Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An empirical assessment of the relationships between service quality, satisfaction and value : a tourism study

This study considers the interplay between customer satisfaction, service quality and value in a tourism environment. The basic point of departure is that the business of marketing is still customer satisfaction, and that customer satisfaction will determine value perceptions and thus eventually behavioural intentions such as actual buying. However, marketers and particularly tourism marketers need to develop accurate models of the process by which these constructs interact. A theoretical model of the hypothesised relationships in the customer's service assessment process is proposed and empirically tested in a tourism environment. The findings of this study provide considerable empirical support for the Experiential Model of Service Evaluation. The model suggests a definite causal ordering : that service quality influences customer satisfaction, which in turn determines value perceptions.
The Rotterdam Demand Model and its Application in Marketing

This paper shows how the system-wide approach to demand analysis can be utilized in marketing. In the context of the Rotterdam model, we describe how the approach can be applied to narrowly defined groups of goods such as beer, wine and spirits to estimate income and price elasticities of demand. The paper also provides extensions to deal with advertising and introduces a new way of identifying market structure.
On Prepayment and Rollover Risk in the US Credit Card Market

Prepayment risk is a major consideration in the US credit card market. According to industry studies, about 17% of balances are transferred annually. Using a dynamic model of repricing, this paper analyzes the impact of prepayment risk on the functioning of the credit card market. We show that the model can account for the level of balance transfers in the data and is also consistent with the observed change in the cross-sectional dispersion of credit card interest rates, which thus far has been attributed to a more precise pricing of default risk. Importantly, we show that the very features that allow our model to account for the cross-sectional features of the market unveil a novel source of macroeconomic fragility. We quantify the potential of this new channel to account for the observed deleveraging in the credit card market during the 2007-09 financial crisis.
Serie Documentos de Trabajo Superintendencia de Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones

This article describes, in simple terms, the main aspects regarding self-regulation of stock exchanges. Generally speaking, stock exchanges are considered selfregulatory organizations (SRO) since they have the powers to regulate, supervise and penalize their broker members and the companies listed in the market. This paper presents a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of self-regulation as opposed to governmental regulation and supervision, and provides some insights about the best ways to balance both regulatory systems. Chilean stock exchanges historically have operated in a climate of centralized governmental supervision. This papers discusses some areas of self-regulation that can be improved in Chilean stock markets. Finally, the paper summarizes the recent discussion on the effects of stock exchanges demutualization on regulation and self-regulation.
Country‐of‐manufacture effects for known brands

This paper examines the differential effects of country‐of‐manufacture information on product beliefs and attitudes for brands with different levels of brand equity. Results show that when there is congruence between brand origin and country of manufacture (e.g. a Sony television that is made in Japan), the latter information has no significant effect on product beliefs and global product attitude. When country‐of‐manufacture information indicates that a branded product is made in a country with a less reputable image than that of the brand origin (e.g. a Sony television that is made in Mexico), the information produces more negative effects on product evaluations for low equity brands than high equity brands. These results can be attributed to two different perceptual processes through which incongruent country‐of‐manufacture information affects product evaluations for brands with different levels of brand equity.
Direct Interaction of the Rat unc-13 Homologue Munc13-1 with the N Terminus of Syntaxin*

unc-13 mutants in Caenorhabditis elegans are characterized by a severe deficit in neurotransmitter release. Their phenotype is similar to that of the C. elegans unc-18 mutation, which is thought to affect synaptic vesicle docking to the active zone. This suggests a crucial role for the unc-13 gene product in the mediation or regulation of synaptic vesicle exocytosis. Munc13-1 is one of three closely related rat homologues of unc-13. Based on the high degree of similarity between unc-13 and Munc13 proteins, it is thought that their essential function has been conserved from C. elegans to mammals. Munc13-1 is a brain-specific peripheral membrane protein with multiple regulatory domains that may mediate diacylglycerol, phospholipid, and calcium binding. In the present study, we demonstrate by three independent methods that the C terminus of Munc13-1 interacts directly with a putative coiled coil domain in the N-terminal part of syntaxin. Syntaxin is a component of the exocytotic synaptic core complex, a heterotrimeric protein complex with an essential role in transmitter release. Through this interaction, Munc13-1 binds to a subpopulation of the exocytotic core complex containing synaptobrevin, SNAP25 (synaptosomal-associated protein of 25 kDa), and syntaxin, but to no other tested syntaxin-interacting or core complex-interacting protein. The site of interaction in syntaxin is similar to the binding site for the unc-18 homologue Munc18, but different from that of all other known syntaxin interactors. These data indicate that unc-13-related proteins may indeed be involved in the mediation or regulation of synaptic vesicle exocytosis by modulating or regulating core complex formation. The similarity between the unc-13 and unc-18 phenotypes is paralleled by the coincidence of the binding sites for Munc13-1 and Munc18 in syntaxin. It is possible that the phenotype of unc-13 and unc-18 mutations is caused by the inability of the respective mutated gene products to bind to syntaxin.
Universal appeals with local specifications

