Business Commons^™

How You Look Is Who You Are: The Appearance Reveals Character Lay Theory Increases Support For Facial Profiling, Shilpa Madan, Krishna Savani, Gita Venkataramani Johar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

People are excessively confident that they can judge others’ characteristics from their appearance. This research identifies a novel antecedent of this phenomenon. Ten studies (N = 2,967, 4 preregistered) find that the more people believe that appearance reveals character, the more confident they are in their appearance-based judgments, and therefore, the more they support the use of facial profiling technologies in law enforcement, education, and business. Specifically, people who believe that appearance reveals character support the use of facial profiling in general (Studies 1a and 1b), and even when they themselves are the target of profiling (Studies 1c and 1d). …

New-Media Advertising And Retail Platform Openness, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We recently have witnessed two important trends in online retailing: the advent of new media (e.g., social media and search engines) makes advertising affordable for small sellers, and large online retailers (e.g., Amazon and JD.com) opening their platforms to allow even direct competitors to sell on their platforms. We examine how new-media advertising affects retail platform openness. We develop a game-theoretic model in which a leading retailer, who has both valuation and awareness advantages, and a third-party seller, who sells an identical product, engage in price competition. We find that the availability of relatively low-cost advertising through new media plays …

Space Tourism By 2024 A Growing Possibility In China, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Developments this year have turbocharged the race to be the first to launch paying customers into space

Play, Not Pay. Learn Languages The Duolingo Way, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

A Carnegie Mellon University Professor, who is also the creator of CAPTCHA and RECAPTCHA, wants to give everyone equal access to education through free lessons on a mobile app. He is Luis von Ahn

Can You "Die" In Real Life If The Metaverse Bans You?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Four important elements are required in order for the metaverse to become a decentralised creators’ economy

Spacs: Is It For Real Estate?, Melvyn Teo, Ronald Tan, Indran Thana, Yin Mei Lock

Perspectives@SMU

SPACs are gaining popularity but investors should do their homework

The Effects Of Recommender System On Sales Promotion Of High-Value Products: Evidence From A Field Experiment In The Real Estate Industry, Lian Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Real estate sales industry in China has long suffered the problem of inefficient matching of customers to projects. Inspired by the design of recommender systems, which have been widely used in the online retail industry, and are shown to facility customer-product matching and improve sales, we apply this system to the real estate sales industry using a novel approach. Instead of recommending products to customers, we suggest the best potential customers to salespeople with whom they will conduct sales with. Using city-wide sales data from the largest real estate sales company in China, we first develop a recommend system based …

The Industry Expertise Of Sell-Side Equity Analysts, Matthew Louis Dearth

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Institutional investors, the most important consumer of analyst research, consistently rank industry knowledge as the most important attribute of analysts. Despite this, little is known about how investors measure industry knowledge since analyst output which can be evaluated objectively is usually associated with firm-level outcomes such as earnings forecasts or price targets. Comprehensive data are recently available for analyst forecasts of key performance indicators (“KPIs”), firm-performance metrics specific to a particular industry. Whereas reactions to earnings forecasts and other firm-level outputs only inform us about analyst skill in firm-level predictions, stock-price reactions to forecast revisions of industryspecific KPIs can proxy …

Do Managers Learn From Analyst Participation In Conference Calls?, Amanda Aw Zhi Xin Yong, Young Jun Cho, Holly I. Yang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

While research finds that conference calls are informative to the market and analysts, they can also be informative to managers as analysts’ questions can provide a feedback effect. Using a sample of conference call transcripts from 2002 to 2018, we find that greater analyst participation, as measured by the number of words spoken by analysts relative to the number of words spoken by managers during conference calls, is associated with higher accuracy in managers’ subsequent earnings forecasts. Cross-sectional tests show that this positive association is more pronounced when managers use more uncertain words in conference calls, when analysts use a …

Support For Increasing Low-Wage Workers’ Compensation: The Role Of Fixed-Growth Mindsets About Intelligence, Shilpa Madan, Anyi Ma, Neeraj Pandey, Aneeta Rattan, Krishna Savani

