Commitment or Entrenchment?: Controlling Shareholders and Board Composition

This paper examines the determinants of board composition and firm valuation as a function of board composition in Taiwan - a country that features relatively weak protection for investors, firms with controlling shareholders, and pyramidal groups. The results suggest that there is poor governance when the board is dominated by members who are affiliated with the controlling family but good governance when the board is dominated by members who are not affiliated with the controlling family. In particular board affiliation is higher when negative entrenchment effects - measured by (1) divergence in control and cash flow rights, (2) family control, and (3) same CEO and Chairman - are strong and lower when positive incentive effects, measured by cash flow rights, are strong. Moreover, relative firm value is negatively related to board affiliation in family-controlled firms. Thus, the proportion of directors represented by a controlling family appears to be a reasonable proxy for the quality of corporate governance at the firm level when investor protection is relatively weak and it is difficult to determine the degree of separation between ownership and control.

The Role of Trust in Explaining Food Choice: Combining Choice Experiment and Attribute Best−Worst Scaling

This paper presents empirical findings from a combination of two elicitation techniques—discrete choice experiment (DCE) and best–worst scaling (BWS)—to provide information about the role of consumers’ trust in food choice decisions in the case of credence attributes. The analysis was based on a sample of 459 Taiwanese consumers and focuses on red sweet peppers. DCE data were examined using latent class analysis to investigate the importance and the utility different consumer segments attach to the production method, country of origin, and chemical residue testing. The relevance of attitudinal and trust-based items was identified by BWS using a hierarchical Bayesian mixed logit model and was aggregated to five latent components by means of principal component analysis. Applying a multinomial logit model, participants’ latent class membership (obtained from DCE data) was regressed on the identified attitudinal and trust components, as well as demographic information. Results of the DCE latent class analysis for the product attributes show that four segments may be distinguished. Linking the DCE with the attitudinal dimensions reveals that consumers’ attitude and trust significantly explain class membership and therefore, consumers’ preferences for different credence attributes. Based on our results, we derive recommendations for industry and policy

Italian polka

textItalian Polka is an experiment that builds a bridge between Music and the field of Costume Design. It explores the new relationship of integration and artistic possibility between Music, Costume Design, Dance, and Digital Art. This is also an attempt to participate in a new form of performing art: a combination of a live concert and a costume show.Theatre and Danc

Individual Differences in Discounting Delayed Gains, Delayed Losses, and Probabilistic Losses

Many decisions in one’s daily life involve the discounting of delayed or probabilistic losses: Should we pay off our credit-card balance in full or incur interest; should we buy more collision and liability insurance or risk having to pay more in case of an accident? Despite its importance, however, discounting of losses is understudied, and few studies have focused on individual differences. The current study recruited 407 on-line participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk who completed three discounting questionnaires: delayed losses, probabilistic losses, and delayed gains. Magnitude effects were observed with delayed gains (i.e., larger delayed gains were discounted less steeply than smaller delayed gains), but there were no systematic effects of amount on the discounting of delayed losses or probabilistic losses. Almost all participants increasingly discounted the value of gains as the delay to their receipt increased. In contrast, although the majority of participants increasingly discounted the aversiveness of losses as the delay to the payment increased and as the probability of payment decreased, a number of participants showed different patterns of choice. More specifically, there was a subgroup of participants that discounted the aversiveness of losses substantially more when the payment would be required after a relatively short delay or with a high probability but discounted the aversiveness less as the delay to the payment increased or the probability of payment decreased. Another subgroup of participants didn’t discount the aversiveness of losses with delay or probability at all. When these individual differences in responding patterns were taken into account, differential relations between the choices of delayed gains, delayed losses, and probabilistic losses emerged. Taken together, the results show that people differ quantitatively in their discounting of delayed gains but differ qualitatively as well as quantitatively in their discounting of delayed and of probabilistic losses. These results suggest that the processes underlying the discounting of delayed gains, delayed losses, and probabilistic losses are different, and it is critical to consider individual differences in decision-making when studying loss discounting

Can Corporate Governance Variables Enhance the Prediction Power of Accounting-Based Financial Distress Prediction Models?

We integrated accounting, corporate governance, and macroeconomic variables to build up a binary logistic regression model for the prediction of financially distressed firms. Debt ratio and ROA are found to be the most explanatory accounting variables while the percentage of directors controlled by the largest shareholder (which measures negative entrenchment effect), management participation, and the percentage of shares pledged for loans by large shareholders are shown to have positive contribution to the probability of financial distress. For macroeconomic sensitivities, firms with higher sensitivities to the annualized growth rates of manufacturing production index and money supply (M2) are more vulnerable to financial distress. As to the issue of sampling technique, we find that oversampling of distressed firms is subject to the problem of choice-based sample bias pointed out by Zmijewski (1984). The classification accuracy is overstated consequently. We try to include as many healthy firms as possible in our sample instead of following the traditional 1: 1 or 1: 2 matching principle. The results show that the classification accuracy is mostly significantly improved in our integrated prediction model when the sample is closest to the actual population. For the trade-off between type I and type II errors in the predicted probability classification, we maximize the sum of classification accuracy for both groups of firms (the healthy and the distressed). It is found that an estimated probability of financial distress of 0.2000 represents the optimal cutoff point for predicting financial distress. Under such a cutoff scheme, our integrated model produces an in-sample classification accuracy of 80.7% for distressed firms and 93.2% for healthy firms. For out-sample prediction, 90% of the distressed firms and 85.4% healthy firms in 2001 are correctly identified using an integrated model built upon samples from 1998 to 2000.Corporate governance, Financial distress prediction model, Choice-based sample bias

