Fear of the unknown: a pre-departure qualitative study of Turkish international students

This paper presents findings from eleven in-depth interviews with Turkish undergraduate students, who were, by the time of data collection, about to spend a semester at a European university under the Erasmus exchange scheme. The students all agreed to be interviewed about their feelings about studying in a foreign culture, and were found to be anxious prior to departure about the quality of accommodation in the new destination, their language ability and the opportunity to form friendships. Fears were expressed about possible misconceptions over Turkey as a Muslim and a developing country. Suggestions are made for HEI interventions to allay student travellers’ concerns

Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance

In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes, by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences in experience across the entire team) and intrapersonal team diversity (i.e., whether individuals on the team are more or less specialized). We also examine whether team familiarity - team members' prior experience working with one another - helps teams to better manage challenges created by task changes and greater interpersonal team diversity. Using detailed project- and individual-level data from an Indian software services firm, we find that the interaction of task-change with intrapersonal diversity is related to improved project performance, while the interaction of task-change with interpersonal diversity is related to diminished performance. Additionally, the interaction of team familiarity with interpersonal diversity is related to improved project performance in some cases. Our results highlight a need for more nuanced approaches to leveraging experience in team management.Diversity, Knowledge Work, Project Flexibility, Task Change, Team Familiarity

Who's afraid of an EU tax and why? Revenue system preferences in the European Parliament

The EU's revenue system is still typical for an organisation based on international cooperation and stands in contrast to the Union's far advanced legislative and political role. This contrast feeds the debate on granting the EU an autonomous tax source. Our contribution explores the factors which shape the acceptance of the EU tax option among European policy makers. We make use of a unique database : A survey among Members of the European Parliament (MEP) which resulted in a response of some 150 of the representatives. Our results confirm an important role for party ideology and individual characteristics but they also demonstrate that country-specific factors are important to understand the support for an EU tax. In the light of our findings the status quo bias in the EU's revenue system can be attributed to the persistent importance of national interests with respect to fiscal burden sharing and tax policy. --European Parliament,EU tax,revenue system

Selective Exposure: Implications for Information Elaboration in Asynchronous Online Discussions

Selective exposure is an inhibitor to teaching and learning in an IT-enabled learning environment because in electronic environments, students have greater freedom over what they choose to access and read. This study will use in-class field experiments in order to examine the impact of information presentation and familiarity of the source on the quality of information elaboration through the mediating factor of selective exposure. Selective exposure is an individual’s tendency to seek confirmatory (as opposed to non-confirmatory) information related to a choice that has been made by the individual. Information elaboration requires attending to the decision-related information, processing that information, and analyzing the information to present a coherent argument related thereto. The integrative quality of information elaboration depends on the extent to which non-confirmatory and confirmatory opinions are attended to, processed, and combined to lead to a decision. This research will contribute to the literature on IT-enabled teaching and learning

Does geography matter to bondholders?

We find that the location of corporate headquarters significantly affects the firm’s bondholders. Similar to Loughran and Schultz (2006) and others, who show that investors are better able to obtain information on nearby companies, we look at firms located in large metropolitan cities, small cities, and rural areas and find that firms located in remote rural areas exhibit significantly higher costs of debt capital (of up to 65 basis points) in comparison to their urban counterparts. Unlike other studies that focus on the role of information asymmetries in the local bias of investors and decision makers, we are able to show that firms in remote areas experience greater costs of debt capital primarily because of a greater difficulty of monitoring their activities. We find that the adverse impact of bad corporate governance on bondholders is magnified in geographically remote firms, primarily because geographic distance reduces the effectiveness of external monitoring. Consistent with that, we show that in the private placement market, where firms are closely monitored by institutional investors, location plays no role in explaining the cross-sectional variation in the cost of debt capital across companies. We also find that the passage of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which brought about regulatory improvements in monitoring and governance, significantly reduced the agency costs of debt in rural firms. Taken together, our results indicate that the firm’s information environment interacts with the impact of corporate governance, particularly affecting the effectiveness of external monitoring in alleviating agency problems between insiders and debt holders.

