Internationalisation, cultural distance and country characteristics: a Bayesian analysis of SME's financial performance

Relying on the accounting data of a panel of 403 Italian manufacturing SMEs collected over a period of 5 years, we find results suggesting that multinationality per se does not impact on the economic performance of international small and medium sized firms. It is the characteristics of the country selected i.e. the political hazard, the financial stability and the economic performance that significantly influence SMEs financial performance. The management implication for small and medium sized firms selecting and entering new geographic markets is significant, since our results show that for SMEs it is the market selection process that really matters and not the degree of multinationality

Nash equilibrium and bisimulation invariance

Game theory provides a well-established framework for the analysis of concurrent and multi-agent systems. The basic idea is that concurrent processes (agents) can be understood as corresponding to players in a game; plays represent the possible computation runs of the system; and strategies define the behaviour of agents. Typically, strategies are modelled as functions from sequences of system states to player actions. Analysing a system in such a setting involves computing the set of (Nash) equilibria in the concurrent game. However, we show that, with respect to the above model of strategies (arguably, the "standard" model in the computer science literature), bisimilarity does not preserve the existence of Nash equilibria. Thus, two concurrent games which are behaviourally equivalent from a semantic perspective, and which from a logical perspective satisfy the same temporal logic formulae, may nevertheless have fundamentally different properties (solutions) from a game theoretic perspective. Our aim in this paper is to explore the issues raised by this discovery. After illustrating the issue by way of a motivating example, we present three models of strategies with respect to which the existence of Nash equilibria is preserved under bisimilarity. We use some of these models of strategies to provide new semantic foundations for logics for strategic reasoning, and investigate restricted scenarios where bisimilarity can be shown to preserve the existence of Nash equilibria with respect to the conventional model of strategies in the computer science literature

Biofilm Origin of Clay-Coated Sand Grains

The presence of clay-sized particles and clay minerals in modern sands and ancient sandstones has long presented an interesting problem, because primary depositional processes tend to lead to physical separation of fine- and coarse-grained materials. Numerous processes have been invoked to explain the common presence of clay minerals in sandstones, including infiltration, the codeposition of flocculated muds, and bioturbation-induced sediment mixing. How and why clay minerals form as grain coats at the site of deposition remains uncertain, despite clay-coated sand grains being of paramount importance for subsequent diagenetic sandstone properties. We have identified a new biofilm mechanism that explains clay material attachment to sand grain surfaces that leads to the production of detrital clay coats. This study focuses on a modern estuary using a combination of field work, scanning electron microscopy, petrography, biomarker analysis, and Raman spectroscopy to provide evidence of the pivotal role that biofilms play in the formation of clay-coated sand grains. This study shows that within modern marginal marine systems, clay coats primarily result from adhesive biofilms. This bio-mineral interaction potentially revolutionizes the understanding of clay-coated sand grains and offers a first step to enhanced reservoir quality prediction in ancient and deeply buried sandstones

Evaluation of Agents Interactions in a Context-Aware System

The evaluation of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is a complex problem and it does not have a single form. Much effort has been spent on suggesting and implementing new architectures of MAS. Often these new architectures are not even compared to any other existing architectures in order to evaluate their relative benefits. The present work focuses on interactions, the most important characteristic of any complex software as autonomous agents according to [25], as a problematic of evaluation. So, in this paper, we describe the assignment of evaluation values to Agents interaction in a specific MAS architecture. This evaluation is based on the weight of the messages brought by an interaction.Funded by projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI,CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, SINPROB, CAM MADRINET S-0505/TIC/0255, and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

Analysis of Dialogical Argumentation via Finite State Machines

Dialogical argumentation is an important cognitive activity by which agents exchange arguments and counterarguments as part of some process such as discussion, debate, persuasion and negotiation. Whilst numerous formal systems have been proposed, there is a lack of frameworks for implementing and evaluating these proposals. First-order executable logic has been proposed as a general framework for specifying and analysing dialogical argumentation. In this paper, we investigate how we can implement systems for dialogical argumentation using propositional executable logic. Our approach is to present and evaluate an algorithm that generates a finite state machine that reflects a propositional executable logic specification for a dialogical argumentation together with an initial state. We also consider how the finite state machines can be analysed, with the minimax strategy being used as an illustration of the kinds of empirical analysis that can be undertaken.Comment: 10 page