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Approximately 44% of U.S. workers are low-wage workers. Recent years have witnessed a raging debate about whether to raise their minimum wages. Why do some decision-makers support raising wages and others do not? Ten studies (four preregistered) examined people’s beliefs about the malleability of intelligence as a key antecedent. The more U.S. human resource managers (Study 1) and Indian business owners (Study 2) believed that people’s intelligence can grow (i.e., had a growth mindset), the more they supported increasing low-wage workers’ compensation. In key U.S. swing states (Study 3a), and a nationally representative sample (Study 3b), residents with a more …

Social Media Influencers In Crisis: Providing Counsel On Instagram, Pang, A., Debbie Lee, Gindelin Low, Valerie Hum

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Increasingly, organizations are harnessing social media influencers (SMIs) as third-party advocates or key opinion leaders (KOLs). Consumers view them as knowledgeable sources of information (Tuten & Solomon, 2017). In the United States, the Kardashians are used by a number of organizations to promote their products. Yang (2019) noted that while Western influencers are mostly video bloggers on Instagram or YouTube, Chinese KOLs have multiple channels, including social media platforms WeChat and Weibo, social networking sites Douban or TikTok. Figures from 2016 point to it as a US$8.6 billion industry in China (Yang, 2019).

Augmented Reality In Retail And Its Impact On Sales, Yong Chin Tan, Sandeep R. Chandukala, Srinivas K. Reddy

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The rise of Augmented Reality (AR) technology presents marketers with promising opportunities to engage customers and transform their brand experience. While firms are keen to invest in AR, research documenting its tangible impact in real-world contexts is sparse. In this article, the authors outline four broad uses of the technology in retail settings. Next, they focus specifically on the use of AR to facilitate product evaluation prior to purchase, and empirically investigate its impact on sales in online retail. Using data obtained from an international cosmetics retailer, they find that AR usage on the retailer’s mobile app is associated with …

What Does Homophily Do? A Review Of The Consequences Of Homophily, Gokhan Ertug, Julia Brennecke, Balaza Kovacs, Tengjian Zou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Understanding the consequences of homophily, which is among the most widely observed social phenomena, is important, with implications for management theory and practice. Therefore, we review management research on the consequences of homophily. As the consequences of homophily have been studied at the individual, dyad, team, organizational, and macro levels, we structure our review accordingly. We highlight findings that are consistent and contradictory, as well as those that point to boundary conditions or moderators. In conducting our review, we also derive implications for management research from insights gained by research in other disciplines on this topic. We raise specific issues …

Developing Talent Through Work-Integrated Learning, Poh Sun Seow, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.

Postmaterialism And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Yujia Cui, Jiwei Wang, Kangtao Ye

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper explores how postmaterialism culture influences corporate tax avoidance behavior. Using a proprietary dataset of China tax audits, we find that firms owned by investors from countries with higher postmaterialism values are less likely to engage in tax avoidance behavior in China. In addition, we find some evidence that the negative association between postmaterialism and tax avoidance is more pronounced when tax enforcement is stronger, indicating that national culture and formal institutions act as complements. To check the external validity of our main results, we further use a cross-country sample from 21 countries over 22 years. The evidence from …

A Research On The Innovative Performance Of Clustering Enterprises In Industrial Parks: Evidence From Shenzhen, China, Jiangong Bai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

How about the innovation performance of enterprises clustered in the industrial parks? This is the core question of this study. Based on the thinking and evolution of the question, this study will focus on the impact of industrial agglomeration on enterprise innovation performance with enterprise relations and informal institution as intermediate variables.

In this study, Shenzhen, as a city of innovation, is selected as the research area where sample parks and enterprises can be investigated to obtain data. This study constructs and measures the strength of informal institution and enterprise innovation performance through grounded theory and fuzzy matter-element method, evaluates …

Financial Capacity And The Demand For Audit Quality, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald J. Lobo, Pingui Rao, Heng Yue

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Prior research documents that financial capacity could be positively or negatively associated with the demand for audit quality. We re-examine this relation using changes in local real estate prices as exogenous shocks to corporate financial capacity. Using auditor size, auditor industry specialisation, and auditor fees as measures of audit quality, we find robust evidence that an increase (decrease) in financial capacity significantly reduces (increases) the demand for audit quality, and that this relation is more pronounced when firms are more financially constrained, when external monitoring by institutional investors and financial analysts is weaker, and when there is more negative news …