Purpose – Aims to explore the factorial structure of automobile brand image in the context of a cross‐national study. More specifically, we intend to answer two questions: whether the factor structure of brand image perception differ across countries, and whether these differences are owing to nation's culture and level of economic development.Design/methodology/approach – An existing data set, which consists of data collected from survey research, was employed. Data covering the top 20 automobile markets consisting of 4,320 eligible new car owners. Perception of and attitude towards automobile brand associations were measured using nominal scales.Findings – Provides empirical evidence that supports the applicability of multiple brand image dimensions corresponding to the consumer's sensory, utilitarian, symbolic and economic needs at the global level. The study also suggested that factor structure of brand image differs across nations and these differences might be reflective to a nation's culture and it.
The Regulation of PRIIPs: Great Ambitions, Insurmountable Challenges?

The Regulation on key information documents for packaged retail and insurance-based investment products ("PRIIPs Regulation") purports to deal with two important concerns in the field of investor protection: (i) investors do not read, understand or digest extensive and/or technical information; and(ii) they hardly compare the products and services of different financial institutions.The first concern relates to the long established problems of information overload and rational ignorance. The PRIIPs Regulation tackles this problem by introducing a short information document, which uses easy to understand language and visual indicators supporting the content of the document.The second concern relates to the fact that information documents are often hard to compare in view of their different formats. Standardization of the information document is one obvious answer to this problem. It is however only useful, in as far as the scope of the Regulation is sufficiently wide and covers all comparable products. The PRIIPs Regulation is innovative in this respect, being the first piece of "horizontal" or "cross-sectoral" legislation in the history of EU financial regulation, covering banking, investment and insurance products, instead of limiting its scope of application to one of these sectors.Although the PRIIPs Regulation deals with very concrete investor protection concerns and should therefore be supported as an important improvement, it also raises important concerns, challenges and criticisms. This contribution situates the PRIIPs Regulation in its law and economics and behavioral finance context and offers a critical analysis of its benefits, drawbacks and – seemingly insurmountable – challenges.
Healthcare audio event classification using Hidden Markov Models and Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models

Audio is a useful modality complement to video for healthcare monitoring. In this paper, we investigate the use of Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models (HHMMs) for healthcare audio event classification. We show that HHMM can handle audio events with recursive patterns to improve the classification performance. We also propose a model fusion method to cover large variations often existing in healthcare audio events. Experimental results from classifying key eldercare audio events show the effectiveness of the model fusion method for healthcare audio event classification.
Patients prescribed injectable heroin or methadone -their opinions and experiences of treatment.

AIMS To describe the opinions and experiences of treatment of a cohort of patients prescribed injectable opiate treatment (IOT). DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS Cross-sectional survey of all patients on injectable diamorphine or methadone at a tertiary referral clinic in the northwest of England in June 2000. FINDINGS A total of 104 subjects were prescribed IOT, mostly male (87.5%) and with a mean age of 36.3 years (SEM 0.66, range 20-53). The majority (75.0%) were prescribed injectable methadone with the remainder (25.0%) on injectable diamorphine. Most subjects (93.3%) used intravenously, many (58.7%) into the femoral vein. Treatment was sought most frequently in order to procure a drug supply of known dose and purity, to improve family relationships and to avoid trouble with the police. Half were satisfied with their treatment but many wanted to change to injectable diamorphine or to increase their doses. Subjects cited many advantages of injectable diamorphine over injectable methadone, although benefits of injectable methadone were acknowledged. CONCLUSIONS Subjects articulated a consistent desire for IOT in order to 'stabilize' their lives in a number of ways. This sample was recruited from one of the country's largest specialist IOT clinics. The generalizability of this study's findings to all patients in the United Kingdom currently prescribed IOT, however, was not examined. Nevertheless, these findings suggest that clinicians and policy makers should be aware of many heroin users' perception of IOT as long-term treatment and their clear preference for injectable diamorphine. Further investigation of differential outcomes between oral and injectable OT and between different injectable opiates is warranted.
Attentional Graph Convolutional Networks for Knowledge Concept Recommendation in MOOCs in a Heterogeneous View

