470 research outputs found
International expansion and home-country resource acquisition: a signaling perspective of emerging-market firms’ internationalization
Despite growing attention to the role of home countries in studies of emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs), there is limited focus on how international expansion affects EMNEs’ home conditions. Drawing on signaling theory, we propose that EMNEs’ international expansions serve as a signaling mechanism that shapes perceptions of stakeholders in their home countries and thus facilitate their resource acquisition from these stakeholders. The signaling effect is strengthened when EMNEs enter more advanced host countries where higher entry barriers incur higher signaling costs that serve as isolating mechanisms; and when they are located in less developed home markets where information asymmetry is more serious due to weaker institutional arrangements. Furthermore, congruent signals, such as patents, strengthen the main effect by cross-confirming the signaled content, while incongruent signals, such as political connections, weaken it due to ambiguity in interpreting the original signal. Using instrumental variables and a difference-in-differences design to account for potential endogeneity of international expansion, our empirical analysis of Chinese-listed privately owned enterprises from 1999 to 2019 supports our propositions
ARE STABLECOINS SAFE HAVENS FOR TRADITIONAL CRYPTOCURRENCIES? AN EMPIRICAL STUDY DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
We investigate whether stablecoins are safe havens for traditional cryptocurrencies with fresh evidence from the recent crisis period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results support the safe-haven properties of Tether for both before and during the pandemic. For Digix, a gold-backed stablecoin with relatively small market capitalization, we find a change in characteristics before and during the pandemic, but do not find statistically significant evidence for its safe-haven properties. Furthermore, we document that, when considering the economic benefits and costs of adding safe-haven assets into cryptocurrency portfolios, the one with Tether outperforms both a naked portfolio and the portfolio with a traditional safe-haven asset such as gold
ANGIOTENSIN-(1-7)/MAS AXIS AND VASCULAR INFLAMMATION
Atherosclerosis, as a potentially serious condition, has become one of the most prevalent causes of mortality over the world. RAS (Reninangiotensin- system) is recognized to be a key role in the development of atherosclerosis, which considered as a chronic inflammatory disease. Ang II (angiotensin II) is proven to cause atherosclerosis, hypertension and aortic aneurysms. While activation of Mas receptors by Ang-(1-7) [angiotensin-(1- 7)] shows an important role in prevention of atherosclerosis. The activation of Ang-(1-7)/Mas receptor axis counteracts Ang II-induced hypertension, inflammation, fibrosis and apoptosis responses. We have concluded that, the relationship between Ang-(1-7)/Mas axis and vascular inflammation could be the paving-stone of the avoidance and novel treatment for atherosclerosis. The scope of this study is to review the relationship between Ang-(1-7)/Mas axis and vascular inflammation in the development of atherosclerosis
GraphGAN: Graph Representation Learning with Generative Adversarial Nets
The goal of graph representation learning is to embed each vertex in a graph
into a low-dimensional vector space. Existing graph representation learning
methods can be classified into two categories: generative models that learn the
underlying connectivity distribution in the graph, and discriminative models
that predict the probability of edge existence between a pair of vertices. In
this paper, we propose GraphGAN, an innovative graph representation learning
framework unifying above two classes of methods, in which the generative model
and discriminative model play a game-theoretical minimax game. Specifically,
for a given vertex, the generative model tries to fit its underlying true
connectivity distribution over all other vertices and produces "fake" samples
to fool the discriminative model, while the discriminative model tries to
detect whether the sampled vertex is from ground truth or generated by the
generative model. With the competition between these two models, both of them
can alternately and iteratively boost their performance. Moreover, when
considering the implementation of generative model, we propose a novel graph
softmax to overcome the limitations of traditional softmax function, which can
be proven satisfying desirable properties of normalization, graph structure
awareness, and computational efficiency. Through extensive experiments on
real-world datasets, we demonstrate that GraphGAN achieves substantial gains in
a variety of applications, including link prediction, node classification, and
recommendation, over state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: The 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018), 8
page
Adversarial Batch Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Learn to Reward from Imperfect Demonstration for Interactive Recommendation
Rewards serve as a measure of user satisfaction and act as a limiting factor
in interactive recommender systems. In this research, we focus on the problem
of learning to reward (LTR), which is fundamental to reinforcement learning.
Previous approaches either introduce additional procedures for learning to
reward, thereby increasing the complexity of optimization, or assume that
user-agent interactions provide perfect demonstrations, which is not feasible
in practice. Ideally, we aim to employ a unified approach that optimizes both
the reward and policy using compositional demonstrations. However, this
requirement presents a challenge since rewards inherently quantify user
feedback on-policy, while recommender agents approximate off-policy future
cumulative valuation. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel batch
inverse reinforcement learning paradigm that achieves the desired properties.
Our method utilizes discounted stationary distribution correction to combine
LTR and recommender agent evaluation. To fulfill the compositional requirement,
we incorporate the concept of pessimism through conservation. Specifically, we
modify the vanilla correction using Bellman transformation and enforce KL
regularization to constrain consecutive policy updates. We use two real-world
datasets which represent two compositional coverage to conduct empirical
studies, the results also show that the proposed method relatively improves
both effectiveness (2.3\%) and efficiency (11.53\%
A multi-channel photometric detector for multi-component analysis in flow injection analysis
The detector, a multi-channel photometric detector, described in this
paper was developed using multi-wavelength LEDs (light emitting
diode) and phototransistors for absorbance measurement controlled
by an Intel 8031 8-bit single chip microcomputer. Up to four flow
cells can be attached to the detector. The LEDs and phototransistors
are both inexpensive, and reliable. The results given by the detector
for simultaneous determination of trace amounts of cobalt and
cadmium in zinc sulphate electrolyte are reported. Because of the
newly developed detector, this approach employs much less hardware
apparatus than by employing conventional photometric detectors
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