Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding value co-creation in a co-consuming brand community

Recent research has suggested that consumers collectively co-create value through consumption practices. This paper provides additional insights into value creation by demonstrating how individual consumers play distinct roles in the value creation process. By focusing on microdimensions of co-consuming groups, we show how individual consumers engage in value creation processes in the context of brand culture. We bring together concepts of value creation, working consumers, and double exploitation to demonstrate the roles played by consumers and communities in value co-creation. We focus on value creation in a particular type of co-consuming group: an online football fan community. Results show that co-consuming groups are platforms for value creation. We argue that double exploitation is not necessarily a threat to consumers because it may instead enable them to play active roles in value co-creation and gain power against brand owners. This paper contributes to the existing literature on brand community and the value co-creation paradigm by: (1) demonstrating the dynamic roles played by consumers in the value co-creation; (2) revealing new forms of consumer organization; and (3) illustrating how working consumers work among themselves in managing brand communities.
Risk Shifting versus Risk Management in Debt Rollover

Does risk shifting incentives or risk management incentives dominate when firms rollover large amounts of maturing debt? The empirical evidence supports the risk management hypothesis by identifying a hump-shaped relation between long-term debt maturity and firm risk. Using difference-in-differences approach that relies on the ex-ante variation in long-term debt at the onset of the crisis of 2007, I find that firms with greater exposure to rollover risk increase R&D intensive investments. This paper high-light that the incentive to avoid financial distress plays a significant role in explaining the riskiness of investments.
Reducing Trade Costs in East Africa: Deep Regional Integration and Multilateral Action

There is substantial evidence that with the progressive global decline in tariffs over several decades, trade costs are a more significant barrier to trade than tariffs, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper decomposes trade costs into three categories: costs that can be lowered by trade facilitation, nontariff barriers, and the costs of business services. The paper develops a 10-region, 18-sector, global trade model that includes Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda of the East African Customs Union. The analysis finds that deep integration in the East African Customs Union that lowers these trade costs results in significant gains for the four countries, especially from improved trade facilitation. Extending the lowering of nontariff barriers and services liberalization multilaterally would increase the gains between two and seven times, depending on the country. that the analysis also finds that reducing nondiscriminatory services barriers in Kenya and Tanzania would increase welfare even more than multilateral reduction of discriminatory services barriers. The paper is innovative both conceptually and empirically. It contains foreign direct investment in services and is the first paper to numerically assess liberalization of barriers against domestic and multinational service providers in a multi-sector, multi-region, applied general equilibrium model. The paper uses new databases of the ad valorem equivalents of barriers in services and the time in trade costs. Both databases are shown to be important to the results.
Strategic Approach to Build Customers Trust in Adoption of Internet Banking in Nigeria

Trust plays a vital role in acceptance and usage of internet banking, hence applying appropriate strategies to build customers’ trust is essential for the service providers. The objective of this study is to investigate the strategies to build customers trust in acceptance and usage of internet banking in Nigerian. This study utilized interpretive research approach to understand the strategies used to build customers trust in internet banking in Nigerian banks. The data was primarily collected through semi- structured interviews with bank managers and analysis of the websites and annual reports of the banks were used to complement data from primary source. Five findings which emerged from this research include customer orientation, information technology development, security strategy, institution based trust and viable marketing. These findings provided insight into the strategies used by Nigerian banks to build customers trust in acceptance and usage of internet banking.
Generating fuzzy rules by learning from examples

A general method is developed for generating fuzzy rules from numerical data. The method consists of five steps: dividing the input and output spaces of the given numerical data into fuzzy regions; generating fuzzy rules from the given data; assigning a degree to each of the generated rules for the purpose of resolving conflicts among the generated rules; creating a combined fuzzy-associative-memory (FAM) bank based on both the generated rules and linguistic rules of human experts; and determining a mapping from input space to output space based on the combined FAM bank using a defuzzifying procedure. The mapping is proved to be capable of approximating any real continuous function on a compact set to arbitrary accuracy. The method is applied to predicting a chaotic time series. <<ETX>>
Web Site Utilization in SME Business Strategy: The Case of Canadian Wine SMEs

Abstract This paper reports on empirical reseazch focused on how small- and medium-size Canadian enterprises operating in the wine sector utilize the Internet in their marketing and business strategies to provide information to consumers, create relationships with consumers, and utilize online e-commerce channels to sell more or all of what they produce. Based on a content analysis of the web sites of a randomly selected sample of Canadian wineries, this research found that a very high proportion of SME wineries utilize web sites in their marketing and business strategies. The highest proportion of wineries utilize their sites for providing information, followed by use for e-commerce, and by use of the site for creating and developing relationships with existing and potential consumers. Use of web sites for more sophisticated purposes (e-commerce and relationship building) is significantly related to exporting wine outside of the direct region where the SME winery is located geographically.
Policy Interest Rates, Capital Regulation, and Banking System Stability

