Business Commons^™

Capacity Allocation In Flexible Production Networks: Theory And Applications, Guodong Lyu, Wang-Chi Cheung, Mabel C. Chou, Chung-Piaw Teo, Zhichao Zheng, Yuanguang Zhong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In many production environments, a fixed network of capacity is shared flexibly between multiple products with random demands. What is the best way to configure the capacity of the production network and to allocate the available capacity, to meet pre-determined fill rate requirements? We develop a new approach for network capacity configuration and allocation, and characterize the relationship between the capacity of the network and the attainable fill rate levels for the products, taking into account the flexibility structure of the network. This builds on a new randomized allocation mechanism to deliver the desired services.We use this theory to investigate …

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

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors devise a volatility timing strategy based on statistical tests on the slope of the volatility decile portfolio return profile. Superior performance is obtained, with a 30% increase in Sharpe ratio and an order of magnitude improvement on cumulated wealth. The profitability of the volatility timing strategy can be attributed to holding a diversified portfolio during bear markets, while holding a concentrated growth portfolio during bull markets.

Introduction: Understanding The Transformational Power Of China's Belt And Road Initiative, Yue Wah Chay, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This book features several introductory readings about the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), a strategic development initiative launched by the Chinese Government under the leadership of President Xi Jinping in 2013 to jointly build an economic belt along the Silk Road. Some of the key objectives of BRI, previously known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR) or Silk Road Economic Belt, include promoting infrastructure development, trade and investments in Asia, Europe and Africa. BRI is a gigantic development initiative whose key components include the creation of several interconnected economic land corridors (=belts): China–Mongolia–Russia; China–Central Asia– West Asia, China–Pakistan, the China–Indochina …

Authentic Leadership In The Digital Age, Richard R. Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Artificial intelligence algorithms are actively assessing our personality and behaviour based on our social media footprint with amazing accuracy – even after we have retired or died.

Commercial Construction Schedule Collaborators And Current Scheduling Practices, Evan D. Bingham, Jay P. Christofferson, Mark Hutchings

The Professional Constructor

Construction mangers use the project schedule to communicate aspects of construction timing critical to project success. These schedules may be created using the collaboration of multiple project stakeholders or be the creation of a single manager. The tools used to create and communicate the schedule could range from hand drawn to critical path computer software. Because these practices may vary from company to company, commercial construction mangers can benefit from an understanding of common scheduling practices in the industry. This paper is a report of findings for commercial contractors working in the western United States. Construction managers working for 23 …

Attraction And Retention Of Minority Managerial Employees At Electrical Contractors, Ben F. Bigelow, Anthony J. Perrenoud, Anusree Saseendran

The Professional Constructor

Diversity in the managerial workforce in construction is limited, with a shortage of talent in the industry and the demand projected to grow over the next ten years. The challenge of attracting and retaining managerial talent is exacerbated for trade contractors as they have historically promoted management from the trades. This study explored differences, based on ethnicity, when it comes to factors that attract and retain managerial talent in electrical construction. Data was collected through a nationwide survey of management employees of electrical contractors. It was found that while some factors were influential for all ethnic groups, certain factors became …

Building Information Model-Based Quantity Takeoff – Leadership Support And Training, Morgan Tagg, James P. Smith, Jay P. Christofferson, Kevin R. Miller

The Professional Constructor

Building Information Modeling (BIM) plays an important role in the modern construction industry. BIM models are tools that help stakeholders perform a variety of functions including communication, visualization, trade coordination, and clash detection. A less commonly utilized functionality of BIM that shows strong potential to improve efficiencies and reduce error is model-based quantity take off (QTO). The literature identifies eight challenges to implementing BIM QTO. This paper focuses on the leadership and training elements inherent to two of the identified challenges – 1) New skills and training, and 2) reluctance of employees to adopt. Through semi-structured interviews with estimators, preconstruction …

The Cultural Context For The Pursuit Of Vocation, Charles Seeley

Journal of Research Initiatives

How does the cultural context influence the pursuit of vocation? How does culture influence the decisions that young people make about the life direction they pursue? This qualitative, ethnographic study was conducted to discover and describe the motivational influences in the lives of students and graduates of The Leadership Center, located in rural Honduras, as they traveled a journey through high school and on to The Leadership Center in pursuit of a vocation. The sample of study participants consisted of thirty young women, thirteen graduates, and seventeen students of The Leadership Center. While the culture of Honduras was not explicitly …

Forecasting Realized Volatility Using A Nonnegative Semiparametric Model, Anders Eriksson, Daniel P. A. Preve, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper introduces a parsimonious and yet flexible semiparametric model to forecast financial volatility. The new model extends a related linear nonnegative autoregressive model previously used in the volatility literature by way of a power transformation. It is semiparametric in the sense that the distributional and functional form of its error component is partially unspecified. The statistical properties of the model are discussed and a novel estimation method is proposed. Simulation studies validate the new method and suggest that it works reasonably well in finite samples. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the proposed model is evaluated against a number of …

Using A Decision-Making Placemat To Inform Strategy, Christine Baker Mitton, Adrienne Mundorf, Kris Putnam-Walkerly, Susanna Krey

The Foundation Review

Strategic planning in philanthropy allows board and staff to articulate and commit to their priorities and set a plan for how to accomplish a foundation’s goals. To do so requires the processing and sharing of complex internal and external information amid the competing priorities and commitments of multiple stakeholders.

