Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strategic vs. Non-Strategic Motivations of Sanctioning

We isolate strategic and non-strategic motivations of sanctioning in a repeated public goods game. In two experimental treatments, subjects play the public goods game with the possibility to sanction others. In the STANDARD sanctions treatment, each subject learns about the sanctions received in the same round as they were assigned, but in the SECRET sanctions treatment, sanctions are announced only after the experiment is finished, removing in this way all strategic reasons to punish. We find that sanctioning is similar in both treatments, giving support for nonstrategic explanations of sanctions (altruistic punishment). Interestingly, contributions to the public good in both treatments with sanctioning are higher than when the public goods game is played without any sanctioning, irrespective of announcing the sanctions to their receivers during the play of the game, or only after the game is finished. The mere knowledge that sanctions might be assigned increases cooperation: subjects correctly expect that nonstrategic sanctioning takes place against freeriders.
Distributed Coordination and Cooperation Control for Networked Mobile Manipulators

This paper addresses distributed coordination and cooperation control for networked mobile manipulators over a jointly connected topology with time delays. First, tracking control is proposed to guarantee the position and velocity synchronization of the networked mobile manipulators, while keeping a formation. For cooperation control, the decoupled dynamics is considered so that the task and null space of the mobile manipulators can be designed to achieve different missions. For end-effector motion, synchronization control works in combination with force controls to ensure that the network of mobile manipulators achieves cooperative manipulation and transportation. The motion of the mobile bases is controlled in the null space, which can be designed to track a trajectory, avoid colliding with obstacles, and achieve velocity consensus without influencing the main task. Numerical examples are addressed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed networked robotic system.
Strategies which aim to positively impact on weight, physical activity, diet and sedentary behaviours in children from zero to five years. A systematic review of the literature

Preventing the development of obesity in children is an international health priority. To assess the effectiveness of interventions designed to prevent obesity, promote healthy eating and/or physical activity and/or to reduce sedentary behaviours in 0–5‐year‐old children, a systematic review of the literature was performed. Literature searches were limited to articles published between January 1995 and June 2006, printed in English and sampling children aged 0–5‐years. Searches excluded literature concerned with breastfeeding, eating disorders, and interventions which were school‐based or concerned with obesity treatment. Two reviewers independently extracted data and assessed study strengths and weaknesses. Nine included studies were grouped based on the settings in which they were delivered. Most studies involved multi‐approach interventions, were conducted in the USA and varied in study designs and quality. All showed some level of effectiveness on at least one obesity‐behaviour in young children. These studies support, at a range of levels, the premise that parents are receptive to and capable of some behavioural changes that may promote healthy weight in their young children. The small quantity of research heralds the need, particularly given the potential for early intervention to have long‐lasting impacts on individual and population health, to build in a substantial way upon this evidence base.
Do Takeover Auctions Induce a Winner's Curse?

We test for the winner's curse in the corporate takeover market by comparing bidder returns in auctions versus negotiations. Our sample entails 308 takeovers that were announced in the 1989 to 1999 period. Our classification of auctions and negotiations comes from a unique data set on the private sales process that occurs prior to the public announcement of a takeover. We find that the returns to bidders in auctions are similar to the returns to bidders in negotiations. The results hold after controlling for size and deal characteristics that have been shown to affect bidder returns. The results are also robust to a variety of proxies for takeover competition. Our results do not support the existence of a winner's curse in the corporate takeover market. Roll (1986) provides a provocative model of the takeover process in which overconfident managers at bidding firms fall prey to the winner's curse when acquiring other publicly traded corporations. He contends that his model is as consistent with the evidence on the returns to bidders in takeovers as other models based on synergy or disciplinary motives. Thaler (1988) builds on Roll's (1986) model to argue that the non-positive return to bidders is consistent with a winner's curse in the takeover market. Moeller, Schlingemann, and Stulz (2004) conclude that the apparent overpayment by large bidders in corporate takeovers could stem from the factors described in Roll's (1986) model. While possibly consistent with the overall data on bidder returns, a more direct test of the winner's curse in the corporate takeover market would analyze the effect of takeover competition on bidder returns. For example, laboratory experiments such as Kagel and Levin (1986) contrast the effects on bidding of a large number of bidders versus a small number of bidders. In the corporate takeover setting, the basic question is: Do bidders fare worse when they participate in an auction for a target than when they negotiate with a target on a one-on-one basis? We address this question with a novel data set on auctions and negotiations in corporate takeovers. For a sample of 308 takeovers announced in the 1989 to 1999 period, we use information from SEC filings to determine the competitiveness of the private sales process that occurs prior to any public announcement of the takeover. This private sales process, which is described by Herzel and Shepro (1990) and Wasserstein (2000) and formally modeled by Hansen (2001), …
Learning from others to adapt quality management to the future