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are becoming a modish way for education, which provides a large-scale and open-access learning opportunity for students to grasp the knowledge. To attract students' interest, the recommendation system is applied by MOOCs providers to recommend courses to students. However, as a course usually consists of a number of video lectures, with each one covering some specific knowledge concepts, directly recommending courses overlook students' interest to some specific knowledge concepts. To fill this gap, in this paper, we study the problem of knowledge concept recommendation. We propose an end-to-end graph neural network based approach calledAttentional Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Deep Knowledge Recommender (ACKRec) for knowledge concept recommendation in MOOCs. Like other recommendation problems, it suffers from sparsity issue. To address this issue, we leverage both content information and context information to learn the representation of entities via graph convolution network. In addition to students and knowledge concepts, we consider other types of entities (e.g., courses, videos, teachers) and construct a heterogeneous information network (HIN) to capture the corresponding fruitful semantic relationships among different types of entities and incorporate them into the representation learning process. Specifically, we use meta-path on the HIN to guide the propagation of students' preferences. With the help of these meta-paths, the students' preference distribution with respect to a candidate knowledge concept can be captured. Furthermore, we propose an attention mechanism to adaptively fuse the context information from different meta-paths, in order to capture the different interests of different students. To learn the parameters of the proposed model, we propose to utilize extended matrix factorization (MF). A series of experiments are conducted, demonstrating the effectiveness of ACKRec across multiple popular metrics compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods. The promising results show that the proposed ACKRec is able to effectively recommend knowledge concepts to students pursuing online learning in MOOCs.
Influence of Incidental Discrete Emotions on Health Risk Perception and Persuasion

ABSTRACT This research examines the effects of two incidental discrete emotions—fear and anger—on health risk perception (i.e., perceived susceptibility to a health problem) and persuasion. In two experiments, fear and anger were induced before participants were exposed to a public service announcement that advocated sun protection behaviors to prevent skin cancer (Experiment 1) or flossing to prevent gum diseases (Experiment 2). It was found that fearful participants perceived greater susceptibility to the health risk than angry participants and those who were in a neutral affective state. Angry participants did not differ from those in a neutral affective state in terms of perceived susceptibility. There was mixed evidence that fear exerted an indirect effect on attitude toward the recommended health behavior and intention to perform the health behavior through health risk perception. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
A Total Risk Measurement Framework for Hedge Funds and Funds of Funds

This paper illustrates how qualitative analysis can be incorporated into quantitative risk measurement in order to construct an expected distribution of hedge fund returns that explicitly allows for market, residual and tail risk. We show how the combination of statistical criteria with out-of-sample model evaluation techniques, coupled with a qualitative understanding of the particular hedge fund strategy can lead to more robust risk factor models that capture the out-of-sample rather than the historical variation in hedge fund returns. Using Monte Carlo simulation techniques, that allow the most appropriate data generating process for each risk factor, we proceed to build a market risk based expected distribution of returns which is then adjusted for the presence of residual and tail risk. The residual risk distribution of expected returns is entirely based on the out-of-sample errors of the risk factor model and by using the out-of-sample explanatory power of the model as the weighting parameter we allow the model to ‘self correct’ when the actual returns deviate significantly from the model conditional expected returns. The tail risk distribution of returns and the correlation of these tails are solely based on qualitative analysis. We propose a methodology for the quantification of the potential impact of factors such as leverage, liquidity and concentration on the size and probability of excess losses due to tail risks. The proposed framework allows investors to explicitly measure, monitor and manage the modelable and non-modelable risks in a hedge fund portfolio.
Market Orientation and the New Product Paradox.

