than 4500 manager-year observations through controlling different personal and firm characteristics show that individual …

Transshipment Timing In Inventory Competition, Lin Zang

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

We study retailers’ preferences for transshipment timing in the presence of product substitution in overlapping markets where there is either pre-substitution transshipment (TS) or post-substitution transshipment (ST). By building a two-retailer game model, we find that when the retailer with excess inventory can dictate the transshipment price, there always exists a unique pair of equilibrium order quantities. We also find that the equilibrium order quantity in the post-substitution transshipment will always be larger than that in the pre-substitution transshipment in the symmetric case. But surprisingly, the expected profit of the post-substitution transshipment always dominates that of the pre-substitution transshipment, though …

Customer’S Operational Efficiency And Trade Credit Provision, Wai Ho Chan

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

This study examines whether the trade credit provision is affected by customers’ operational efficiency. We link the supplier firms with their major customers using the Customer Segment database in order to identify the trade credit provision for each pair of supplier-customer relationships. While suppliers have the incentive to provide trade credit to high-quality customers in order to increase market share, excess trade credit would also harm the suppliers once the customers default. Our empirical results indicate that operational efficiency and trade credit are positively associated. This finding supports the view that suppliers tend to select and provide trade credit to …

What Makes Your Movies More Engaging For Backers? A Text Analysis Of Kickstarter Projects, Shuman Liu

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular channel for entrepreneurs to raise funds from the crowd to support their startup projects. However, the percentage of crowdfunding projects that can reach their funding goals is relatively small among all crowdfunding websites. Although previous studies have examined various factors such as individual project attributes, social ties that might influence the fund-raising outcomes, the project pitches, as a key part of any crowdfunding proposal, have rarely been studied for their role in driving the crowdfunding success.

In this research, we study a corpus of 1559 movie projects from Kickstarter up to the end of …

Risk Invulnerability : The Impact Of A Desirable Background Risk, Sai Kit Hui

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

I extend the classical risk vulnerability definition proposed by Gollier and Pratt (1996) and suggest a new definition namely risk invulnerability, which is to say a desirable background risk that has a positive mean value exceeding the precautionary saving premium makes a decision maker less risk averse with respect to other independent risk. While the value function used in Milne and Robertson (1996) is comparable to the von Neumann Morgenstern utility function used in risk invulnerability, I follow the literature and show that a corporate under stochastic wealth and threat of liquidation is risk invulnerable when the wealth level of …

Credibility And Nationalism In Narrative Economics, Dong Wang

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Narratives such as news, messages and stories can affect people’s thinking and become significant factors in decision-making. Shiller (2017) uses the term “narrative economics” to describe a new economic subfield that studies how stories people tell each other affect economic fluctuations. This thesis considers the economic and political role of narratives in newspapers and social media. It consists of three chapters. Chapter 2 examines how information credibility affects the asset pricing of stocks and cryptocurrencies under news shocks. We first apply well-trained multiclassification algorithms in machine learning to analyse data drawn from newspapers and social media. Then we calculate the …

粵港澳大灣區的港資製造業經營情況、對灣區經濟貢獻與實現轉型升級發展策略顧問研究報告, China Economic Research Programme(Cerp), Lingnan University 嶺南大學中國經濟研究部

China Economic Research Programme (CERP) Research Report

本研究報告對於港資製造業這個領域的嶄新研究貢獻，主要歸結為以下幾個類別：

1. 以多項第一手數據表明，並讓香港特區政府重新認識到港資製造業在「延外發展」模式經營下對香港整體經濟佔有非常重要帶動作用、貢獻和地位；
2. 本報告通過挖掘包括國家工商總局在內的大數據方式，從而得出近年包括大灣區以至不同九個市在內的港資製造業企業數目、從業人員數目、註冊資本、營業利潤等的具體數字和變動情況；由於工商總局的註冊或登記數字的個案數比統計局的抽樣為主的統計數字更為具體，因而相關數字能夠更仔細的反映出港資製造業在大灣區內的經營情況，較具有參考價值；
3. 本報告以大數據結合問卷調查、深入訪談等方式交叉分析，互補有無，能夠發現更多港資製造業企業對大灣區的經濟貢獻具體情況，有助外界尤其是特區政府和內地相關部委了解到港資企業特別是港資製造業對整個大灣區經濟的重要性，尤其港資製造業如何對專業服務業產生帶動作用，有助社會各界重新關注振興製造業和實現製造業轉型升級的重要性，從而推出更為切合實際的具體振興方案；
4. 通過對不同企業和行業的深入訪談，可以令大家更為仔細了解港資製造業目前的經營情況、優勢所在和面對的挑戰，有助中小港資製造業企業借鑑相關經驗，從而發展壯大；
5. 這份報告的對策建議部份，內容主要針對包括內地政府、香港特區政府，以及港資製造業企業三大部分，當中具代表性和可操作性的建議，如能獲得有關方面加以關注，對促進港資製造業企業以至整個大灣區的製造業發展均有裨益。有助業界尤其兩地政府知道發展壯大港資製造業事關回應全球產業升級大趨勢，需要讓香港和灣區九市、以至整個廣東和全國的大格局在這大趨勢中去分析和綜合規劃。

Introversion And Online Word-Of-Mouth Behavior : What Roles Do Review Website Design And Product Design Play?, Shu Ting Lau

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the online review behavior of introverted customers. Introversion is a major personality trait that has been widely discussed in many personality theories. This thesis includes two essays. Essay 1 investigates how the design of an online review website can affect the willingness to do an online review of introverts. Based on the arousal theory, it is hypothesized that introverted consumers, because of their avoidance of arousal, would have a higher willingness to do online review in an environment where other users’ feedback is not allowed, but this design does not affect extroverts. These predictions are confirmed by …