Effects of user experience on user resistance to change to the voice user interface of an in‑vehicle infotainment system: Implications for platform and standards competition

This study examines the effects of user experience on user resistance to change—particularly, on the relationship between user resistance to change and its antecedents (i.e. switching costs and perceived value) in the context of the voice user interface of an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. This research offers several salient findings. First, it shows that user experience positively moderates the relationship between uncertainty costs (one type of switching cost) and user resistance. It also negatively moderates the association between perceived value and user resistance. Second, the research test results demonstrate that users with a high degree of prior experience with the voice user interface of other smart devices exhibit low user resistance to change to the voice user interface in an IVI system. Third, we show that three types of switching costs (transition costs, in particular) may directly influence users to resist a change to the voice user interface. Fourth, our test results empirically demonstrate that both switching costs and perceived value affect user resistance to change in the context of an IVI system, which differs from the traditional IS research setting (i.e. enterprise systems). These findings may guide not only platform leaders in designing user interfaces, user experiences, and marketing strategies, but also firms that want to defend themselves from platform envelopment while devising defensive strategies in platform and standards competition

A Note on the Sri Lankan Experience in Poverty Reduction

‘Poverty’ is a complex, multifaceted and much investigated subject which has generated an colossal amount of literature. The situation in relation to Sri Lanka is no different—both in relation to the complexity of the subject and the investigation and literature it has generated. Within the international debates, Sri Lanka has been used extensively as a case study as in the early work on the basic needs and growth versus welfare debates, UNICEF’s work on Adjustment with a Human Face and more recently in the World Bank’s Voices of the Poor qualitative study. The domestic research and literature has been as prolific, the most recent group being the background material for the Framework on Poverty Reduction.1 This paper will not attempt to summarise the existing debates and literature or provide a comprehensive overview to poverty and its many facets in Sri Lanka. Instead it will briefly place Sri Lanka in the context of South Asia and look at the policy framework which brought about the present situation and the ongoing and envisaged policy changes. Finally it will highlight a few selected issues which are of growing interest and have received relatively less attention. A selected bibliography is provided at the end.

Alleviating Own-Race Bias in Cross-Racial Identifications

Over the past 80 years, courts, social scientists, and legal scholars have come to agree that eyewitness testimony is largely unreliable due to a variety of confounding factors. One prominent factor that makes eyewitness testimony faulty is own-race bias; individuals are generally better at recognizing members of their own race and tend to be highly inaccurate in identifying persons of other races. This instance, where a witness of one race attempts to identify a member of another race, is referred to as a cross-racial identification. Own-race bias in cross-racial identifications creates racial discrimination in the American judicial system, where a majority of defendants in criminal cases are minorities. Courts have traditionally ignored the problem of own-race bias in the courtroom, believing that traditional safeguards such as cross-examination and summation effectively resolve racial discrimination in the judicial system. Critical race theorists, however, argue that this response not only fails to address own-race bias, but actually contributes to racial discrimination by reinforcing ordinariness–the idea that racism and racial discrimination are ordinary experiences, not abnormalities. In response, academics have proposed multiple solutions, including allowing expert testimony, issuing jury instructions, or eliminating eyewitness testimony altogether, to address the problem of own-race bias. Applying ordinariness, and balancing the concerns of the judiciary, the optimal solution to alleviate own-race bias is to issue a jury instruction. I argue, though, that the few cross-racial identification jury instructions that are currently in place have critical flaws. Applying critical race theory and, more specifically, ordinariness, I argue that an optimal jury instruction must be mandatory in all situations where a cross-racial identification has occurred, drafted using objective language, and issued before the identifying witness testifies against the defendant and separate from the general eyewitness testimony jury instruction