Revisiting the OLI Paradigm: The Institutions, the State, and China's OFDI

We propose a modified theoretical framework based on John Dunning’s classical OLI paradigm in the international business literature to analyze Chinese firms’ fast-growing and aggressive outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). In particular, from an institutional perspective, we suggest a “state-stewardship” view to incorporate state institutions into the OLI paradigm. This paper supplements our earlier work (Ren, Liang, and Zheng, 2011) on identifying the formal institutional determinants of Chinese firms’ OFDI motivations and strategies, by further looking at the impact of direct and indirect policies, and the OFDI state-controlled financial intermediaries. Under our modified OLI framework we also examine the potential concerns on China’s state-backed OFDI and its implication on long-term sustainability.outward foreign direct investment, institutions, state-stewardship view, OLI paradigm

Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory

Perception and expression of emotion are key factors to the success of dialogue systems or conversational agents. However, this problem has not been studied in large-scale conversation generation so far. In this paper, we propose Emotional Chatting Machine (ECM) that can generate appropriate responses not only in content (relevant and grammatical) but also in emotion (emotionally consistent). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the emotion factor in large-scale conversation generation. ECM addresses the factor using three new mechanisms that respectively (1) models the high-level abstraction of emotion expressions by embedding emotion categories, (2) captures the change of implicit internal emotion states, and (3) uses explicit emotion expressions with an external emotion vocabulary. Experiments show that the proposed model can generate responses appropriate not only in content but also in emotion.Comment: Accepted in AAAI 201

Integrin α\u3csub\u3ev\u3c/sub\u3eβ\u3csub\u3e8\u3c/sub\u3e Adopts a High Affinity State for Soluble Ligands Under Physiological Conditions

© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. It has been proposed that integrins adopt a low affinity conformation under physiological conditions. Integrin can either be activated through cytoplasm or by binding of cations such as Mn2+ to the head domain. The cytoplasmic activation pathway, that is, inside-out signaling has been regarded as the physiological pathway for integrin activation. Integrin β8 is important for neuron vascular development. However, due to the highly divergent cytoplasmic domain, this integrin probably does not rely on inside-out signaling for affinity regulation. We therefore hypothesized that the β8 integrin uniquely assumes a constitutively high affinity state under physiological conditions. We discovered that β8 indeed exhibited high binding to soluble vitronectin in the presence of Ca2+ and the ligand binding could not be further enhanced by addition of Mn2+. The lower ectodomain stalk of the integrin, which is comprised by the integrin epidermal growth factor-like (I-EGF) domains and βTD domain, is critical for this high affinity conformation. In addition, we found that unlike other integrins, Mg2+ at low concentration inhibited β8 ligand binding. Mutagenesis studies indicated that β8 integrin possesses a unique cation binding site which might contribute to the ligand binding affinity. Our study showed that both the β8 lower ectodomain stalk and the head domain play an important role in its high affinity state under physiological conditions. J. Cell. Biochem. 118: 2044–2052, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc