THE TRIAD THAT BINDS: FINANCIAL ANALYSTS AND BOARD INTERLOCKS

This study explores the structural embeddedness of board interlocks in financial analysts’ firm coverage ties. Drawing on the theories of triangular ties, I conceptualize the relationship between financial analysts, a focal CEO, and the interlock director as a triad and examine how the positivity or negativity of analyst stock recommendations regarding the focal firm CEO and the interlock directors influence the maintenance of the board interlock ties. The theoretical perspectives and empirical findings of this study suggest that a structural shift from open to closed triad, where the focal firm CEO and the interlock director are followed by a common set of financial analysts, makes dyad members prefer partners with similar, rather than better stock recommendations to avoid unfavorable social comparison and cognitive dissonance

ComLittee: Literature Discovery with Personal Elected Author Committees

In order to help scholars understand and follow a research topic, significant research has been devoted to creating systems that help scholars discover relevant papers and authors. Recent approaches have shown the usefulness of highlighting relevant authors while scholars engage in paper discovery. However, these systems do not capture and utilize users' evolving knowledge of authors. We reflect on the design space and introduce ComLittee, a literature discovery system that supports author-centric exploration. In contrast to paper-centric interaction in prior systems, ComLittee's author-centric interaction supports curation of research threads from individual authors, finding new authors and papers with combined signals from a paper recommender and the curated authors' authorship graphs, and understanding them in the context of those signals. In a within-subjects experiment that compares to an author-highlighting approach, we demonstrate how ComLittee leads to a higher efficiency, quality, and novelty in author discovery that also improves paper discovery

Is women empowerment a zero-sum game? Unintended consequences of Microfinance for women empowerment in Ghana

Purpose: Against the background of growing concerns that development interventions can sometimes be a zero sum game, the purpose of this paper is to examine the unintended consequences of microfinance for women empowerment in Ghana. Design/methodology/approach. The study employs a participatory mixed-method approach including household questionnaire surveys, focus group discussions and key informant interviews to investigate the dynamics of microfinance effects on women in communities of different vulnerability status in Ghana. Findings: The results of hierarchical regression, triadic closure and thematic analyses demonstrate that the economic benefits of microfinance for women is also directly associated with conflicts amongst spouses, girl child labour, polygyny and the neglect of perceived female domestic responsibilities due to women’s devotion to their enterprises. Originality/value. In the light of limited empirical evidence on potentially negative impacts of women empowerment interventions in Africa, this paper fills a critical gap in knowledge that will enable NGOs, policy makers and other stakeholders to design and implement more effective interventions that mitigate undesirable consequences

Information passing in healthcare social networks

In recent years, social networks have become one of the most influential developments in our lives. In this paper, we investigate trust relationships and information passing in online social networks that focus on health. Our results are based on a social network called doktorsitesi.com which is the one of the largest online social networks in Turkey about healthcare that is managed by professionals. We show that there is a connection among patients in terms of information passing in doktorlarsitesi.com and quantify this information passing. Our findings implicate that healthcare interactions are embedded in social networks, and the results on the existence of information passing on other types of e-commerce social networks also apply to healthcare social networks.Publisher's Versio

Improving accuracy of recommender systems through triadic closure

The exponential growth of social media services led to the information overload problem which information filtering and recommender systems deal by exploiting various techniques. One popular technique for making recommendations is based on trust statements between users in a social network. Yet explicit trust statements are usually very sparse leading to the need for expanding the trust networks by inferring new trust relationships. Existing methods exploit the propagation property of trust to expand the existing trust networks; however, their performance is strongly affected by the density of the trust network. Nevertheless, the utilisation of existing trust networks can model the users’ relationships, enabling the inference of new connections. The current study advances the existing methods and techniques on developing a trust-based recommender system proposing a novel method to infer trust relationships and to achieve a fully-expanded trust network. In other words, the current study proposes a novel, effective and efficient approach to deal with the information overload by expanding existing trust networks so as to increase accuracy in recommendation systems. More specifically, this study proposes a novel method to infer trust relationships, called TriadicClosure. The method is based on the homophily phenomenon of social networks and, more specifically, on the triadic closure mechanism, which is a fundamental mechanism of link formation in social networks via which communities emerge naturally, especially when the network is very sparse. Additionally, a method called JaccardCoefficient is proposed to calculate the trust weight of the inferred relationships based on the Jaccard Cofficient similarity measure. Both the proposed methods exploit structural information of the trust graph to infer and calculate the trust value. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the TriadicClosure method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by substantially improving prediction accuracy and coverage of recommendations. Moreover, the method improves the performance of the examined state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and coverage when combined with them. On the other hand, the JaccardCoefficient method for calculating the weight of the inferred trust relationships did not produce stable results, with the majority showing negative impact on the performance, for both accuracy and coverage

