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Uncertainty Can Be Fun And Motivating!, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Research reveals how not knowing the reward can motivate us to repeat our behaviour

Small Data, Small Steps: Lessons From Assessing The Investment Studio, Jiaxin Low

Research Collection Library

Singapore Management University’s (SMU) Li Ka Shing Library was renovated in 2014. During the renovation, the Investment Studio was created within the library to house high-end financial databases such as Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters (now Refinitiv). Usage of the space was assessed using quantitative and qualitative data, comparing the first academic terms across two academic years, 2017 and 2018. The data provided evidence to support anecdotal evidence and library staff’s knowledge and observation. The assessment resulted recommendations for further action. It also provided opportunity to engage with users and stakeholders of this unique space.

Essays On Anomalies In Asset Pricing, Xinrui Duan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In Chapter 1, we examine whether various anomalies can be driven by two common behavioral forces, namely, "subjective" sentiment (representing investors' subjective biased beliefs) and "objective" limited attention (representing investors' objective cognitive constraints). While sentiment explains well many anomalies that are more speculative on the short-leg, it fails to explain anomalies that are equally speculative on the long and short-leg, including momentum and post-earnings announcement drift. Market-wide attention shifts, proxied by number of news averaged across stocks, significantly attenuates underreaction-driven anomalies, beyond the effect of sentiment. Our findings suggest that increase in market-wide attention can temporarily reduce the cost of …

Women In Innovation: Challenges And Opportunities, Mengzi Jin

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Innovation and creativity are the engines of social and economic progress. What roles do women play in innovation? Emerging evidence reveals that fewer women than men enter and succeed in innovation-related fields. Tackling gender inequality at work has always been one of the grand societal challenges, however little is known about gender issues specific to innovation achievements. This dissertation attempts to explain gender gaps in the innovation and creativity context. Innovation typically involves generating multiple novel and useful ideas, selecting the most promising one for implementation, and persistently championing the idea through implementation. I theorize and unpack the gender effect …

How Ties With Family Members Influence Professionals' Creativity In Family Businesses: The Role Of Hive Effect And Trust, Rameshwari Ramachandra

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Many Asian enterprises are family businesses. In recent years, there has been a growing body of research on creativity in Asian firms, but few studies on the creativity of the professionals working in Asian family businesses. Given the importance of creativity in family businesses for their continued success, I examined how a professional’s ties to family members in a family business influenced their creativity. I proposed that the number of family members in a professional’s network would positively predict the professional’s creativity, and that this effect would be mediated by the family members’ affective and cognitive trust in the professional. …

Shared Leadership And Team Motivation: An Exploratory Study, Yufeng Chi

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Despite the importance of team innovation for organizations, the conditions that foster team innovation are still not well understood. In this dissertation, I propose a theoretical model in which the impact of shared leadership on team innovation is mediated by information sharing and team potency. I utilize a two-wave longitudinal, multi-method and multi-source research design to examine the research hypotheses. I argue that shared leadership not only improves a team’s information sharing and team potency, but also generates cognitive and motivational advantages that are conducive to innovation. In addition, I show that the relationship between shared leadership and team innovation …

Battling Counterfeits In A Massive Market: Designing And Evaluating An Id-Tag Based Solution For Electronic Product Monitoring And Controlling, Xiao Ying Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The problem of counterfeit and shoddy goods in China has been rampant and persistent one. The complexity of the Chinese market makes solving this problem extremely difficult. Three government agencies have tried to combat this problem extensively, from market entrance permission for prior-processing, sampling and inspection for in-processing, and punishment for post-processing. The responsibility division among agencies, however, created the cracks and holes in dealing with the problem. The existing government solution is too slow in response and too sparse in coverage to be effective and efficient. Anti-counterfeit labels and their derivatives are employed for counterfeit identification and prevention. Their …

Distilling Managerial Insights And Lessons From Ai Projects At Singapore's Changi Airport (Part 2), Steve Lee, Steven M. Miller

Asian Management Insights

Since 2017, Changi Airport group (CAG) has initiated a host of pilot projects that use connective and intelligent technologies to enable its move towards digital transformation and SMART Airport Vision. This has resulted in a first wave of deployment of AI and Machine Learning-enabled applications across various functions that can better sense, analyse, predict, and interact with people.