Audit Adjustments Matter: What They Reveal About Companies' Financial Reporting, Themin Suwardy, Chu Yeong Lim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study investigates the characteristics, nature and extent of proposed audit adjustments to the financial statements of listed companies in Singapore. Data was gathered from the 2018 to 2020 financial statements of 412 companies, along with views of close to 280 audit committee chairs and heads of finance (or similar designations) on the effectiveness of their companies’ finance function.

Microfoundations Of Dynamic Managerial Capabilities: A Personality Perspective, Alan Jiun Haw Tea

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Research in dynamic capabilities (Teece 2007) looks at how organizations derive and potentially sustain competitive advantage by dynamically making sense of opportunities, marshalling and manipulating assets and resources in response to these opportunities (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000; Teece, 2007). The study of dynamic managerial capabilities is concerned with the microfoundations – attendant attributes as it were – that underpin managers’ ability to effectively participate in the dynamic capabilities of sensing, seizing and reconfiguring (Helfat & Martin, 2015b; Helfat & Peteraf, 2015). Apart from the predominant cognitive account of microfoundations, there remains an under-theorized and underresearched gap in the field of …

Social New Retailing Business Model And Its Applicable Regulatory Pattern, Rui Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the booming development of mobile Internet in China, social platforms have unlocked new channels for commodity supply chain and retailing and promoted business model innovation. Online social networking has fundamentally changed the way the entire society communicates. Social networking is no longer constrained by space, social platforms have become a stage for many ordinary people to showcase themselves, and the popularity of mobile payment has made mobile phones the wallets of Chinese residents as well. The innovative contents and interaction styles delivered by social software have triggered a qualitative change in the efficiency of everyone's communication and interaction, making …

Outsourcing Climate Change, Rui Dai, Rui Duan, Hao Liang, Lilian Ng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines whether and how firms combat climate change. Our study provides robust evidence that firms outsource part of their carbon emissions to foreign suppliers and shows how internal and external stakeholders significantly shape firms' environmental policies. Furthermore, firms tend to seek a foreign supplier and decrease their emission abatement efforts as pressure to reduce domestic emissions intensifies. These firms are also less incentivized to develop green technologies. Finally, we find that outsourcing emissions has real and economic consequences, with investors demanding a higher carbon premium for their exposures to carbon risks associated with increased outsourced emissions.

Killing The Cat? A Review Of Curiosity At Work, Filip Lievens, Spencer H. Harrison, Patrick Mussel, Jordan A. Litman

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper focuses on the emergent importance of curiosity at work for individuals and organizations by reviewing management research on curiosity at work. We start by leveraging prior reviews on early and contemporary foundations of the curiosity construct in the larger psychological literature, with a focus on definitional clarity, dimensionality, and differences with other constructs in its nomological network. Next, we review different streams of management research on curiosity at work (i.e., broad generative and nongenerative effects, curiosity as a catalyst for personal action, curiosity as a catalyst for interpersonal action, curiosity as a catalyst for leadership, curiosity as an …

Forecasting Equity Index Volatility By Measuring The Linkage Among Component Stocks, Yue Qiu, Tian Xie, Jun Yu, Qiankun Zhou

Research Collection School Of Economics

The linkage among the realized volatilities of component stocks is important when modeling and forecasting the relevant index volatility. In this article, the linkage is measured via an extended Common Correlated Effects (CCEs) approach under a panel heterogeneous autoregression model where unobserved common factors in errors are assumed. Consistency of the CCE estimator is obtained. The common factors are extracted using the principal component analysis. Empirical studies show that realized volatility models exploiting the linkage effects lead to significantly better out-of-sample forecast performance, for example, an up to 32% increase in the pseudo R2. We also conduct various forecasting exercises …

What Drives Companies To Do Good? A “Universal” Ordering Of Corporate Social Responsibility Motivation, Alwyn Lim, Shawn Pope

