What motivates European firms to adopt environmental management systems?.

The growing world concern about the impact of industrial activities on the environment has motivated companies to adopt Environmental Management Systems (EMSs). Despite this trend, very Httle has been written about the variables associated with the implementation of this type of management tool. This article describes the individual, strategic and organizational variables that a sample of European firms use to determine whether to adopt these EMS. It also discusses the most frequently used environmental standards, the outside influences that motivate directors to implement them and the personal perceptions that playa key role in determining whether the standards will be adopted.Environmental Management Systems; European firms;

Re-evaluating green marketing strategy : a stakeholder perspective.

Purpose The present study aims to examine the influence of stakeholders on green marketing strategy (GMS). Marketing literature recognizes that stakeholders play a significant role in influencing organizations and markets, but has not targeted a single integrated approach to examine the relationship between stakeholder management and GMS. Design/methodology/approach This research comprised several phases, including the development of a typology of GMS, an analysis of how managers prioritize stakeholders, a study of the influence of stakeholders on GMS, and an analysis of the influence of the organizational context on managers’ perception of the stakeholders. The hypotheses were validated using multivariate correlational techniques. Findings The study identified the stakeholders associated with GMS and their impact on the strategy adopted by the firms, and established how this is moderated by the firm’s own economic sector and organizational characteristics. Research limitations/implications Future studies might replicate and extend the research in other industries and countries to ascertain whether environmental concerns have different effects in other contexts. Practical implications The surveys on GMS and stakeholder perception undertaken in the present survey are a potential source of information for managers because they can be used as a self diagnostic tool to determine if a firm’s attitude to the environment is reactive or proactive. Originality/value Results show that the organizational “greening” process is not a linear, one dimensional progression, rather an uneven process in which several GMS profiles prioritize different stakeholders. The results also reveal that underlying perceptual, behavioral, and organizational factors influence GMS implementation.Green marketing; Environmental management; Stakeholder analysis; Spain;

M-Theory Giant Gravitons with C field

We find giant graviton configurations of an M5-brane probe in the D=11 supergravity background generated by a stack of non-threshold (M2,M5) bound states. The M5-brane probe shares three directions with the background and wraps a two-sphere transverse to the bound states. For a particular value of the worldvolume gauge field of the PST formalism, there exist solutions of the equations of motion for which the M5-brane probe behaves as a wave propagating in the (M2,M5) background. We have checked that the probe breaks the supersymmetry of the background exactly as a massless particle moving along the trajectory of its center of mass.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX; v2: references adde

Generating Multi-Categorical Samples with Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose a method to train generative adversarial networks on mutivariate feature vectors representing multiple categorical values. In contrast to the continuous domain, where GAN-based methods have delivered considerable results, GANs struggle to perform equally well on discrete data. We propose and compare several architectures based on multiple (Gumbel) softmax output layers taking into account the structure of the data. We evaluate the performance of our architecture on datasets with different sparsity, number of features, ranges of categorical values, and dependencies among the features. Our proposed architecture and method outperforms existing models

Giant Gravitons with NSNS B field

We study the motion of a D(8-p)-brane probe in the background created by a stack of non-threshold (D(p-2), Dp) bound states for $2\le p\le 6$. The brane probe and the branes of the background have two common directions. We show that for a particular value of the worldvolume gauge field there exist configurations of the probe brane which behave as massless particles and can be interpreted as gravitons blown up into a fuzzy sphere and a noncommutative plane. We check this behaviour by studying the motion and energy of the brane and by determining how supersymmetry is broken by the probe as it moves under the action of the background.Comment: 24 pages, LaTe

Countertrade and the choice of strategic trading form

Reciprocal trade agreements, usually known under the generic name of countertrade (CT) have been traditionally seen as a form of bilateralism, and thus as an inefficient form of international exchange. Although contemporary trade theories do not fully explain the increasing prevalence of CT transactions, we will argue that it is possible to construct and use a third (hybrid) institutional form, which is congruent with the transaction-cost theories, and we will show how — under market imperfections — countertrade can reduce transaction costs while conserving the efficiency gains generated by these specific arrangements.Publicad

Locating-dominating sets and identifying codes in graphs of girth at least 5

Locating-dominating sets and identifying codes are two closely related notions in the area of separating systems. Roughly speaking, they consist in a dominating set of a graph such that every vertex is uniquely identified by its neighbourhood within the dominating set. In this paper, we study the size of a smallest locating-dominating set or identifying code for graphs of girth at least 5 and of given minimum degree. We use the technique of vertex-disjoint paths to provide upper bounds on the minimum size of such sets, and construct graphs who come close to meet these bounds.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure

The assessment of credit guarantee schemes for SME's: valuation and cost

Small and medium enterprises (SME' s) have important limitations from the financial viewpoint. Their reduced capability to generate resources (self-financing) and their high financial costs as compared to the profitability of investments, makes them highly dependent of short-term bank financing. Among the different mechanisms used to solve these financial problems we find credit guarantee schemes as the Loan Guarantee Associations (LGA). These (mutual or government granted) credit insurance systems were set to facilitate the access of SME ' s to the credit market covering part of the loss incurred when borrowers default on a loan. In spite of some legal differences, LGA in most European Union countries function in a fairly similar way, making therefore easier to compare their operational cost and impact on business. This study provides a model for the valuation of the costs and implicit benefits associated with the loan guarantee programs. Empirical results indicate that the use of LGA is likely to differ among SME' s depending on company size and debt financial cost. The relatively high cost of the loan guarantee, is not always fully compensated with a similar reduction of the interest rates of the financing entity, hindering, in many cases, the full development of the schemes

Flux Stabilization of D-branes in a non-threshold bound state background

We study some configurations of brane probes which are partially wrapped on spheres transverse to a stack of non-threshold bound states. The latter are represented by the corresponding supergravity background. Two cases are studied: D(10-p)-branes in the background of (D(p-2), Dp) bound states and D(8-p)-branes in the (NS5, Dp) geometry. By using suitable flux quantization rules of the worldvolume gauge field, we determine the stable configurations of the probe. The analysis of the energy and supersymmetry of these configurations reveals that they can be interpreted as bound states of lower dimensional objects polarized into a D-brane.Comment: 11 pages, LaTe