The purpose of this paper is to compare leadership behaviours from two different approaches with the leadership behaviours within quality management in order to find possible areas for developing leadership within quality management. A case study has been carried out at a Swedish award-winning organisation in order to study leadership behaviours. In-depth interviews have been carried out with the intention to explore how the manager has worked to become one of Sweden's best workplaces. Leadership behaviours from three different approaches are summarised in ‘The Core Leadership Behaviours’. The analysis of the leadership methodologies and behaviours used by the leaders and the ‘Core Leadership Behaviours’ from the three different approaches has been summarised for each approach. The comparison indicates that there are interesting leadership behaviours in Change Oriented Leadership, as well as in KaosPilots, that are not established within quality management. The leadership behaviours could complement quality management to meet new and challenging demands from customers and co-workers.
Gender, Social Networks, and Entrepreneurship in Ghana

This article reports the results of an exploratory study on gender-based differences in the motives underlying entrepreneurial activities in Ghana, the barriers and opportunities that the operational environment presents, and the manner in which entrepreneurs leverage resources. The evidence suggests that female entrepreneurs tend to have more difficulties in accessing bank financing but they compensate by cultivating social relationships and using the social capital derived from them as a resource leveraging mechanism. Women also tend to depend more on their social relationships for moral and emotional support during the initial stages of their enterprise development. No other substantial gender-based differences have been noted.
Short sales in the NYSE batch open and NASDAQ opening cross

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to study short sales trading as part of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) batch open and National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) opening cross. The paper examines whether short transactions at the open can predict future returns. Design/methodology/approach - The study tests to see if short transactions in the NYSE opening batch trade and NASDAQ opening cross are informative of future returns. Findings - It is found that a stock's opening-trade short volume is predictive of its short volume for the rest of trading day, positively related to its previous-day price change, and positively related to its overnight price change at the opening trade on option-expiration Fridays when the stock is part of the Standard and Poor (S and P) 500 index. Originality/value - While previous research shows that intraday short sale trades are informative, this is the first paper to examine the opening trade of the day, and whether these short sales are informative.
Open Architecture Software Design for Online Spindle Health Monitoring

This paper presents an open systems architecture-based software design for an online spindle health monitoring system. The software is implemented using the graphical programming language of LabVIEW, and presents the spindle health status in two types of windows: simplified spindle condition display and warning window for standard machine operators (operator window) and advanced diagnosis window for machine experts (expert window). The capability of effective and efficient spindle defect detection and localization has been realized using the analytic wavelet-based envelope spectrum algorithm. The software provides a user-friendly human-machine interface and contributes directly to the development of a new generation of smart machine tools.
Disclosure of Corporate Environmental Policies in Annual Reports: Further Evidence Incorporating a National Ideology–An Australian Study

ABSTRACT During the last decade, there has been a growing awareness at a community level and, more recently, at a business level of a changing emphasis on the disclosure of environmental performance by Australian public companies. Over the last few years, many studies have been undertaken which have examined the disclosure of environmental information by analyzing public company Annual Reports in Australia. Previously, public companies preferred to prepare Corporate Environmental Policy (CEP) statements for internal use only rather than for external reporting (Tilt, 1997, 2001). However, now these reports appear in the annual reports of Australian public companies. Using content analysis, this study examines a sample of public companies listed on the ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) in 2000 and the reporting nexus between these companies' CEPs and their Annual Reports. The results show that environmentally sensitive companies are disclosing more environmental information than other companies. Emerging from these results, our study shows that companies involved in the survey adopted some disclosure on environmental issues based on the ideological belief in such environmental issues. There are currently only limited requirements for any formal identification or reporting with regard to environmental assets, liabilities or contingencies in Australia. Our research has shown that environmentally sensitive companies provided a significantly greater amount of voluntary positive environmental disclosures than the non-sensitive companies. Based on the results of our research it is fair to say that there is an ideological belief within the Australian public companies and the Accounting profession on environmental reporting issues.
What makes employment safe? An analysis with misclassied German register data.