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The classic question of why companies do corporate social responsibility (CSR) is central to much theoretical, regression-based, and experimental research. Guiding research into this question is a tripartite schema of normative, instrumental, and political CSR motivations that has become increasingly established in the CSR literature. This paper challenges the schema’s status as a typology of equally plausible alternatives through an integration and analysis of a worldwide literature of 120 existing academic surveys on CSR motivation. Rather, the paper reformulates the schema into a surveyed ordering of CSR motivations that might be called “universal” in having remarkable stability across time periods, …

Producing Industrial Pigs In Southwestern China: The Rise Of Contract Farming As A Coevolutionary Process, Forrest Qian Zhang, Hongping Zeng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The literature on contract farming (CF) has to date focused on how outside capital uses CF to vertically integrate non-capitalist producers into agro-industrial value chains. We argue that in places where multiple dynamics of capitalist growth co-exist, CF relationships can also emerge between different types of capitalist producers that are already in capitalist production using other organizational forms. In this situation, the well-studied drivers that fuel the spread of CF become less consequential; the emergence of CF is instead more contingent on the complex interactions between producers and the specific conditions and events in the local environment. We conceptualize the …

Why Companies Practice Corporate Social Responsibility, Shawn Pope, Alwyn Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The article discussed why companies practice corporate social responsibility (CSR) and their meta-analysis of 200 surveys over 20 years found that CSR is often embraced as a “halo” strategy.

A Comparison Between The Eu Green Taxonomy And South Africa’S Green Taxonomy, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Andreas G. F. Hoepner, Anh Vu

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Both South Africa and the European Union have introduced a common language and a clear definition of what is ‘sustainable’ through a taxonomy, a classification of environmentally sustainable economic activities, at the core of their sustainable finance ecosystem. Sustainable finance taxonomies provide transparency on what can be considered green and, hence, help investors, public authorities and policy makers make informed decisions, avoid green washing, and scale up sustainable investment. The purpose of the present report is to provide a comparison between the EU Taxonomy Regulation1 , including the respective EU Climate Delegated Act 2 and South Africa’s Green Finance Taxonomy3 …

Impact Investing Via Affiliation With Academia, Ngos, Or Other Collaborations?, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Andreas G. F. Hoepnner, Yanan. Lin, Fabiola Schneider

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

While ESG investing has become mainstream, impact investment has yet to be institutionalised and legitimized. We investigate how impact investment firms claim legitimacy compared to their ESG peers. Impact investment is still a nascent field and suffers from a heavier burden of proof. Legitimacy has been recognised as a strategy to overcome the liability of newness. Combining private market data with statements made by investment firms on their websites we investigate how they claim legitimacy. We find that impact investment firms are more likely to claim to be involved in partnerships, specifically with academia and corporations than their ESG peers. …

Charitable Organizations In Singapore: From Clan Based To State Facilitated Endeavors, Hang Wu Tang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Singapore, with a five million population, has a vibrant charitable sector with over 2000 registered charities attracting approximately USD$2.18 billion in annual donations. How did Singapore’s charitable sector achieve its current level when it has been, in the past, segregated along mainly religious, race and clan-based communities? This paper explores this question by piecing together the current ecosystem, regulatory and tax infrastructure which facilitates the charitable sector in Singapore. Central to the development of the charitable sector has been the Singapore government’s role of being a gatekeeper, regulator and enabler of charities. In analysing the government’s role in the charitable …

A Bubble Of Protection: Examining Dispositional Optimism As A Psychological Buffer Of The Deleterious Association Between Negative Work-Family Spillover And Psychological Health, Sean T. H. Lee, Bryan K. C. Choy, Jose C. Yong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Demands and stressors from work increasingly encroach upon people’s family lives in modern settings, resulting in poorer familial relationships and impaired psychological health. The current study proposed and examined dispositional optimism as a potential psychological buffer of the deleterious impact of negative work-to-family spillover (WFS) on psychological health. Based on a sample of employed midlife adults in the United States (N = 1,252) drawn from a large and nationally representative dataset, MIDUS 3, we found that dispositional optimism significantly moderated the relationship between negative WFS and subjective well-being, even after controlling for a variety of potential confounds. However, this moderation …