Business Commons^™

How Do The Ceo Political Leanings Affect Reit Business Decisions?, Xiaoying Deng, Paul M. Anglin, Yanmin Gao, Hua Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Business decisions made by the real estate industry have a profound effect on the well-being of people who live, work, or shop in these buildings. While these decisions may be informed by evidence, the available evidence is often incomplete or imperfect. Therefore, the personal opinions or judgments of senior executives can have an effect. In this paper, we study these effects in two parts: risk-taking and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities. Since a person’s political learning is a relatively stable measure, and is associated with preferences for risk and ESG activities, we examine how the political leanings of the …

Going Far Together By Being Here Now: Mindfulness Increases Cooperation In Negotiations, Theodore Charles Masters-Waage, Jared Nai, Jochen Reb, Samantha Sim, Jayanth Narayanan, Noriko Tan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Integrating theorizing across the mindfulness and negotiation literatures, we hypothesize that mindfulness increases cooperation in negotiations. We further propose that processes of self-transcendence, self-regulation, and self-awareness mediate this effect. We test these hypotheses in five studies across different forms of cooperation, in both distributive and integrative negotiation contexts, and for both measured and experimentally induced mindfulness. In Study 1a, individuals higher on measured state mindfulness displayed greater cooperative orientation measured as preference for pareto-optimal agreements. In Study 1b, experimentally induced mindfulness led to greater cooperative orientation measured as the recall of cooperative heuristics. In Study 2, a distributive (fixed-sum) negotiation, …

Stock Return Prediction Using Financial News: A Unified Sequence Model Based On Hierarchical Attention And Long-Short Term Memory Networks, Haoling Chen, Peng Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Stock return prediction has been a hot topic in both research and industry given its potential for large financial gain. The return signal, apart from its inherent volatility and complexity, is often accompanied by a multitude of noises, such as other stocks’ performance, macroeconomic factors and financial news, etc. To better characterize these factors, we propose a new model that consists of two levels of sequence: an NLP-based module to capture the sequential nature of words and sentences in the financial news, and a time-series-based module to exploit the sequential nature of adjacent observations in the stock price. In this …

Smart Manufacturing And Its Implications For Singapore's Smes, Thomas Menkhoff, Surianarayanan Gopalakrishnan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

While Covid-19 and the climate catastrophe continue to make headlines, local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are quietly setting the gears of Smart Manufacturing in motion with a strategic focus on digitising and automating production processes powered by "Industry 4.0" (I4.0) ready business models. A shared view among several interviewees we talked to recently in the context of an ongoing study on the impact of I4.0 on the business models of local manufacturers is that Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT), machine learning, visual computing, automation and digital twining are deemed of great importance for the long-term competitiveness of Singapore's manufacturing ecosystem on …

Technology Lends A Hand To Green E-Commerce, Hao Liang, Sin Mei Cheah

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The world has witnessed an e-commerce boom in the past 2 decades, and Asia-Pacific is now driving the latest wave of growth. The Covid-19 pandemic has further accelerated consumers' growing preference for online consumption, with the Asia-Pacific region raking US$230 billion in online retail sales in 2020. This article is adapted from the authors' teaching case study - Alibaba Cainiao's Smart Green Logistics Strategy: Good for the Earth, Good for the Business.

When Your Authority Fluctuates Throughout The Day, Eric M. Anicich, Michael Schaerer, Jake Gale, Trevor A. Foulk

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

For many of us, the power we feel at work — how much, when it occurs, and around whom — can fluctuate. This can result in a surprising increase in stress and a decrease in well-being. To address this, consider these strategies for making power imbalances more manageable. First, be deliberate in scheduling your tasks to cluster activities with similar levels of power together. Second, give your work a routine and consider “theming” together days with similar activities. Third, create a role-transcendent identity in order to embrace your different levels of power. And finally, work to actively manage your well-being.