Ai Gets Real At Singapore's Changi Airport (Part 1), Steve Lee, Steven M. Miller

Asian Management Insights

Ranked as the best airport for seven consecutive years, Singapore’s Changi Airport is lauded the world over for the efficient, safe, pleasurable and seamless service it offers the millions of passengers that pass through its facilities annually. Much of Changi Airport’s success can be attributed to the organisation’s customer-oriented business focus and deeply embedded culture of service excellence, combined with a host of advanced technologies operating invisibly in the background. The framework for this technology enablement is Changi Airport Group’s (CAG’s) SMART Airport Vision—an enterprise-wide approach to connective technologies that leverages sensors, data fusion, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), …

Asian Luxury Retail Is Human, Stéphane J.G. Girod

Asian Management Insights

Digital giants such as Alibaba and Amazon, and online luxury specialists like Farfetch, Yoox and Net-a-Porter are thriving in Southeast Asia. Yet, even as online commerce sales is rising five times faster than the overall market, forecasters agree on one thing: online sales for luxury will flatten at around 25 percent of the total market by 2025.1Farfetch was bracing itself for this plateau when it clinched a partnership with Chanel in 2018. Their goal is to become the leading luxury retail operating system.

A Recipe For Success: Asia's F&B Franchising, Kek Sin Koh

Asian Management Insights

Asian food and beverage (F&B) brands are exploding in popularity all over the world. Since 1999, Asian fast food restaurants have grown by 500 percent globally, making it the single fastest-growing food category, outstripping the growth of the next four, i.e. Middle Eastern, Chicken, Pizza, and Latin.1 At the same time, there is a huge opportunity for F&B franchising in Asia Pacific—over the past decade, the sector has flourished with the entry and expansion of both international and Asian brands, and in 2016, the restaurant industry in this region was estimated to be worth some US$1.5 trillion.2 Going forward, there …

Against All Odds, William Heinecke

Asian Management Insights

William Heinecke, the founder and Chairman of Minor International, a Bangkok-based multinational company operating in hospitality, restaurants and lifestyle brands distribution, shares his journey as an American-born Thai businessman and serial entrepreneur.

Beyond The Buzzword, Ryal Wun

Asian Management Insights

According to Jen Boynton, vice president of member engagement at 3BL Media, “Corporate responsibility is simply a way for companies to take responsibility for the social and environmental impacts of their business operations.”1Looked at this way, corporate social responsibility (CSR) can, in effect, include a whole gamut of business practices and policies that make a business socially accountable—to itself, its stakeholders, and the public. These activities can range from philanthropy and environmental consciousness to ethical labour practices.

Family Togetherness, Navneet Bhatnagar

Asian Management Insights

Family-controlled businesses are the dominant form of business organisation across the world, and particularly so in many Asian countries. A major challenge that family businesses face is the lack of togetherness or cohesion among the members of the owner family, especially across generations. This often leads to confusion, differences and confl icts within the family and poses a serious threat to the sustained growth and long-term survival of the business. Lack of family togetherness also puts the founder’s legacy at risk. Breakups and splits in large business families have the potential to create macro-level disturbances, especially given their massive scale …

Managing Across Borders In Asia, Richard R. Smith, Suee Chieh Tan

Asian Management Insights

Across many countries in Asia, we are witnessing local leaders rise to the level of country leader or managing director in their home country. However, when it comes to taking on regional roles in global fi rms, many of these leaders are unable to work effectively across borders. In other words, there were some skills or factors that allowed them to be successful in one country, but were not transferable to others.

