1,357 research outputs found
Constructing an Index for Brand Equity: A Hospital Example
If two hospitals are providing identical services in all respects, except for the brand name, why are customers willing to pay more for one hospital than the other? That is, the brand name is not just a name, but a name that contains value (brand equity). Brand equity is the value that the brand name endows to the product, such that consumers are willing to pay a premium price for products with the particular brand name. Accordingly, a company needs to manage its brand carefully so that its brand equity does not depreciate. Although measuring brand equity is important, managers have no brand equity index that is psychometrically robust and parsimonious enough for practice. Indeed, index construction is quite different from conventional scale development. Moreover, researchers might still be unaware of the potential appropriateness of formative indicators for operationalizing particular constructs. Towards this end, drawing on the brand equity literature and following the index construction procedure, this study creates a brand equity index for a hospital. The results reveal a parsimonious five-indicator brand equity index that can adequately capture the full domain of brand equity. This study also illustrates the differences between index construction and scale development
A Two-stage Architecture for Stock Price Forecasting by Integrating Self-Organizing Map and Support Vector Regression
Stock price prediction has attracted much attention from both practitioners and researchers. However, most studies in this area ignored the non-stationary nature of stock price series. That is, stock price series do not exhibit identical statistical properties at each point of time. As a result, the relationships between stock price series and their predictors are quite dynamic. It is challenging for any single artificial technique to effectively address this problematic characteristics in stock price series. One potential solution is to hybridize different artificial techniques. Towards this end, this study employs a two-stage architecture for better stock price prediction. Specifically, the self-organizing map (SOM) is first used to decompose the whole input space into regions where data points with similar statistical distributions are grouped together, so as to contain and capture the non-stationary property of financial series. After decomposing heterogeneous data points into several homogenous regions, support vector regression (SVR) is applied to forecast financial indices. The proposed technique is empirically tested using stock price series from seven major financial markets. The results show that the performance of stock price prediction can be significantly enhanced by using the two-stage architecture in comparison with a single SVR model
Instantons and Condensate
We argue that the is similar to .Comment: 6 pages, 1 fig., 1 tab., RevTeX to be use
Self-energy-part resummed quark and gluon propagators in a spin-polarized quark matter and generalized Boltzmann equations
We construct perturbative frameworks for studying nonequilibrium
spin-polarized quark matter. We employ the closed-time-path formalism and use
the gradient approximation in the derivative expansion. After constructing
self-energy-part resummed quark and gluon propagators, we formulate two kind of
mutually equivalent perturbative frameworks: The first one is formulated on the
basis of the initial-particle distribution function, and the second one is
formulated on the basis of `` physical''-particle distribution function. In the
course of construction of the second framework, the generalized Boltzmann
equations and their relatives {\em directly} come out, which describe the
evolution of the system. The frameworks are relevant to the study of a magnetic
character of quark matters, e.g., possible quark stars.Comment: 57 page
Three-Charge Black Holes on a Circle
We study phases of five-dimensional three-charge black holes with a circle in
their transverse space. In particular, when the black hole is localized on the
circle we compute the corrections to the metric and corresponding
thermodynamics in the limit of small mass. When taking the near-extremal limit,
this gives the corrections to the constant entropy of the extremal three-charge
black hole as a function of the energy above extremality. For the partial
extremal limit with two charges sent to infinity and one finite we show that
the first correction to the entropy is in agreement with the microscopic
entropy by taking into account that the number of branes shift as a consequence
of the interactions across the transverse circle. Beyond these analytical
results, we also numerically obtain the entire phase of non- and near-extremal
three- and two-charge black holes localized on a circle. More generally, we
find in this paper a rich phase structure, including a new phase of
three-charge black holes that are non-uniformly distributed on the circle. All
these three-charge black hole phases are found via a map that relates them to
the phases of five-dimensional neutral Kaluza-Klein black holes.Comment: 58 pages, 10 figures; v2: Corrected typos, version appearing in JHE
Topological Defects and Non-homogeneous Melting of Large 2D Coulomb Clusters
The configurational and melting properties of large two-dimensional clusters
of charged classical particles interacting with each other via the Coulomb
potential are investigated through the Monte Carlo simulation technique. The
particles are confined by a harmonic potential. For a large number of particles
in the cluster (N>150) the configuration is determined by two competing
effects, namely in the center a hexagonal lattice is formed, which is the
groundstate for an infinite 2D system, and the confinement which imposes its
circular symmetry on the outer edge. As a result a hexagonal Wigner lattice is
formed in the central area while at the border of the cluster the particles are
arranged in rings. In the transition region defects appear as dislocations and
disclinations at the six corners of the hexagonal-shaped inner domain. Many
different arrangements and type of defects are possible as metastable
configurations with a slightly higher energy. The particles motion is found to
be strongly related to the topological structure. Our results clearly show that
the melting of the clusters starts near the geometry induced defects, and that
three different melting temperatures can be defined corresponding to the
melting of different regions in the cluster.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.
Time-Space Noncommutativity in Gravitational Quantum Well scenario
A novel approach to the analysis of the gravitational well problem from a
second quantised description has been discussed. The second quantised formalism
enables us to study the effect of time space noncommutativity in the
gravitational well scenario which is hitherto unavailable in the literature.
The corresponding first quantized theory reveals a leading order perturbation
term of noncommutative origin. Latest experimental findings are used to
estimate an upper bound on the time--space noncommutative parameter. Our
results are found to be consistent with the order of magnitude estimations of
other NC parameters reported earlier.Comment: 7 pages, revTe
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