Volatility Timing Under Low-Volatility Strategy, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors show that the slope of the volatility decile portfolio’s return profile contains valuable information that can be used to time volatility under different market conditions in the United States. During good (bad) market conditions, the high- (low-) volatility portfolio produces the highest return. The authors proceed to devise a volatility timing strategy based on statistical tests on the slope of the volatility decile portfolio’s return profile. Volatility timing is achieved by being aggressive during strong growth periods and conservative during market downturns. Superior performance is obtained, with an additional return of 4.1% observed in the volatility timing strategy, …

Joint News, Attention Spillover, And Market Returns Predictability, Li Guo, Lin Peng, Yubo Tao, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We analyze over 2.6 million news articles and propose a novel measure of joint news coverage of firms. The measure strongly and negatively predicts market returns, with a monthly R-squared of 3.93% in sample and 6.52% out of sample. The relation is causal, robust to existing predictors, and is especially strong when market uncertainty is high or when market frictions are large. At the firm level, joint news coverage is associated with a 20.3% increase in EDGAR downloads by new IPs from the investor bases of the other covered firms. Our evidence suggests that joint news triggers investor attention spillover …

Accounting And Finance Lessons In The Time Of Covid-19: Views From The Pacific Basin: Part 2, Kuan Yong David Ding, Julie Harrison, Martien Lubberink, Chris Van Staden

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The global COVID-19 pandemic is now in its second year, and we are fast approaching the third. The year 2021 has brought some hope that vaccination will lead to the end of the pandemic. But it has also brought a more infectious variant of COVID-19 and multiple waves of surging cases that show no immediate sign of disappearing. As the pandemic continues to impact global societies and economies, it is imperative that we study its impact to try and understand how it will affect us in both the short-term and long-term. While the longer-term impacts are still unknown, there is …

A Queueing Model For Customer Rescheduling And No-Shows In Service Systems, Yue Tang, Houyuan Jiang, Jingui Xie, Zhichao Zheng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study an M/M/1/K queue where customers can reschedule their appointments. Rescheduled customers show up with higher probabilities, incurring lower no-show costs, but rescheduling also frees up slots that may not be filled later, leading to wasted service capacity and lower throughput. The system manager aims to minimize the long-run average cost by controlling rescheduling policies. We derive conditions under which rescheduling should be allowed for different scenarios depending on whether customers can reschedule only once or multiple times.

Platform-Dependent Entrepreneurs: Participants In An Expanding Universe Of Platforms?, F. Ted Tschang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The article Platform-dependent entrepreneurs: Power asymmetries, risks, and strategies in the platform economy drew on the intermediary business model to review the damaging actions that platform firms may employ with entrepreneurs. This exchange argues that platform firms may treat entrepreneurs differently on other platform types-particularly ones where complex relationships may cause participants and platforms to become mutually dependent, or where the platform's position depends less on extracting revenue directly from participants. I suggest that particular business models might facilitate the use of alternative strategic actions that are more benign toward entrepreneurs. These situations can determine additional boundary conditions for this …

Socially Responsible Corporate Customers, Rui Dai, Hao Liang, Lilian Ng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Corporate customers are an important stakeholder in global supply chains. We employ several unique international databases to test whether socially responsible corporate customers can infuse similar socially responsible business behavior in suppliers. Our findings suggest a unilateral effect on corporate social responsibility (CSR) only from customers to suppliers, an evidence further supported by exogenous variation in customers’ close-call CSR proposals and by product scandals. Customers exert influence on suppliers’ CSR through positive assortative matching and their decision-making process. Enhanced collaborative CSR efforts help improve operational efficiency and firm valuation of both customers and suppliers but increase only the customers’ future …