Consumers’ Preference for Sweet Peppers with Different Process Attributes: A Discrete Choice Experiment in Taiwan

Based on an online discrete choice experiment (DCE) this study investigates the relative importance of food label information (country of origin, production methods, chemical residue testing (CRT)) and price for Taiwanese consumers’ in their purchase of sweet peppers. Results show that respondents focus mostly on the COO labeling during their sweet-pepper shopping, followed by price. Information concerning CRT results and production methods are of less importance. Our findings also indicate that interaction between attributes matter and that preference for attribute levels differs depending on socioeconomic characteristics

Consumers’ Preference for Sweet Peppers with different Process Attributes: A Discrete Choice Experiment in Taiwan

Based on an online discrete choice experiment (DCE) this study investigates the relative importance of food label information (country of origin, production methods, chemical residue testing (CRT)) and price for Taiwanese consumers’ in their purchase of sweet peppers. Results show that respondents focus mostly on the COO labeling during their sweet-pepper shopping, followed by price. Information concerning CRT results and production methods are of less importance. Our findings also indicate that interaction between attributes matter and that preference for attribute levels differs depending on socioeconomic characteristics

Single deep ultraviolet light emission from boron nitride nanotube film

Light in deep ultraviolet DUV region has a wide range of applications and the demand for finding DUV light emitting materials at nanoscale is increasingly urgent as they are vital for building miniaturized optic and optoelectronic devices. We discover that boron nitride nanotubes BNNTs with a well-crystallized cylindrical multiwall structure and diameters smaller than 10 nm can have single DUV emission at 225 nm 5.51 eV. The measured BNNTs are grown on substrate in the form of a thin film. This study suggests that BNNTs may work as nanosized DUV light sources for various applications. © 20

Scleral contact lenses for visual rehabilitation in keratoconus and irregular astigmatism after refractive surgery

AbstractThis study aims to report our experience of using fluid-ventilated, gas-permeable scleral contact lenses (SCLs) for visual rehabilitation of patients with keratoconus and irregular astigmatism after refractive surgery. This is a noncomparative interventional case series reporting eight consecutive patients fitted with SCLs because of irregular astigmatism following the failure of other optical corrections. Retrospective chart review and data analysis included age, sex, etiology prior to lens fitting, visual outcomes, follow-up time, and complications. Twelve eyes of eight patients were studied. All eyes were fitted with SCLs due to unsatisfactory vision with spectacle correction or other contact lens modalities. Five eyes had keratoconus and seven had irregular corneas post refractive surgery. The mean follow-up period was 14.4 ± 1.3 months (range 11–17 months). The mean age was 32.63 ± 7.68 years (range 18–48 years). The average steepest keratometry(Kmax) of our series was 49.56 ± 12.2 D. The mean refractive astigmatism was 5.50 ± 5.3 D. The mean best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) in logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution improved from 0.71 ± 0.50 (range 0.10–1.40) to 0.05 ± 0.07 (range 0.00–0.15) after SCL fitting (p < 0.001). All reported eyes achieved significant improvement in the BCVA with SCL fitting. None of the patients discontinued to wear SCLs. SCLs should be considered lenses of choice in irregular corneas refractory to conventional optical correction

Evaluating Everyday Behaviors with Delayed and/or Probabilistic Consequences Through a Discounting Framework

Delay and probability discounting refer to the decrease in subjective value of an outcome as the time until its occurrence increases and the likelihood of its occurrence decreases, respectively. Significant differences between the discounting of gains and losses, either delayed or probabilistic, have been documented in the literature. A recent study that investigated similarities and differences between the discounting of delayed gains, delayed losses, and probabilistic losses, found qualitative individual differences (i.e., subgroups) present only in the discounting of losses (Yeh et al., 2020). The current study expanded the previous investigation of subgroups to the discounting of probabilistic gains (Experiment 1) and examined to what extent the discounting of gains and losses, both delayed and probabilistic, are associated with everyday behaviors that involve delayed and/or probabilistic consequences (Experiment 2). Across two experiments, there was no evidence of subgroups either in the discounting of delayed gains or in the discounting of probabilistic gains, whereas a considerable number of individuals showed atypical discounting both in the discounting of delayed losses and in the discounting of probabilistic losses, consistent with the notion that subgroups were present only in the discounting of losses. Regarding the associations between degree of discounting and everyday behaviors that involve delayed and/or probabilistic consequences, only 2 out of 204 regression coefficients (4 types of discounting tasks x 51 everyday behaviors investigated) reached statistical significance after correcting for multiple testing. Furthermore, neither degree of discounting nor the demographic variables (i.e., gender, age, years of education, and household income) were strong predictors for everyday behaviors, and degree of discounting only accounted for limited proportions of variance beyond the demographic variables. Our findings provide support for studying the discounting of losses by subgroups while showing degree of discounting alone is not sufficient to predict individuals’ everyday behaviors