The extant literature shows that the strength of the market orientation–performance relationship decays as the terminal measure of performance shifts from new product success to profitability to market share. As Day (1999) concluded, a broader nomological inquiry is needed to more fully understand the nature and limits of market orientation's effects. This suggests that a broader nomological inquiry is needed to fully understand the nature and limits of market orientation's effects. Utilizing a national sample of marketing executives, the present study's purpose is to build a fuller understanding of the effects of market orientation on firm performance. Its structural equations model includes measures of new product success, profitability, and market share. The research reinforces a strong positive relationship between market orientation and new product success. The expanded nomological network under study, however, implies barriers to market orientation's effectiveness. First, market-orientation-inspired increases in the priority firms place on “breakthrough” learning without commensurate increases in the priority placed on “breakthrough” innovation capabilities can boomerang and negatively impact new product success. Second, market-orientation-inspired new product development programs that are unable to increase market share can negatively impact profitability. These gatekeepers to the success of market orientation underscore the need for firms to coordinate a strong market orientation with resources and capabilities that increase the effectiveness of the marketing function. Without such coordination, the positive effect of market orientation on new product success may be limited to incremental innovations, and the overall effect of successful new products on profitability may be limited.
Formal research exposure during neurology residency training matters

In North America, the curriculum of neurology residency training must accomplish a variety of metrics in a constrained period of time. The 6 American Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Core Competencies are made up of different milestones that residents should master at key stages of their medical training, including patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, and systems-based practice. The ACGME requires scholarly activity by all trainees participating in residency and fellowship programs. The curriculum should advance a resident's knowledge of the basic principles of research and introduce him or her to a research pathway that would enhance the quality of medical training. Research, as any other educational and professional activity, has to be taught within a structured mentored educational program that advances the student from basic to more complex skills. Traditionally, the research activity during the neurology residency was left to the discretion and motivation of the neurology resident during his or her training. The final research production defied easy measurement and varied substantially across graduating residents. Other medical specialties, including internal medicine, have explored the advantages of having a formal scholarly program during the residency. Participation in scholarly activity can lead residents to superior clinical performance as well as better scores on the in-service residency examinations and board examinations.1
Concurrently induced plasticity due to convergence of distinct forms of spike timing‐dependent plasticity in the developing barrel cortex

Spike timing‐dependent plasticity (STDP) has been demonstrated in a variety of neural circuits. Recent studies reveal that it plays a fundamental role in the formation and remodeling of neuronal circuits. We show here an interaction of two distinct forms of STDP in the mouse barrel cortex causing concurrent, plastic changes, potentially a novel mechanism underlying network remodeling. We previously demonstrated that during the second postnatal week, when layer four (L4) cells are forming synapses onto L2/3 cells, L4‐L2/3 synapses exhibit STDP with only long‐term potentiation (t‐LTP). We also showed that at the same developmental stage, thalamus‐L2/3 synapses express functional cannabinoid type 1 receptor (CB1R) and exhibit CB1R‐dependent STDP with only long‐term depression (t‐LTD). Thus, distinct forms of STDP with opposite directions (potentiation vs. depression) converge in the target layer of L2/3 during the second postnatal week. As the canonical target layer of the thalamus is L4 and thalamic cells activate both L4 and L2/3 cells, in principle, thalamic activity could induce t‐LTP at L4‐L2/3 and t‐LTD at thalamus‐L2/3 simultaneously. In this study, we tested this possibility. We found that when spike timing stimulation was applied to the thalamus and L2/3 cells, synapses between the thalamus and L2/3 were weakened, whereas synapses between L4 and L2/3 were potentiated; therefore, converging STDP caused the predicted concurrent plasticity. We propose that developmentally transient convergences of STDP may play a role in shaping neural networks by facilitating L4‐L2/3 formation and weakening aberrant thalamic innervation to L2/3, both driven by thalamic activity.
Short-duration therapeutic massage reduces postural upper trapezius muscle activity

Massage therapy has historically been used as a therapeutic treatment to help reduce pain and promote relaxation. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of therapeutic massage on the upper trapezius muscles, which are commonly associated with increased muscle tension. This was a randomized crossover study. Seventeen healthy individuals (nine women; 24.5±4.0 years) participated in the study. All individuals participated in two sessions that were held 24 h apart. In one of the sessions, the participants received a moderate pressure massage applied to the shoulders and neck. In the other session, participants sat quietly. The order of the sessions was counterbalanced across participants. Muscle activity, as measured by surface electromyography, of the upper trapezius muscles was recorded. The amount of muscle activity change following massage was compared with the change in muscle activity following quiet sitting. Muscle activity of the upper trapezius reduced significantly (19.3%; P=0.004) following massage compared with muscle activity following quiet sitting (1.0%). Our findings suggest that short-duration moderate pressure massage leads to a reduction in upper trapezius muscle activity. This result has potential implications for clinical populations such as those with chronic neck pain.