Performance of target after rejecting an acquisition offer

The role of the management in the performance of completed M&A deal has been studied under different theoretical frameworks. Questions regarding the target management being overconfident or suffering from certain psychological biases or having a conflict of interest has been asked in this context. The same question could be asked about the management of the target in the M&A deals. This paper analyses such question by focusing on the targets that actively rejects an offer. The decision to reject an offer shows very strong signal about the target management belief in their company valuation since this means foregoing a usually significant premium in the offer. The central question is for these cases, whether a higher foregone premium would predict better performance afterward. The preliminary results show that a 1 percentage point increase in the premium rejected will lead to a 1.7 percentage point increase in the premium of the subsequently completed deal if there is one and also a .13 percentage point increase in the likelihood that the target will enter into another subsequent deal. These results might imply the idea that the target managers have a rational evaluation of their firm and was acting on behalf of their shareholders when they reject the original offer

Comparing Java Programs: Syntactic and Contextual Semantic Differences

This thesis describes the foundation for developing a tool that compares Java programs, or different versions of a program. The tool captures syntactic differences and contextual semantic differences as well. Syntactic differences are “ordinary” changes in the code. This tool works much in the same way as the Unix tool diff, but it is much smarter than diff. This is because it exploits the fact that programs are built differently than ordinary text. The tool diff’s purpose is to compare text, and it will therefore give imprecise or too verbose results. The tool described in this thesis can identify contextual semantic differences because it knows the contexts of methods, meaning that it knows whether methods are directly declared in the class, inherited from implemented interfaces or if methods override the class’ parent’s method. The approach in this thesis for comparing Java programs is to transform the programs into abstract syntax trees. The transformation from source code to abstract syntax trees are done with the help Strafunski. Strafunski is a software bundle that supports generic programming. The implementation of the tool is done in Haskell. Haskell is a functional programming language. The work of comparing abstract syntax trees can be broken down into the problem of finding the largest common subtree of two abstract syntax trees and further more, the problem of finding the longest common subsequence of two sequences. This thesis describes and presents new algorithms for doing this and it also describe working Haskell code of the implementation of the tool

A formula of evaluating structural safety based on fuzzy set theory

This article presents an approach to assess safety levels of structures. A new formula for determining the fuzzy reliability of structures is proposed for the case where the set of loading effect and set of structural durability are general fuzzy sets. Illustration example concerning the bending strength evaluation of a simple-beam structure, is presented with the choice of triangular fuzzy sets for loading effect and structural durability

SUGGESTIONS FOR PROMOTING STUDENTS’ PARTICIPATION IN ENGLISH SPEAKING CLASSES: STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS

EFL high school students’ low level of participation is reported as a problem commonly found in English speaking classes. This study aims to investigate high school students’ perceptions of suggestions for promoting students’ participation in English speaking classes. Questionnaires and interviews were employed as data collection instruments of the study. 206 EFL high school students from three grades in a high school in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam responded to the questionnaire and then 6 of them participated in the semi-structured interview sessions. The results strongly endorsed that “promote students’ self-confidence”, “make learning tasks stimulating and the way teachers present tasks”, “establish a supportive and caring relationship”, and “create a pleasant classroom climate” were significant strategies promoting students’ participation. The results of the study are expected to contribute to the comprehension of teachers’ strategies to enhance students’ participation in English speaking classes. Article visualizations