The recent empirical studies suggest that a change in the policy interest rate has a significant impact on the liquidity management of the banks.Focusing on the role of the interbank market in mitigating a trade-off associated with the cost of precautionary hoarding of liquidity, this paper proposes a new transmission channel of the interest rate policy to the banking stability through the banks’ liquidity management.The announced policy rate should reflect the tightness of the interbank market during the shock, which is given by the combination of its probability and severity.Even though the probability of the shock is low, as long as its severity is high, the policy rate should be fixed at its lower end of the target range for securing the banking stability.Capital requirements play a role in strengthening the banking stability by ensuring that the banks insulate their depositors from the shock.The level of capital requirements should depend on the policy rate, which suggests that the substantial expansion of the role of central banks helps the banking stability.
Balanced Proper Orthogonal Decomposition Applied to Magnetoquasi-Static Problems Through a Stabilization Methodology

Model order reduction (MOR) methods are applied in different areas of physics in order to reduce the computational time of large scale systems. It has been an active field of research for many years, in mechanics especially, but it is quite recent for magnetoquasi-static problems. Although the most famous method, the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) has been applied for modeling many electromagnetic devices, this method can lack accuracy for low-order magnitude output quantities, like flux associated with a probe in regions where the field is low. However, the balanced POD (BPOD) is an MOR method, which takes into account these output quantities in its reduced model to render them accurately. Even if the BPOD may lead to unstable reduced systems, this can be overcome by a stabilization procedure. Therefore, the POD and the stabilized BPOD will be compared on a 3-D linear magnetoquasi-static field problem.
Pulse shaping for high capacity impulse radio ultra-wideband wireless links under the Russian spectral emission mask

Two pulse shapes for IR-UWB transmission under the Russian spectral emission mask are proposed and their potential experimentally demonstrated. Pulses based on the hyperbolic secant square function and the frequency B-spline wavelet are shown to enable transmission of 1.25Gbit/s signals, reaching a maximum transmission distance of 6.5 m.
Development and production of a prototype iodine contrast phantom for CEDEM

Phantoms containing iodine details with clinically relevant iodine concentrations are required to systematically study dose requirements, for quality assurance and optimizing exposure parameters and protocols for contrast enhanced dual energy mammography (CEDEM) applications. Most such phantoms use liquid iodine solutions, challenging the user with air inclusions, evaporation or the necessity for changing the iodine concentration through refilling. A prototype phantom with an array of sintered solid iodine-containing platelets with iodine area weights of 0, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 1.5 and 2 mg cm−2 is described. Disks containing various iodine concentrations were produced using polymer sintering of Iopamidol embedded into a polystyrene/graphite matrix. Iopamidol-containing platelets with a diameter of 0.5 cm and thickness of 550 µm forming an array with gradually increasing iodine area weight, were embedded in PMMA to allow statistical analysis of contrast and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). The homogeneity of the plates was tested and images of the phantom were acquired to assess the iodine area density progression and to evaluate phantom accuracy. The phantom was imaged on a mammography system applying low and high energy spectra as used for CEDEM. The disks show good homogeneity. Uncertainties in absolute iodine area weight were estimated ±5%. The iodine CNR showed a linear correlation with R2 > 0.99. Polymer powder sintering works well for producing stable iodine contrast phantoms without the necessity to handle liquid iodine solutions. Thus, it is a promising approach to construct phantoms not only for CEDEM but also angiography or other contrast enhanced methods with iodine details for quality control or research purposes and optimization.
Improved survival in ARDS patients associated with a reduction in pulmonary capillary wedge pressure.

The survival and ICU length of stay of 40 ARDS patients admitted to the ICU were analyzed to determine if a management strategy of lowering the pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (Ppw) was associated with an increased survival or a decreased ICU length of stay. ARDS was defined as three or four quadrant alveolar filling roentgenographically, a PaO2 less than 80 mm Hg with an FIO2 greater than . 5 and a Ppw less than 18 mm Hg. Patients were divided into two groups: group 1 included all patients in whom there was a reduction of Ppw by at least 25 percent, and group 2 included patients in whom there was no, or less than a 25 percent reduction in Ppw. Survival was statistically different between the groups with 12 of 16 group 1 patients and seven of 24 group 2 patients surviving to hospital discharge. This difference remained statistically significant after stratifying patients by age and the APACHE II severity of illness index. We conclude that this retrospective analysis supports the notion that treatment of low pressure pulmonary edema with reduction of Ppw is associated with an increased survival.
Early metabolism evaluation making traditional Chinese medicine effective and safe therapeutics