This article explores the development and use of a decision-making placemat tool to inform the strategic shift of the Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland's place-based program area. The foundation has focused its work on housing, health, education, and disparities in outcomes for Cleveland, Ohio, residents who are living in poverty, …

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Publicness And The Identity Of Public Foundations, Alexandra Williamson, Belinda Luke

The Foundation Review

This article investigates understandings of publicness in the context of public foundations in Australia by examining how perceptions of publicness inform and influence the practice and conduct of those grantmaking foundations. As part of a broader study on perceptions of accountability and identity in Australian foundations, the article provides empirical evidence from interviews with managers and trustees from a diverse group of public foundations suggesting that understandings and applications of two dimensions of publicness were significant: donations, or public money; and grantmaking, or public benefit. Further elements of publicness were expressed around foundations’ visibility and the transparency of their operations. …

Strengthening Support For Grantees: Four Lessons For Foundations, Anna J. Bettis, Susan Pepin

The Foundation Review

As society becomes more interconnected, the problems nonprofits are tasked with addressing require systems work. It is imperative for funders to adapt not only to the challenges faced by the organizations they fund, but also to the dynamic social systems within which they aim to effect change. This requires new approaches that are responsive to community needs and address the known challenges in grantor-grantee relationships.

This article offers a new perspective on the role of private foundations and four key lessons for strengthening funder support. These learnings build upon existing research and were gleaned from a qualitative analysis of data …

The World Predictive Power Of U.S. Equity Market Skewness Risk, Jian Chen, Fuwei Jiang, Shuyu Xue, Jiaquan Yao

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study investigates the cross-country impact of U.S. equity market skewness risk. We find that a large decrease in the U.S. market skewness significantly predicts higher future returns on international equity markets. The predictability remains significant after controlling for a set of U.S. and local forecasting variables. Furthermore, we find strong predictability in- an out-of-sample setting and the predictability delivers a large economic value. The U.S. market skewness also forecasts U.S. economic recessions and international market conditions, consistent with the international three-moment capital asset pricing model (three-moment CAPM) and the intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM).

When Individual Goal Pursuit Turns Competitive: How We Sabotage And Coast, Szu-Chi Huang, Stephanie C. Lin, Ying Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

People working toward individual goals often find themselves surrounded by others who are pursuing similar goals, such as at school, in fitness classes, and through goal-oriented network devices like Fitbit. This research explores when these individual goal pursuits can turn into competitions, why it happens, and the downstream consequences of this pseudo-competition on goal pursuers. We found that people were more likely to treat their goal pursuit as a competition when they were near the end (vs. at the beginning) of their individual goal and thus prioritized relative positional gain (i.e., performing better than others sharing similar pursuits) over making …

State-Owned Enterprises As Bribe Payers: The Role Of Institutional Environment, Noman Shaheer, Jingtao Yi, Sali Li, Liang Chen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Our paper draws attention to a neglected channel of corruption—the bribe payments by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This is an important phenomenon as bribe payments by SOEs fruitlessly waste national resources, compromising public welfare and national prosperity. Using a large dataset of 30,249 firms from 50 countries, we show that, in general, SOEs are less likely to pay bribes for achieving organizational objectives owing to their political connectivity. However, in deteriorated institutional environments, SOEs may be subjected to potential managerial rent-seeking behaviors, which disproportionately increase SOE bribe propensity relative to privately owned enterprises. Specifically, our findings highlight the importance of fostering …

When Do Expert Teams Fail To Create Impactful Inventions?, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Yimin Lin, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the salience of expertise in creating high impact inventions and question experts’ ability to deploy novel ideas. Specifically, we examine the relationships between expertise, component originality, and a team's structural holes’ position in the collaborative network and propose that, in relative terms, expert teams create lower impact inventions if they deploy more original components and if they occupy structural holes. We test and confirm our hypotheses in a sample of semiconductor firms. In post‐hoc analyses, we find a three‐way interaction where the negative effect of structural holes almost disappears when an expert team experiments with original components whereas …

Can Vuca Help Us Generate New Theory Within International Business?, L. Jeremy Clegg, Hinrich Voss, Liang Chen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory …

A Common Approach For Consumer And Provider Fairness In Recommendations, Dimitris Sacharidis, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitrios Kleftogiannis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a common approach for handling consumer and provider fairness in recommendations. Our solution requires defining two key components, a classification of items and a target distribution, which together define the case of perfect fairness. This formulation allows distinct fairness concepts to be specified in a common framework. We further propose a novel reranking algorithm that optimizes for a desired trade-off between utility and fairness of a recommendation list.