On the role of monoterpene chemistry in the remote continental boundary layer

The formation of organic nitrates (RONO[subscript 2]) represents an important NO[subscript x] (NO[subscript x] = NO + NO[subscript 2]) sink in the remote and rural continental atmosphere, thus impacting ozone production and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation. In these remote and rural environments, the organic nitrates are primarily derived from biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) such as isoprene and monoterpenes. Although there are numerous studies investigating the formation of SOA from monoterpenes, there are few studies investigating monoterpene gas-phase chemistry. Using a regional chemical transport model with an extended representation of organic nitrate chemistry, we investigate the processes controlling the production and fate of monoterpene nitrates (MTNs) over the boreal forest of Canada. MTNs account for 5–12% of total oxidized nitrogen over the boreal forest, and production via NO[subscript 3] chemistry is more important than production via OH when the NO[subscript x] mixing ratio is greater than 75 pptv. The regional responses are investigated for two oxidation pathways of MTNs: one that returns NO[subscript x] to the atmosphere and one that converts MTNs into a nitrate that behaves like HNO[subscript 3]. The likely situation is in between, and these two assumptions bracket the uncertainty about this chemistry. In the case where the MTNs return NO[subscript x] after oxidation, their formation represents a net chemical NO[subscript x] loss that exceeds the net loss to peroxy nitrate formation. When oxidation of MTNs produces a molecule that behaves like HNO[subscript 3], HNO[subscript 3] and MTNs are nearly equal chemical sinks for NO[subscript x]. This uncertainty in the oxidative fate of MTNs results in changes in NO[subscript x] of 8–14%, in O[subscript 3] of up to 3%, and in OH of 3–6% between the two model simulations.United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NNX08AR13G)United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Earth Systems Science Fellowship

Global and regional effects of the photochemistry of CH_3O_2NO_2: evidence from ARCTAS

Using measurements from the NASA Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites (ARCTAS) experiment, we show that methyl peroxy nitrate (CH_3O_2NO_2) is present in concentrations of ~5–15 pptv in the springtime arctic upper troposphere. We investigate the regional and global effects of CH_3O_2NO_2 by including its chemistry in the GEOS-Chem 3-D global chemical transport model. We find that at temperatures below 240 K inclusion of CH_3O_2NO_2 chemistry results in decreases of up to ~20 % in NO_x, ~20 % in N_2O_5, ~5 % in HNO3, ~2 % in ozone, and increases in methyl hydrogen peroxide of up to ~14 %. Larger changes are observed in biomass burning plumes lofted to high altitude. Additionally, by sequestering NO_x at low temperatures, CH_3O_2NO_2 decreases the cycling of HO_2 to OH, resulting in a larger upper tropospheric HO_2 to OH ratio. These results may impact some estimates of lightning NO_x sources as well as help explain differences between models and measurements of upper tropospheric composition

Mediation Analysis for Count and Zero-Inflated Count Data without Sequential Ignorability and Its Application in Dental Studies

Mediation analysis seeks to understand the mechanism by which a treatment affects an outcome. Count or zero‐inflated count outcomes are common in many studies in which mediation analysis is of interest. For example, in dental studies, outcomes such as the number of decayed, missing and filled teeth are typically zero inflated. Existing mediation analysis approaches for count data often assume sequential ignorability of the mediator. This is often not plausible because the mediator is not randomized so unmeasured confounders are associated with the mediator and the outcome. We develop causal methods based on instrumental variable approaches for mediation analysis for count data possibly with many 0s that do not require the assumption of sequential ignorability. We first define the direct and indirect effect ratios for those data, and then we propose estimating equations and use empirical likelihood to estimate the direct and indirect effects consistently. A sensitivity analysis is proposed for violations of the instrumental variables exclusion restriction assumption. Simulation studies demonstrate that our method works well for different types of outcome under various settings. Our method is applied to a randomized dental caries prevention trial and a study of the effect of a massive flood in Bangladesh on children\u27s diarrhoea

Low temperatures enhance organic nitrate formation: evidence from observations in the 2012 Uintah Basin Winter Ozone Study

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and total alkyl nitrates (ΣANs) were measured using thermal dissociation laser-induced fluorescence during the 2012 Uintah Basin Winter Ozone Study (UBWOS) in Utah, USA. The observed NO2 concentration was highest before sunrise and lowest in the late afternoon, suggestive of a persistent local source of NO2 coupled with turbulent mixing out of the boundary layer. In contrast, ΣANs co-varied with solar radiation with a noontime maximum, indicating that local photochemical production combined with rapid mixing and/or deposition was the dominant factor in determining the ΣAN concentrations. We calculate that ΣANs were a large fraction (~60%) of the HOx free radical chain termination and show that the temperature dependence of the alkyl nitrate yields enhances the role of ΣANs in local chemistry during winter by comparison to what would occur in the warmer temperatures of summer

Expectation-Oriented Analysis and Design

A key challenge for agent-oriented software engineering is to develop and implement open systems composed of interacting autonomous agents. On the one hand, there is a need for permitting autonomy in order to support desirable system properties such as decentralised control. On the other hand, there is a need for restricting autonomy in order to reduce undesirable system properties such as unpredictability. This paper introduces a novel analysis and design method for open agent-oriented software systems that aims at coming up to both of these two contrary aspects. The characteristics of this method, called EXPAND, are as follows: (i) it allows agents a maximum degree of autonomy and restricts autonomous behaviour only if necessary (ii) it uses systemlevel expectations as a key modelling abstraction and as the primary level of analysis and design; and (iii) it is sociologically grounded in Luhmann's systems theory. The application of EXPAND is illustrated in a "car-trading platform" case study