Increasing attention is being paid to the scientific evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). As many TCMs are capable of biotransformation in the gastrointestinal tract, attention to biotransformation of TCM in the gastrointestinal tract may lead to discovery of the active components and active mechanisms. In this article, we review reports that host metabolic enzymes and intestinal bacteria may be responsible for the metabolism of TCM. Good understanding of the in vivo course of TCM will help us to know how to conduct metabolism evaluation of TCM by using in vitro human-derived system. This evaluation system will create new views on TCM as effective and safe therapeutic agents.
International and Product Diversification: Their Interrelationship and Impact on Firm Performance

Managerial decisions regarding the geographic and product market scope of a firm’s activities are the essence of corporate strategy. Yet, our understanding of the relationship between these strategic choices, and how they jointly interact to impact firm performance, remains equivocal; with the results from prior studies yielding more questions than answers. This paper provides a conceptual and empirical contribution to the international business and strategy literatures by presenting an integrative framework that captures the joint and simultaneous nature of the relationships between international diversification, product diversification, and firm performance. Our framework and empirical methods address several methodological shortcomings of prior work and provide robust statistical evidence to substantiate or refute prior empirical findings regarding the empirical linkages between a firm’s corporate strategic scope and its performance. A key aspect of our integrative framework is that is enables us to gain a better understanding of how managerial decisions regarding the firm’s geographic and product market scope interrelate, an issue that has not been the focus of much prior empirical work.
Should we worry about an “academic‐practitioner divide” in marketing?

In marketing, as in other areas of management studies, there is a feeling abroad that lines of communication need to be improved between those who work largely in the academic sphere and the practitioner community. Introduces the papers presented in this special issue, which explore the nature of the “academic‐practitioner divide”, investigates the reasons for it and the barriers to communication that exist, and put forward ideas for improving the effectiveness of academic‐practitioner collaboration. However, members of the academic community should carefully avoid a headlong and uncritical rush for managerial relevance, since their claim to a unique position in the knowledge production process relies on maintaining objectivity and a certain distance from the day‐to‐day pressures of marketing management.
Quality Factor of an Antenna With Closely Spaced Resonances

The exact and corrected approximate <i>QZE</i>(ω) quality factors of an electrically small antenna were derived by using an equivalent circuit of the antenna. The quality factors complying with the lower bound on the quality factor <i>Q</i><sub>lb</sub>(ω) were defined by means of magnitudes of frequency derivatives of reactance of resonant and antiresonant subcircuits to provide their additivity in the vicinity of an antiresonant frequency ω<sub>a</sub>. The quality factor <i>QZE</i>(ω) was used to approximate the conductance bandwidth of an antenna with overlapped resonances. The quality factors at the maximums of the bands of conductance and return loss <i>Q</i><sub>ZE</sub>(ω<sub>1,2</sub>) were utilized to calculate the composite quality factor of the antenna <i>Q</i><sub>ZEc</sub>(ω<sub>a</sub>) >; <i>Q</i><sub>lb</sub>(ω).
Can Universities Help to Satisfy Accounting Practitioners' Needs: A Survey of Responses of Accounting Academics' to Accounting Practitioners' Perceptions of Weaknesses and Strengths of Accounting Graduates in Hong Kong

Purpose: This study seeks to obtain Hong Kong accounting academics’ responses to weaknesses and strengths perceived by major accounting employers of Hong Kong accounting graduates. Design/ Methodology/ Approach: This is a qualitative study consisting of two phases. The first phase relates to identifying the weaknesses and strengths of university graduates by sending a Likert-scale questionnaire to the big-4 accounting firms. The second phase consists of interviewing accounting academics. In areas where improvements are sought, suggestions for remedial activities from each surveyed institution as well as the reasons as to why some institutions cannot help are recorded. In areas where the graduates have done well, the institutions’ responses include whether these have been the results of their efforts, or that credit cannot be claimed. Findings:Common approaches suggested to enhance the skill sets in several areas include the use of case studies, instructional materials and exam questions that are unstructured and ambiguous, projects or presentations requiring interactivity and encouraging students to participate more in student and external activities with the universities arranging more internships, study tours and exchange programs. The use of the aforementioned factors also contributed to accounting graduates doing well in several areas. Research Limitations:This paper is based entirely on a survey of expert opinions from both major accounting employers and accounting academics. It would not be appropriate to use statistical tools under these circumstances. Practical Implications: The results of this study can be used as a reference by accounting academics in countries or jurisdictions where the educational and business environments are similar to those in Hong Kong. Social Implications:After reading this paper, accounting practitioners would have a clear understanding of what universities can and cannot do in the nurturing of the expected skillsets of accounting graduates. Hence, they should not point fingers at accounting academics for doing a less than adequate job for not being able to overcome some of the perceived weaknesses of accounting graduates. Originality: This is a topic that has never been explored previously.
Analyses of Cytotoxic and Genotoxic Potentials of ＂Loranthus micranthus＂ using the ＂Allium cepa＂ Test