Responsible Leadership, Flocy Joseph

Asian Management Insights

An array of scandals has rocked the world in recent times, such as financial malpractices (Arthur Andersen, Lehman Brothers, the LIBOR scam), unethical practices (FIFA mismanagement), and environmental damages (Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Volkswagen emission controls). All of which the critics of capitalism are not unhappy to report and embellish in great detail. The competing goals of a quest for power, meeting ethical standards, maintaining profitability, securing dwindling resources, and adapting to global environmental change have created an increasingly complex business canvas for leaders to navigate. The acceleration of environmental and social challenges exert pressure on corporate leaders to …

Surecash: Promoting Financial Inclusion In Bangladesh, Aurobindo Ghosh, Lipika Bhattacharya

Asian Management Insights

The street scene of honking cycle rickshaws, jaywalking pedestrians and precariously tilting buses in crowded Dhaka was an easy distraction. It was December 2017 when Matteo Chiampo, an advisor to the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP),1 was writing an advisory report on the future growth strategy for SureCash, a mobile financial services (MFS) company in Bangladesh. Brainstorming for questions, and not answers, was something he had not tried before. Nevertheless, Chiampo tried to focus on the questions he had on his mind—questions that he believed would give novel and transformative insights on the way forward.

Innovation: Does Asia Need Newton Or Edison?, Rajendra K. Srivastava, Philip Zerrillo

Asian Management Insights

Ask who has contributed the most to innovation over the past five centuries and you might get very different answers. On one end, you would have to consider Sir Isaac Newton, who was one of the most influential scientists of our time. A philosopher, physicist and mathematician, Sir Newton was the leader of the scientific revolution, and his work at Cambridge University laid the groundwork for many of the world’s greatest inventions. And on the other end, you have Thomas Alva Edison, who attended school for a total of 12 weeks in his life. This self-taught inventor with nearly 1,100 …

Securing The Corporate Sustainability Advantage, Havovi Joshi

Asian Management Insights

The UN Global Compact is the largest sustainable business initiative in the world, with more than 70 local chapters that work with close to 10,000 companies, large and small, across the world. With 3,000 stakeholders, we are a true multi-stakeholder initiative. We were founded 19 years back by former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, with a view to giving the organisation a human face. So Mr. Annan put forward Ten Principles relating to UN conventions—spanning human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. These principles constitute the foundation of what we think of as corporate sustainability, and all companies that join the UN …

Profit People And Planet, Havovi Joshi

Asian Management Insights

On behalf of the Editorial Board of Asian Management Insights, its authors and readers, I would like to thank our outgoing Editor-in-Chief, Dr Philip Zerrillo, who founded the magazine and invested signifi cant efforts to advance its profi le these past five years.

Stock Price Contagion Effects Of Low-Quality Audits At The Individual Audit Partner Level, Ferdinand A. Gul, Chee Yeow Lim, Kun Wang, Yanping Xu

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We use Chinese audit partner data to show that partners associated with financial reporting fraudinduce share price declines among non-fraudulent firms audited by the same audit partners. In cross-sectionalanalyses, we find that share price declines are more pronounced when low-quality partners (LQPs) failed to issuemodified audit opinions during the period in question and when the LQPs were from one of the Top 10 audit firms.Additional analyses show that investors impose larger penalties on contagion firms when fraudulent firms are largerand the time lapse between sanction and fraud commitment is shorter. The personal characteristics of LQPs (exceptgender) do not cause a …

Disruption Risk Mitigation In Supply Chains: The Risk Exposure Index Revisited, Sarah Yini Gao, David Simchi-Levi, Chung-Piaw Teo, Zhenzhen Yan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Simchi-Levi et al. (2014, 2015a) proposed a novel approach using the Time-To-Recover (TTR) parameters to analyze the Risk Exposure Index (REI) of supply chains under disruption. This approach is able to capture the cascading effects of disruptions in the supply chains, albeit in simplified environments -- TTRs are deterministic, and at most one node in the supply chain can be disrupted. In this paper, we proposed a new method to integrate probabilistic assessment of disruption risks into the REI approach and measure supply chain resiliency by analyzing the Worst-case CVaR (WCVaR) of total lost sales under disruptions.We show that the …