Networks of Influence: Implementing Politically Sustainable Multinational Stakeholder Strategies

In a bid to gain stakeholder support for their operations, multinational firms operating in politically uncertain environments often inappropriately apply a rational financial approach to a sociopolitical problem. Using the tools of network theory, I present an alternative sociopolitical approach to gaining stakeholder support by engendering cooperative relations and increasing tie formation while minimizing conflict. This dissertation comprises three paper chapters. The first, theory, paper chapter outlines a theory of influence exploring how the firm\u27s strategic position within the network of stakeholders affords it positional benefits of information and reputation, while also highlighting the costs of exposure to pre-existing conflict and the fostering of conflict through asymmetric relations. The second, empirical, paper chapter explores how firms can best manage altercentric and egocentric uncertainty in the nonmarket environment and compares the efficacy of the ex ante strategies that the firm can use to manage both types of uncertainty. I hypothesize and find that through strategic network positioning that affords it information, the firm can manage its egocentric uncertainty; and, by managing how it is perceived through its associations, the firm can also manage stakeholders\u27 altercentric uncertainty. When both strategies are assessed together, I find greater returns to firms in terms of engendering cooperation, minimizing conflict and forming ties by managing altercentric uncertainty through strategic associations. In the third, also empirical, paper chapter, I use insights from structural balance theory to explore the relationship between dyadic structure and triadic closure among networks of actors in the sociopolitical context. I outline and test hypotheses of four types of structural homophily of the actors in the triad—access to resources, status, likeability and number of ties (popularity)—on the likelihood of the closure of that triad. I find that a link that closes an open directed triad is more likely when the actors of the triad have different access to resources, different status, and similar numbers of ties to other actors. I also find that likeability among actors in the triad has no impact on the likelihood of closing that triad. My empirical papers test the relationships among firms and stakeholders in a novel hand-coded database of 51,754 stakeholder events linking 4,623 unique stakeholders of a population of 19 publicly traded gold mining firms which operate 26 mines in 20 largely emerging economies

Examining the roles of proximity in craft brewery knowledge-sharing and collaboration in Aotearoa New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

The research presented in this thesis examines the roles of proximity dimensions in inter-firm knowledge-sharing and collaboration between craft breweries in Aotearoa New Zealand. I sought to develop a deep understanding of proximity dimensions by responding to the following research questions: (1) What are the roles of proximity in knowledge-sharing between New Zealand’s craft breweries? (1a) How do other dimensions of proximity relate to geographic proximity in the New Zealand Craft Brewing Industry? (2) How are craft brewery collaboration modalities influenced by proximity dimensions in the New Zealand Craft Brewing Industry? Extant literature in this domain focuses on understanding the role of geography and contends that geographic proximity is neither necessary nor sufficient for inter-firm learning or collaboration. Such literature is constrained by static methodological approaches, grounded in positivism. Static positivistic approaches limit understanding as to how the roles of proximity dimensions inter-relate and change over time. Addressing this limitation with an exploratory qualitative approach deepens understanding of proximity in knowledge-sharing and collaboration. Towards this approach, I conduct this research following an interpretive research paradigm. Empirical material has been collected via semi-structured interviews with 24 participants, from 21 craft breweries, across six geographic regions of Aotearoa New Zealand. These interviews were conducted and subsequently analysed using a method devised from productive hermeneutic thinking. Findings show that the role of geographic proximity in craft brewery knowledge-sharing and collaboration is complex. It is a direct enabler of inter-firm knowledge-sharing, but it is foremost an enabler of other proximity dimensions that facilitate subsequent knowledge exchange and collaboration. By re-examining established proximity dimensions through a hermeneutic lens, this research presents alternate perspectives of institutional, cognitive, and organisational proximity. Contributions to knowledge are also made through the identification of three novel proximity dimensions: triadic proximity; adversarial proximity; and capacity proximity. The roles of each of these new proximities in craft brewery knowledge-sharing and collaboration are demonstrated in this research. The findings of this thesis may be used to inform New Zealand governmental policy, which has historically sought, and failed, to capitalise on proximity as a mechanism for enhancing national innovation performance. Findings may also be of value to industry practitioners, such as craft brewery managers seeking to learn from and collaborate with their industry counterparts