Loranthus micranthus (LM) is one of the Nigerian folk medicinal plants used chronically for the management of immuno-depressive illnesses such as diabetes mellitus, cancer and hypertension. There has not been report on the cytotoxic and genotoxic effects of the plant. This study was conducted to investigate the cytotoxic, mitodepressive and genotoxic effects of LM against Allium cepa root cells. The roots of Allium cepa (onion bulb) were exposed to different concentrations (2.5-40 mg/mL) of L. micranthus aqueous leaf extract (LMAE) using NaN 3 (100 ug/mL) and distilled water as positive and negative controls and examined macroscopically and microscopically for toxic effects. Phytochemical screening of the plant was also carried out using conventional methods. LMEA was found to significantly (p 0.05) at 5 mg/mL compared to the control and did not display significant variation in activity between 20 and 40 mg/mL concentrations respectively (p>0.05). Furthermore, LMAE at 10 mg/mL was found to produce the highest number of aberrant cells but failed to elicit c-mitosis found only at 40 mg/mL. LMAE at 5 mg/mL produced the least number of aberrant cells and also failed to induce micronucleus and binucleated cell formation found mostly at 40 mg/mL. Chromosomal aberrations including stickiness, multipolar anaphase and lagging chromosomes, breaks and bridges were induced by all the extract concentrations tested but not dose-dependently. Tannins, alkaloids, saponins and flavonoids were also present in the extract. Our findings indicate that LM is cytotoxic, mitodepressive and genotoxic to Allium cepa especially at doses beyond pharmacological range in vitro and suggest for safety reasons, the continuous use of this plant at lower concentrations for human phytomedicine coupled with a need to conduct further in vivo genotoxic tests.
Evidence on the Determinants of Corporate Hedging in UK

This work provides empirical evidence on the determinants of corporate hedging using nonsurvey data for UK companies. Data on hedging are obtained from disclosures made in financial statement footnotes by 443 companies subject to UK accounting rules. Evidence is consistent with hypotheses of firms hedging because of costly financial distress and of scale economies of using derivatives. Evidence is mixed with respect to underinvestment incentives and weak with tax incentives to hedge. Evidence also suggests that holding cash is the best substitute for financial derivatives and that managerial ownership does not directly affect the likelihood to hedge.
The effects of flexible firm orientations on market information use: intended and unintended consequences

The current business environment, characterized by rapidly shifting marketplace conditions, is pushing firms to create flexible organizational orientations. At the same time, in order to respond effectively to shifting market conditions, managers throughout the firm must be willing and able to disseminate and respond to market research designed to alert firms to shifts in market conditions. However, little work has focused on how creating a flexible firm orientation affects the way market research is disseminated and used. This article reports the findings of a study designed to enhance our knowledge in this area. The study suggests that firms attempting to create flexibility can lean toward an innovation orientation (encouraging new ideas) or a speed orientation (encouraging a rapid response). The study also suggests that firms which have an innovative orientation tend to use disseminated market research in a way that is consistent with the findings of the research. On the other hand, firms which have a speed orientation tend to use market research in a way that is less consistent with its findings.
Gender Diversity and Economic Performance of Firms: Evidences from Emerging Market

Due to recent concern and heavy discussion on women’s presence in corporate board room, this study examines the link between firm gender diversity and economic performance based on Pakistani listed firms. Empirical evidences show that the issue has a lot been researched in developed economies compared to developing economies. The study employs 30 index firms starting from 2008 to 2010. In order to examine the effect of gender diversity on firm performance, the study uses economic profit of firm, in terms of economic value added (EVA) as performance variable. Thirty seven per cent (37%) listed firms in Pakistan possess women on board while only 7% firms have female CEO. In accordance with prior empirical studies from developed countries, results in this study shows that there is no significant influence of female board members on economic performance of Pakistani listed firms.
The Beneficial Effect of Melatonin on Chronic Cyclosporin a Nephrotoxicity in Rats

Cyclosporin A (CsA)-induced nephrotoxicity may be the consequence of oxidative stress. Anti-oxidant agents could be useful in reducing CsA toxicity. In this light microscopy study, tubular dilatation, atrophy, vacuolization and tubulointerstitial fibrosis were observed in rats given CsA, whereas in rats given CsA plus melatonin, no histological changes occurred. It is concluded that melatonin could be useful for reducing the nephrotoxic effects of CsA.