114 research outputs found
Fighting For Control Power Of GOME Inc.: A Case Study
At 2:30pm, September 28, 2010, a special shareholder meeting for GOME is called by the largest shareholder of GOME, Guangyu Huang, to be held on the first floor of Regal Hotels, 88 Yee Wo Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. GOME Electrical Appliances is one of the largest electrical appliance retailers in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Huang Guangyu, the founder and largest shareholder of GOME, is currently in jail. The purpose of this meeting is to vote on the eight items on the agenda, including deposing the professional manager, Xiao Chen, from the CEO position of GOME. Should the investors support the largest shareholder or the professional manager? It may be the toughest problem GOME has faced in its history. It seems that no matter who wins, the result may not be good news to GOME and its investors. This case is about corporate governance and agency problems and is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses in Investment, Corporate Finance and Financial Markets
Differentiation With Shared Features And Cannibalization Of Information Goods
Large sunk cost of development, negligible cost of reproduction and distribution and substantial economies of scale make information goods distinct from industry goods. In this paper, we analyse versioning strategies of horizontally differentiated information goods with shared feature sets, discrete hierarchical groups and continuous individual consumer tastes. Based on our modelling results, when cannibalization is considered among different market segments, it is always sub-optimal to differentiate information goods if market is not fully differentiated or characteristics of the information goods are not specifically designed to relate to certain market segments
How Medical Crowdfunding Helps People? A Large-scale Case Study on Waterdrop Fundraising
While online medical crowdfunding achieved tremendous success, quantitative
study about whether and how medical crowdfunding helps people remains little
explored. In this paper, we empirically study how online medical crowdfunding
helps people using more than 27, 000 fundraising cases in Waterdrop
Fundraising, one of the most popular online medical crowdfunding platforms in
China. We find that the amount of money obtained by fundraisers is broadly
distributed, i.e., a majority of lowly donated cases coexist with a handful of
very successful cases. We further investigate the factors that potentially
correlate with the success of medical fundraising cases. Profile information of
fundraising cases, e.g., geographic information of fundraisers, affects the
donated amounts, since detailed description may increase the credibility of a
fundraising case. One prominent finding lies in the effect of social network on
the success of fundraising cases: the spread of fundraising information along
social network is a key factor of fundraising success, and the social capital
of fundraisers play an important role in fundraising. Finally, we conduct
prediction of donations using machine learning models, verifying the effect of
potential factors to the success of medical crowdfunding. Altogether, this work
presents a data-driven view of medical fundraising on the web and opens a door
to understanding medical crowdfunding.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at ICWSM 202
Inducing Causal Structure for Abstractive Text Summarization
The mainstream of data-driven abstractive summarization models tends to
explore the correlations rather than the causal relationships. Among such
correlations, there can be spurious ones which suffer from the language prior
learned from the training corpus and therefore undermine the overall
effectiveness of the learned model. To tackle this issue, we introduce a
Structural Causal Model (SCM) to induce the underlying causal structure of the
summarization data. We assume several latent causal factors and non-causal
factors, representing the content and style of the document and summary.
Theoretically, we prove that the latent factors in our SCM can be identified by
fitting the observed training data under certain conditions. On the basis of
this, we propose a Causality Inspired Sequence-to-Sequence model (CI-Seq2Seq)
to learn the causal representations that can mimic the causal factors, guiding
us to pursue causal information for summary generation. The key idea is to
reformulate the Variational Auto-encoder (VAE) to fit the joint distribution of
the document and summary variables from the training corpus. Experimental
results on two widely used text summarization datasets demonstrate the
advantages of our approach
Slimmable Generative Adversarial Networks
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved remarkable progress in
recent years, but the continuously growing scale of models makes them
challenging to deploy widely in practical applications. In particular, for
real-time generation tasks, different devices require generators of different
sizes due to varying computing power. In this paper, we introduce slimmable
GANs (SlimGANs), which can flexibly switch the width of the generator to
accommodate various quality-efficiency trade-offs at runtime. Specifically, we
leverage multiple discriminators that share partial parameters to train the
slimmable generator. To facilitate the \textit{consistency} between generators
of different widths, we present a stepwise inplace distillation technique that
encourages narrow generators to learn from wide ones. As for class-conditional
generation, we propose a sliceable conditional batch normalization that
incorporates the label information into different widths. Our methods are
validated, both quantitatively and qualitatively, by extensive experiments and
a detailed ablation study.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 202
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