We analyse the main determinants for job separation with transition to unemployment using individual administrative data from Germany. While sample size is large and information in target variables is often highly accurate, non target variables are subject to considerable measurement error due to a lack of relevance in the data generating process. We apply comprehensive logical editing and imputing rules for the education and citizenship variables and use validation information to determine misclassification probabilities. Our results suggest the presence of considerable measurement error which strongly affects our estimation results. Long tenure rather than a higher educational degree is the key ingredient for a safe job.
Gender differences in work performance on the Baltimore Therapeutic Equipment work simulator.

OBJECTIVES The purposes of this study were to (a) establish biomechanical and physiological normative data for healthy young women performing three tasks on the Baltimore Therapeutic Equipment work simulator (BTE): wheel-turn, push-pull, and overhead-reach; and (b) compare these data with previously reported values for healthy men of a similar age group. METHOD Twenty women completed five test sessions: (a) task familiarization on the BTE to determine the work intensity that was perceived as hard on the Borg scale, (b) incremental test on an arm crank ergometer to measure peak oxygen uptake (VO2) and peak heart rate (HR), and (c) one of the three tasks in random order for 4 min during the next three sessions. Physiological responses were monitored with a metabolic cart interfaced with an electrocardiogram. RESULTS Torque, work, and power during the three tasks were significantly higher (p < .05) in men than in women. The absolute VO2 (L.min-1) during these tasks was higher in men, but when the VO2 was calculated relative to body weight (ml.kg-1.min-1), no significant (p > .05) gender differences were observed. Computation of energy expenditure relative to body weight and power output (cal.kg-1.W-1) indicated that women expended significantly (p < .05) more energy than men. No significant (p > .05) gender differences were observed for VO2 and HR when the values were expressed as a percentage of their respective peaks. CONCLUSIONS Findings indicated that (a) the functional work capacity is significantly lower in women than in men, (b) women are less efficient than men when the energy expenditure is expressed per unit of body weight and power output, and (c) the relative physiological stress in men and women is similar under these conditions.
Fund Liquidation, Self-Selection, and Look-Ahead Bias in the Hedge Fund Industry

A wide range of empirical biases hampers hedge fund databases. In this paper we focus upon survival-related biases and disentangle look-ahead biases due to self-selection of funds and due to fund termination. Self-selection arises because funds voluntarily report their information to data vendors and may decide to stop doing so. By extending existing methodology, we analyze persistence in hedge fund performance over the period 1994-2000, taking into account the above biases. The results show that look-ahead biases due to liquidation and self-selection enforce each other and may lead to overestimating expected returns by as much as 8% per year. Overall, the results are consistent with positive persistence in hedge fund returns at horizons of two and four quarters.
The Economics of the Food System Revolution

A revolution in food systems—food supply chains upstream from farms, to the food industry in the midstream segments of processing and wholesale and in the downstream segment of retail, then on to consumers—has been under way in the United States for more than a century and in developing countries for more than three decades. The transformation includes extensive consolidation, very rapid institutional and organizational change, and progressive modernization of the procurement system. In this article we examine the economics of these system-wide changes. We argue that the steps of conceptualizing and empirically researching this transformation—its patterns and trends, determinants, and impacts on farms and processing small and micro enterprises—are still in their infancy because of (a) remaining limitations on data suitable for formal modeling and hypothesis testing and (b) the sheer complexity of food system– related decisions that need to be modeled and understood. With the rapid accumulation of high-quality data now under way, conceptual and theoretical progress is also likely to be rapid.
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE WITHIN HIERARCHIES: THE CASE OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

This article uses the music industry to demonstrate a model of technological change that explains the sources and timing of technological discontinuities and dominant designs. The process by which firms translate customer needs into products can be represented in terms of an interaction between customer choice and product design hierarchies. Technological improvements at lower levels in the product design hierarchy can change the design tradeoffs and thus affect movements up and down the hierarchies. Movements up the hierarchies lead to the emergence of new product classes (i.e., technological discontinuity) whereas movements down the hierarchies may result in the emergence of a dominant design in a specific product class.
Comparison of methods for analyzing longitudinal binary outcomes: cognitive status as an example