Scaling Programs With Research Evidence And Effectiveness (Spree), Nan Maxwell, Scott Richman

The Foundation Review

Foundations can serve more people by identifying and supporting effective interventions that are ready to be scaled. This article describes a process called SPREE — Scaling Programs with Research Evidence and Effectiveness — that can help funders and their grantees scale successfully. Implementing this process can assist foundations in using evaluation research as a tool to determine which interventions are likely to produce desired outcomes, and to identify which organizations are ready to scale them. The SPREE process is grounded in evaluation and implementation science frameworks and has been applied since 2016 by the Corporation for National and Community Service. …

Growth Of Community-Based Giving Days In The United States: The Landscape And Effects, Catherine Humphries Brown, Abhishek Bhati

The Foundation Review

Over the past decade, local and regional community foundations across the United States have adopted “giving days” as a means to build awareness, bolster community pride, and raise money for local nonprofit organizations. Despite the increasing prevalence of giving days, little scholarly research has empirically examined this phenomenon and its impact, particularly at the local and regional levels.

To address these gaps, this article shares the findings of a study that examined similarities and differences across communities’ giving days and sought to evaluate the extent to which those days led to more giving at the community level.

While the study …

Full Issue 11.3

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

How Can Foundations Promote Impactful Collaboration?, Douglas Easterling, Laura Mcduffee

The Foundation Review

Funders are increasingly looking to interagency and cross-sector collaboration as a strategy to solve complex, large-scale issues, but many collaborative groups fail to generate an impact with their work. This is due in part to funders’ own practices, such as pre-specifying the problem to be solved or limiting their grantees’ ability to adjust their strategy.

The Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts has been intentional about facilitating the effectiveness of the collaborative groups it supports. Its Health Care & Health Promotion Synergy Initiative provides long-term funding and assistance with planning, evaluation and sustainability to groups that define the problems they want …

Leveraging Effective Consulting To Advance Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In Philanthropy, Stephanie Clohesy, Jara Dean-Coffey, Lisa Mcgill

The Foundation Review

In 2018, the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers launched an initiative to sharpen the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work in grantmaking by increasing the capacity of consultants and grantmakers engaged in these efforts. Network researchers used a systematic protocol to interview consultant members about their most effective partnerships with grantmakers. Case studies drawn from those interviews yielded valuable lessons for advancing DEI in philanthropy.

In sharing some of these lessons, this article advises consultants to be prepared to help grantmakers define or refine the meaning of DEI and understand where equity fits into their values and …

Applied Deep Learning In Intelligent Transportation Systems And Embedding Exploration, Xiaoyuan Liang

Dissertations

Deep learning techniques have achieved tremendous success in many real applications in recent years and show their great potential in many areas including transportation. Even though transportation becomes increasingly indispensable in people’s daily life, its related problems, such as traffic congestion and energy waste, have not been completely solved, yet some problems have become even more critical. This dissertation focuses on solving the following fundamental problems: (1) passenger demand prediction, (2) transportation mode detection, (3) traffic light control, in the transportation field using deep learning. The dissertation also extends the application of deep learning to an embedding system for visualization …

Entrepreneurial Leadership: An Emerging Theory, Sarah Ruttan

Staff Publications

Entrepreneurial leadership is still considered by most a concept rather than a theory (Aldrich & Baker, 1997) and research is limited (Esmer, 2017) despite entrepreneurs having a long history shaping our capitalistic ecosystems. This paper will discuss the emerging entrepreneurial leadership theory as a new paradigm to explore, and its relevance to the leadership model and how education, government and industry are recognizing the importance of learning and teaching this model to ensure continued healthy growth in business and innovation. As entrepreneurs are shaping Canada’s economy through traditional business as well as through continuing to innovate while always considering the …

China's Unethical Economic Development Practices, Kimberly A. Madsen

The Hilltop Review

The purpose of this research paper is to inform the public about some of the unethical economic development practices that China is performing with their citizens and global partners. These activities include escalating the national GDP at the detriment of their citizens through forced relocations in order to build new cities, dividing families with harmful public policies, and the imbalance between their citizens’ annual earnings and housing costs. Also discussed is the environmental pollution of the air, water, and soil, and poorly treating their international constituents when asked to provide consulting services to their nation.

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale H: Cross-Border Regulation, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

As a global financial service provider, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is supervised by banking regulatory agencies in different countries. Bruno Iksil, the derivatives trader primarily responsible for the $6 billion trading loss in 2012, was based in JPM’s London office. This office was regulated both by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) of the United States (US) and by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which served as the sole regulator of all financial services in the United Kingdom (UK). Banking regulators in the US and the UK have entered into agreements with one another to define basic parameters …