Getting By With The Advice Of Their Friends: Ceos' Advice Networks And Firms' Strategic Responses To Poor Performance

This paper theorizes that relatively poor firm performance can prompt chief executive officers (CEOs) to seek more advice from executives of other firms who are their friends or similar to them and less advice from acquaintances or dissimilar others and suggests how and why this pattern of advice seeking could reduce firms' propensity to change corporate strategy in response to poor performance. We test our hypotheses with large-sample survey data on the identities of CEOs' advice contacts and archival data on firm performance and corporate strategy. The results confirm our hypotheses and show that executives' social network ties can influence firms' responses to economic adversity, in particular by inhibiting strategic change in response to relatively poor firm performance. Additional findings indicate that CEOs' advice seeking in response to low performance may ultimately have negative consequences for subsequent performance, suggesting how CEOs' social network ties could play an indirect role in organizational decline and downward spirals in firm performance.Business Administratio

An economical vent cover

Inexpensive formed-plastic vent cover has been developed that allows controlled purge of vent systems and also provides blowout protection. Cover can also be used in relief mode to allow normal system relief flows without disengaging from vent system. Cover consists of two parts made of plastics with varying densities to fit media used and desired pressures

Costs of Chronic Waterborne Zinc Exposure and the Consequences of Zinc Acclimation on the Gill/Zinc Interactions of Rainbow Trout in Hard and Soft Water

Juvenile rainbow trout were exposed to zinc in both moderately hard water (hardness 5 120 mg CaCO3/L, pH = 8.0, Zn = 150 μg/L or 450 μg/L) and soft water (hardness = 20 mg CaCO3/L, pH = 7.2, Zn = 50 μg/L or 120 μg/L) for 30 d. Only the 450 mg/L zinc–exposed fish experienced significant mortality (24% in the first 2 d). Zinc exposure caused no effect on growth rate, but growth affected tissue zinc levels. Whole body zinc levels were elevated, but gills and liver showed no consistent increases relative to controls over the 30-d. Therefore, tissue zinc residues were not a good indicator of chronic zinc exposure. After the 30-d exposure, physiological function tests were performed. Zinc was 5.4 times more toxic in soft water (control 96 h LC50s in hard and soft water were 869 μg/L and 162 μg/L, respectively). All zinc-exposed trout had acclimated to the metal, as seen by an increase in the LC50 of 2.2 to 3.9 times over that seen in control fish. Physiological costs related to acclimation appeared to be few. Zinc exposure had no effect on whole body Ca2+ or Na+ levels, on resting or routine metabolic rates, or on fixed velocity sprint performance. However, critical swimming speed (UCrit) was significantly reduced in zinc-exposed fish, an effect that persisted in zinc-free water. Using radioisotopic techniques to distinguish new zinc incorporation, the gills were found to possess two zinc pools: a fast turnover pool (T1/2 = 3–4 h) and a slow turnover pool (T1/2 = days to months). The fast pool was much larger in soft water than in hard water, but at most it accounted for \u3c3.5% of the zinc content of the gills. The size of the slow pool was unknown, but its loading rate was faster in soft water. Chronic zinc exposure was found to increase the size of the fast pool and to increase the loading rate of the slow pool

Z-Pencils

The matrix pencil (A,B) = {tB-A | t \in C} is considered under the assumptions that A is entrywise nonnegative and B-A is a nonsingular M-matrix. As t varies in [0,1], the Z-matrices tB-A are partitioned into the sets L_s introduced by Fiedler and Markham. As no combinatorial structure of B is assumed here, this partition generalizes some of their work where B=I. Based on the union of the directed graphs of A and B, the combinatorial structure of nonnegative eigenvectors associated with the largest eigenvalue of (A,B) in [0,1) is considered.Comment: 8 pages, LaTe

UK life science company formation: patterns of growth in UK regions and the role of biotechnology incubators

This study examines the regional distribution of new life science company formation and highlights 'hotspots' of where new activity is relatively intense. The analysis indicates that there are generally two types of region, the first type contains life science clusters that were established during the early 2000s and the second type displayed little or no significant life science activity during this period. This study analyses survey data (n=580) and evidences new patterns of life science company activity within peripheral UK regions. The study shows that new life science activity is occurring away from the traditional 'Golden Triangle' of London, Cambridge and Oxford. New life science company activity can be found in peripheral regions such as the East Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside, the North West and in Scotland. The evidence contained in this study suggests that new UK life science company activity is supported by the presence of UK biotechnology incubators. During the early 2000s there were only a handful of biotechnology incubators in the UK, by 2012 there over twenty-five. This study provides evidence to suggest that UK biotechnology incubators play an important role in supporting new life science companies. Since the early 2000s, biotechnology incubators have appeared in the same regions that display significant levels of new life science company activity. Furthermore, significant proportions of new life science companies are located in biotechnology incubators within regions that displayed little or no significant life science activity during the early 2000s. This study demonstrates that biotechnology incubators have an important role to play in supporting regional innovation systems, especially within peripheral regions in the UK

Uniform random colored complexes

We present here random distributions on $(D+1)$-edge-colored, bipartite graphs with a fixed number of vertices $2p$. These graphs are dual to $D$-dimensional orientable colored complexes. We investigate the behavior of quantities related to those random graphs, such as their number of connected components or the number of vertices of their dual complexes, as $p \to \infty$. The techniques involved in the study of these quantities also yield a Central Limit Theorem for the genus of a uniform map of order $p$, as $p \to \infty$.Comment: 36 pages, 9 figures, minor additions and correction

Fitting Spectral Decay with the k-Support Norm

The spectral kk-support norm enjoys good estimation properties in low rank matrix learning problems, empirically outperforming the trace norm. Its unit ball is the convex hull of rank kk matrices with unit Frobenius norm. In this paper we generalize the norm to the spectral (k,p)(k,p)-support norm, whose additional parameter pp can be used to tailor the norm to the decay of the spectrum of the underlying model. We characterize the unit ball and we explicitly compute the norm. We further provide a conditional gradient method to solve regularization problems with the norm, and we derive an efficient algorithm to compute the Euclidean projection on the unit ball in the case p=∞p=∞. In numerical experiments, we show that allowing pp to vary significantly improves performance over the spectral kk-support norm on various matrix completion benchmarks, and better captures the spectral decay of the underlying model

Dynamics of left-right party positions : separating systematic movements from noise

We investigate whether it is feasible to use the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data on party positioning to take account of party movements along the left-right dimension. At issue are answers to two questions. Are there discernable dynamics in party positions? And, if so, is it possible to separate systematic party dynamics from measurement error so as to make effective use of the CMP data? The answer to both questions is yes. Our analysis of 81 parties across the post-War period detects systematic movements in the left-right positions for one third of the parties. Our analysis of measurement error reveals that, as measured by the CMP, about 65% of the variance in party positions records reliable long-term differences across parties, another 16% records systematic movements, and the remaining 19% is error. We conclude with discussions of what one should make of this mix of stability, movements, and error and what one should do about it when using the CMP data to analyze substantively important questions about politics and policy. Of particular importance are our recommendation to be ever mindful of the two possible sources of error—a faulty instrument and erratic behavior on the part of parties themselves—and our suggestion for how to separate or combine those possibilities depending on one’s theoretical concern