Crop Planning In Sustainable Agriculture: Dynamic Farmland Allocation In The Presence Of Crop Rotation Benefits, Onur Boyabatli, Javad Nasiry, Yangfang (Helen) Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines crop planning decision in sustainable agriculture---that is, how to allocate farmland among multiple crops in each growing season when the crops have rotation benefits across growing seasons. We consider a farmer who periodically allocates the farmland between two crops in the presence of revenue uncertainty where revenue is stochastically larger and farming cost is lower when a crop is grown on rotated farmland (where the other crop was grown in the previous season). We characterize the optimal dynamic farmland allocation policy and perform sensitivity analysis to investigate how revenue uncertainty of each crop affects the farmer's optimal …

Revisiting The Human Capital System, Richard Raymond Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A holistic view of human capital inside any organization consists of talent management, organizational structure and culture, and strategic leadership.

The Global Learning Crisis, Claudia Costin

Asian Management Insights

In September 2015, the UN General Assembly approved the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one of which, the SDG-4, focuses on the educational goal of ensuring free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education that will lead to relevant and effective learning outcomes. This goal, which is to be achieved by 2030, is ambitious. Even today, there are too many children without access to a school, or those who are not learning the basics, or dropping out of school.

A Better Economy By "Design", Lawrence Chong

Asian Management Insights

The air was still, and I was going nowhere with the session until I asked the participants about their kids instead of talking more about the bank. The conversations soon turned chirpy as the mothers in the group spoke over one another, sharing their hearts out about their children and their hopes for them. I felt I had unlocked something new, even though this should have been obvious as this is a very family-oriented country. This experience was part of our transformation project for a Southeast Asian bank that would reshape its digital, brand and customer engagement strategy through a …

Debt Heterogeneity And Covenants, Yun Lou, Clemens A. Otto

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Coordination failure among owners of heterogeneous debt types increases distress costs. Covenants reduce expected distress costs by lowering the probability of liquidity shortages, increasing liquidation values, and incentivizing creditor monitoring. We predict and find that new debt contracts include more covenants when borrowers' existing debt structures are more heterogeneous. Our findings suggest that covenants are not only used to address creditor-shareholder conflicts but also to reduce the expected costs of coordination failure among creditors. Further, our results indicate a dynamic component missing from static debt structure models: Debt heterogeneity entails additional covenants (i.e., constraints) when raising future debt.

Recommendations From Sec’S Plain English Handbook: Perspectives From Behavioral Research, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The SEC published the plain English handbook in 1998 with the objective of providing preparers of financial disclosures with a guide to using well-established techniques to create clearer and more informative disclosure documents. The handbook provides various recommendations to preparers of disclosure documents. In this study, I examine and systematically synthesize the extent behavioural research literature that investigates the impact of implementing these recommendations on investors. I do so by developing a framework to systematically examine relevant studies. Overall, the analysis provides important insights from a behavioural perspective into how and why investors react to various recommendations in the SEC’s …

Empirical Investigation Of Digital Strategies In Online Retail, Yong Chin Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation examines digital strategies used by online retailers to engage customers and increase sales. The first essay investigates the impact of offering incentives to recapture lost sales from abandoned online shopping carts (i.e., customers adding items to their carts, but leaving without purchasing). Collaborating with an online fashion retailer, I conducted a randomized field experiment by manipulating the presence of incentives in recovery interventions. Findings reveal that incentives facilitate purchase conversion, but responsiveness to the incentives differs across various customer and cart characteristics.

In the second essay, I explore how retailers can leverage Augmented Reality (AR), a technology that …

Three Essays On Information Diffusion And Market Friction, Li Guo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

How markets impound information into asset prices is one of the most important concerns of financial economics. Due to behavioural bias and transaction friction, information could be mispriced in the real world, thus driving market anomalies and return predictability of behavioural factors. My dissertation contributes to the literature by investigating how information can be quantified, acquired, disseminated and priced in the financial market with the existence of market frictions.

In Chapter 2, we propose an efficient method based on machine learning and textual analysis to quantify cross industry news and shed light on how news travels across different industries. The …