Corporate Sustainability Has Failed: Digitizing Regeneration May Still Save Us, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The author proposes a focus on regeneration as a way for small carbon footprint firms (e.g., consulting, financial services firms) to make a positive sustainability impact. He highlights that service industry firms can proactively contribute to the regeneration of common pool resources, such as forests and lakes, which often become neglected or overused. What makes regeneration different compared to more traditional donations to a conservation nonprofit is the use of digital technology that enables an organization to lay claim to the eco­system benefits it generates through its support. The digitization of benefits claims provides a transparent accounting system for environmental …

Carlos Ghosn: The Rise And Fall Of An Automobile Legend, Jochen Reb, Abhijeet K. Vadera, Sin Mei Cheah

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Was it politics, greed, or hubris that led to Carlos Ghosn's downfall? On December 29, 2019, disgraced auto titan Carlos Ghosn (rhymes with ‘tone’) made an audacious escape from house arrest in Tokyo, where he had been detained on financial impropriety charges. Of all the places imaginable, Ghosn hid in a huge case for musical instruments, which was then loaded onto an aeroplane as cargo. Dubbed as “one of the most brazen and well-orchestrated escape acts in recent history, involving a dizzying array of hotel meet-ups, bullet train travel, fake personas, and the chartering of a private jet”, it was …

Impacts Of Covid-19 On Chinese Nationals' Tourism Preferences, Songshan (Sam) Huang, Yuhong Shao, Ying Zeng, Xinyi Liu, Zhiyong Li

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper examines the impacts of COVID-19 on Chinese nationals' tourism preferences. Employing a mixed-method research design, two rounds of nation-wide online surveys were conducted, one in February 2020 when COVID-19 cases started to peak in China and another one in June 2020 when COVID-19 was a global pandemic; both survey studies were accompanied with semi-structured in-depth interviews and altogether 37 interviews were conducted in two stages. Based on both quantitative survey data and qualitative interview data, the research identified that: 1) COVID-19 significantly reduced Chinese nationals' preferences to travel to countries with high infection numbers, and geographically faraway, administratively …

In Pursuit Of Happiness: Impact Of The Happiness Level Of A Destination Country On Chinese Tourists' Outbound Travel Choices, Ziyao Huang, Sam Huang, Yang Yang, Ziyan Tang, Yutao Yang, Yijun Zhou

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This study examines the impact of the national happiness level of a country on Chinese tourists' travel choices using panel data of 113 countries from 2012 to 2017, controlling for other factors that contribute to Chinese outbound tourism. The results show that the happiness level of a destination country is positively and significantly associated with Chinese tourist arrivals in that country. Examination of the moderation effect reveals cultural distance plays an important role in the impact a destination's happiness level has on Chinese outbound tourism. The influence of a destination's happiness level decreases when the cultural distance increases.

Emotional Analysis Of Learning Cybersecurity With Games Using Iot, Maria Valero, Md Jobair Hossain, Shahriar Sobhan

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The constant rise of cyber-attacks poses an increasing demand for more qualified people with cybersecurity knowledge. Games have emerged as a well-fitted technology to engage users in learning processes. In this paper, we analyze the emotional parameters of people while learning cybersecurity through computer games. The data are gathered using a non-invasive Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to study the signals directly from the users’ brains. We analyze six performance metrics (engagement, focus, excitement, stress, relaxation, and interest) of 12 users while playing computer games to measure the effectiveness of the games to attract the attention of the participants. Results show participants …

Resilience Vs. Prevention. Which Is The Better Cybersecurity Practice?, Frank Katz

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Students in multiple cohorts of our 3000 level Fundamentals of Information Systems Security course were given a discussion question where they had to either agree or disagree with the premise that given all the constant threats to our systems, we should dedicate more of our efforts to quickly repairing the damage of an attack rather than dedicate more of our time and energies to preventing such attacks. They were required to give their reasoning and provide sources to back up their analysis of his comment.