Longitudinal data generate correlated observations. Ignoring correlation can lead to incorrect estimation of standard errors, resulting in incorrect inferences of parameters. In the example used here, standard logistic regression, a population-averaged (PA) model fit using generalized estimating equations (GEE), and random-intercept models are used to model binary outcomes at baseline, three and six years later. The outcomes indicate cognitive impairment versus no cognitive impairment in a sample of community dwelling elders. The models include both time-invariant (age, gender) and time-varying (time, interactions with time) covariates. The absolute estimates from random-intercept models are larger than those of both standard logistic and GEE models. Compared to the model fit using GEE that accounts for time dependency, standard logistic regression models overestimate standard errors of time-varying covariates (such as time, and time by problems with activities of daily living), and underestimate the standard errors of time-invariant covariates (such as age and gender). The standard errors from the random-intercept model are larger than those from logistic regression and GEE models. The choice of models, GEE or random-intercept, depends on the research question and the nature of the covariates. Population-averaged methods are appropriate when between-subjects effects are of interest, and random-effects are useful when subject-specific effects are important.
Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment in Developing Countries: A Panel Data Analysis

The aim of this paper is to explore, by estimating a panel data econometric model, thedetermining factors of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in developing countriesover the period of 1990-2007. The study is based on a sample of panel data on 25developing countries. In the model, dependent variable is FDI inflows. Independentvariables are FDI outflows, GDP, BOP, population, openness of the economy, mobile,internet, technology, ODA and labor. According to the econometric results, in themain model, openness of the economy, market size, availability of labour force, ODA,mobile, technology and internet have positive effects on FDI inflows in developingcountries.
Party Policy in Modern Democracies

Introduction Part I. Policy and Party Competition 1. Policy dimensions and political preferences 2. "Policy spaces" and models of party competition Part II. Measuring Policy Positions 3. The expert surveys as a measurement tool 4. Measurement issues: bias and error correction in expert survey results 5. The Dimensionality of policy spaces 6. Comparing patterns of party competition Part III. Data Appendices References Index
Selecting image pairs for SfM on large scale dataset by introducing a novel set similarity

Structure from Motion (SfM), which reconstructs a 3D model from 2D image sequences, is one of the most important reconstruction techniques in computer vision domain. In recent years, the unordered large photo collections are available on the Web and many researches have been proposed about SfM using the images on the Web. However, computational cost for matching in these researches is very high. To make matching feasible, finding out image connectivity for SfM in advance is important. The bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) with applying standard term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) weighting is one of the widely used methods for calculating image pair similarity as a vector similarity. On the other hand, a method based on Jaccard similarity was proposed to use for this purpose as a set similarity, and improved the precision scores. In this paper, we present a novel set similarity called modified Simpson similarity, and a method for finding appropriate images to match in SfM by combining it with the method using tf-idf weighting. In our method, the similarities between images are calculated using tf-idf as the vector similarity and using modified Simpson similarity as the set similarity. After calculating pairwise similarity by each method, top k most similar images are selected for each image as a query, and we take the intersection of those predicted image pairs. For the evaluation of our method, experimental results are shown on the large dataset which is one of the benchmarks for this purpose. The result of our method which is a combination of tf-idf and modified Simpson similarity achieved better accuracy than any other results by tf-idf, other set similarity and combination of tf-idf and other set similarity.
Predicting Long-Term Cognitive Outcome with New Regression Models in Donepezil-Treated Alzheimer Patients in a Naturalistic Setting

Background/Aims: To build and analyze regression models predicting (1) the long-term cognitive outcome in donepezil-treated patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and (2) the short-term (6 months) cognitive impact of treatment depending on cognitive severity at baseline. Methods: The Swedish Alzheimer Treatment Study (SATS) is an open-label, non-randomized, 3-year, multicentre study in a routine clinical setting. A total of 435 patients, mostly in the mild and moderate stages of Alzheimer’s disease, received the cholinesterase inhibitor donepezil. They were assessed with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale-cognitive subscale (ADAS-cog) at baseline and every 6 months for a total period of 3 years. Regression models were fitted from the actual scores at different intervals for the prediction of the cognitive outcome. Results: The ADAS-cog and MMSE scores during the 3-year treatment period could be predicted with a high degree of explanation using regression models (p < 0.001). Moreover, there was a significant relation between the mean cognitive change after 6 months of treatment and the baseline scores on MMSE (p < 0.01) and ADAS-cog (p < 0.001), respectively. Conclusion: Statistical models can be used to predict cognitive outcome in donepezil-treated cohorts of AD patients. These models can be clinically valuable, for example when assessing the efficacy of new therapies when added to cholinesterase inhibitor treatment.