This paper will describe and explain the concept of cyber resiliency. It will then evaluate …

Warshipping: Hacking The Mailroom, Jackson Szwast, Bryson Payne

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Everyone knows what package shipping is, but not everyone knows what warshipping is. Corporate mailrooms are rarely considered as part of the cybersecurity attack surface of most organizations, but they offer physical access to millions of uninspected packages daily. UPS shipped 5.5 billion items last year, with their daily average being 21.9 million items and operating through 1,800 locations in 2020. FedEx shipped 6.5 million packages daily and operates 2,150 locations. The United States Postal Service delivered 143 billion pieces of mail in 2019. Increasingly the world’s consumers are relying on e-commerce, and during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, package deliveries …

Towards Assessing Password Workarounds And Perceived Risk To Data Breaches For Organizational Cybersecurity Risk Management Taxonomy, Michael J. Rooney, Yair Levy, Wei Li, Ajoy Kumar

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Cybersecurity involves a broad range of techniques, including cyber-physical, managerial, and technical, while authentication provides a layer of protection for Information Systems (IS) against data breaches. The recent COVID-19 pandemic brought a tsunami of data breach incidents worldwide. Authentication serves as a mechanism for IS against unauthorized access utilizing various defense techniques, with the most popular and frequently used technique being passwords. However, the dramatic increase of user accounts over the past few decades has exposed the realization that technological measures alone cannot ensure high level of IS security; this leaves the end-users holding a critical role in protecting their …

Analyzing Robotics Software Vulnerabilities, Hossain Shahriar, Md Jobair Hossain Faruk, Shahriar Sobhan, Mohammad Nazim

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Robots are widely used in our day-to-day life in various domains. For example, eldercare robots, such as CareO-Bots [1]are used to perform household tasks and provide mobility assistance [2]. Amazon uses manufacturing robots to accomplish manufacturing labor activities, such as welding and assembling equipment [2]. According to the International Data Corporation, spending on robotics is expected to reach USD 241.4 billion by the end of 2023 [4].

However, malicious users can exploit security vulnerabilities in hardware and software components of robotics systems to conduct security attacks and cause malfunction, i.e., deviate robots from their expected behaviors. Security attacks on robots …

A Taxonomy Of Cyberattacks Against Critical Infrastructure, Miloslava Plachkinova, Ace Vo

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The current study proposes a taxonomy to organize existing knowledge on cybercrimes against critical infrastructure such as power plants, water treatment facilities, dams, and nuclear facilities. Routine Activity Theory is used to inform a three-dimensional taxonomy with the following dimensions: hacker motivation (likely offender), cyber, physical, and cyber-physical components of any cyber-physical system (suitable target), and security (capable guardian). The focus of the study is to develop and evaluate the classification tool using Design Science Research (DSR) methodology. Publicly available data was used to evaluate the utility and usability of the proposed artifact by exploring three possible scenarios – Stuxnet, …

International Conference Management, Business And Economics, University For Business And Technology - Ubt

UBT International Conference

UBT Annual International Conference is the 9th international interdisciplinary peer reviewed conference which publishes works of the scientists as well as practitioners in the area where UBT is active in Education, Research and Development. The UBT aims to implement an integrated strategy to establish itself as an internationally competitive, research-intensive university, committed to the transfer of knowledge and the provision of a world-class education to the most talented students from all background. The main perspective of the conference is to connect the scientists and practitioners from different disciplines in the same place and make them be aware of the recent …

Oil Price Fluctuations Impact On The Lebanese Economic Well Being, Hanadi Taher

BAU Journal - Health and Wellbeing

This paper investigates the impact of oil price fluctuation on the Lebanese economic well being during the period from 1988 to 2018 using multivariable ordinary least square method with annual time series. taking the Lebanese GDP per capita as proxy for the economic wellbeing as dependent variable and the crud oil average annual prices as proxy for oil price fluctuations with Labor and gross fixed capital formation as two control variables. The test results show a significant and positive impact for the oil price fluctuations on the Lebanese economic well being and the significant results for control variables. In testing …

Knowledge, Attitudes And Practices Regarding The Use Of Antibiotics: A Cross-Sectional Study From A Rural Area Of Lebanon, Carine Mounzer, Safaa Baydoun, Ranya Amer, Jamilah Borjac

BAU Journal - Health and Wellbeing

Despite the presence of a national policy restricting the easy access to antibiotics, irrational use of antibiotics continues to be widespread both in human use and livestock production in Lebanon. This study targets the general population in the rural region of Bekaa to assess their knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) towards antibiotic use. A cross sectional questionnaire was completed by 1151 participants, through face-to-face interviews. Study population was randomly selected. Descriptive statistics and correlation tests were applied in data analysis. 69.2% of participants had a very poor knowledge about antibiotics. More than 70% believed that viral infections may be treated …

The Impact Of Emerging Technology On Nurses Caring Behavior During Blood Pressure Monitoring For Adult Patients At General Hospitals, Kuwait., Eman Al Awade, Hanan Alnuqaidan, Marthal Johnson, Hoda Diab

BAU Journal - Health and Wellbeing

Introduction: The nursing profession has advanced immensely from the onset. Remarkable changes in medical technology facilitated patients’ survival and treatments which were unimaginable during the period of Florence Nightingale. Although, technology empowered the nurses to provide quality care to patients, some of these technologies can break the bond of therapeutic nurse - patient relationship and make it mechanical, instead. Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate nurses caring behavior during blood pressure monitoring with manual and electronic devices. Objective: Compare the nurses caring behavior while monitoring blood pressure by electronic and manual devices. Methods: a descriptive comparative design …

Contemporary Organizational Reality Through The Eyes Of Chaos Theory: A Literature Review, Inas Rafik Zein Eddine

BAU Journal - Health and Wellbeing

Since the beginning of scientific management, organizations have been managed by linear structures and rigid scientific understandings, where and for decades scientific models have been dominating the way organizations are built and the way organizational reality is foreseen. Primarily, these traditional managerial perspectives have been challenged by the Chaos theory, which came to detect the linearity ruling each and every aspect of organizations' course of work. Indeed, this theory was not sufficiently conceptualized in organizations’ philosophies and practices; however, within the rapid pace of the continuous changes and instabilities around, the attention to it has been on the rise. Amid …

Dynamic Interplay Of Environmental Sustainability And Corporate Reputation: A Combined Parametric And Nonparametric Approach, He-Boong Kwon, Jooh Lee, Laee Choi

Rohrer College of Business Departmental Research

For decades, research on the relationship between environmental sustainability and firm performance focused on determining whether the effect of the former on the latter was positive or negative. That potentially controversial approach had driven mainstream research to ask two focal questions: Does it pay to be green? and Does it cost to be green? Recent papers have explored a curvilinear effect (i.e., U-shaped and inverted U-shaped) by tackling another question: When does it pay to be green? These efforts, however, have either oversimplified the complex linkage between these two things into a linear relationship or confined the complexity within a …

Monetary Policy In The Eurozone, Arbiana Govori

UBT International Conference

The main goal of the ECB monetary policy is to keep prices stable and the inflation rate below or close to 2% in the medium term. The legal basis for the single monetary policy is set out in the Treaty on European Union, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, and the Statute of the ECB and the ESCB. The monetary policy strategy of the Eurozone countries is also associated with the stability of the balance of payments

To achieve its main objective, the ECB uses a set of monetary policy instruments as well as various procedures. The …

Laplacian's Statistical Management Of Heat Transmission, Shaqir Elezaj, Egzona Elezaj

UBT International Conference

Laplacian’s is an operator which plays a very important role in various scientific branches. It is an operator which is defined as the nabla square operator. Its role is very important also in relation to the various analyzes of the operational fields that have to do here with heat transfer. Its role is especially considered in relation to the analysis of potential fields, here related to the phenomenon of heat transfer.