Building Core Competencies in a Turbulent Environment: An Exploratory Study of Firm Resources and Capabilities in Chinese Transitional Economy

The impact of firm resources and capabilities on performance among Chinese enterprises has been a subject of anecdotal speculation due to its significant implications for organizational researchers as well as practitioners. Yet empirical evidence has been very limited. In this research, set in the People’s Republic of China, we examine firm resources and capabilities and their impact on firm performance among Chinese enterprises. Using large sample of 12,047 Chinese firms from 1991 to 1992, we found that most of the firm specific resources and capabilities examined in this study have a positive impact on performance. We discussed the implications for organizational researchers, policy makers, and managers, and proposed directions for future research.economic transition, firm strategy, resources and capabilities

Disability Discrimination in Employment: Three Countries Comparison

Firms to date regard their employees as one of the most critical components for their business success. Among them, one group of employees particularly raises our attentions and thoughts. Disabled employees are devoting themselves to make greater business achievements, as well as creating better lives. However, disabled employees to date are still differentiated to be neglected, despised, or even repudiated in many businesses. In this regard, it is important to understand the status quo of governmental actions in protecting employment of handicapped. So, this article employs a structured literature review with a disaggregated analysis of disability protection acts in three countries (i.e., United States, United Kingdom, and China) towards the issue of disability discrimination in employment. Based on the analysis, we suggest that either national legislation or corporate regulation needs to dedicate on protecting disabilities through a growing law-system. Simultaneously, they can also work on protecting disabilities from an active way by advancing their abilities of self-security. Keywords: Disability Discrimination, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), Hong Kong Equal Opportunities Commission (HKEOC

An Integrated Framework for Managing Information Technology Security Uncertainty

Information security to date has been driven a lot of attention in business world. The cyber security standards play significant and crucial role in promoting feasible approaches to organizations while making comprehensive strategical planning. This paper aims at providing a systematic overview of information technology (IT) security management in organizations. Conducted a structured literature from academic database and industry whitepapers, we review a number of the critical issues and challenges facing the industry today and in the future. In line with the fundamental elements of information security, we propose an integrated framework to understand the current situation of IT security management. In particular, we focus on several critical fundamental functions of IT security management: Security and Risk Management, Security Operations, and Security Assessments and Testing. Then, we use the proposed framework as a lens to discuss and solve the security issues in bring your own device (BYOD) in organizations. Keywords: IT security, IT security framework, bring your own device DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-18-01 Publication date:June 30th 202

Building core competencies in a turbulent environment

The impact of firm resources and capabilities on performance among Chinese enterprises has been a subject of anecdotal speculation due to its significant implications for organizational researchers as well as practitioners. Yet empirical evidence has been very limited. In this research, set in the People`s Republic of China, we examine firm resources and capabilities and their impact on firm performance among Chinese enterprises. Using large sample of 12,047 Chinese firms from 1991 to 1992, we found that most of the firm specific resources and capabilities examined in this study have a positive impact on performance. We discussed the implications for organiyational researchers, policy makers, and managers, and proposed directions for future research

Curcumin evokes antidepressant-like effects in mice by regulating miR-124/brain derived neurotrophic factor

Purpose: To investigate the effect and mechanism of curcumin on depression in mice Methods: Mice were subjected to chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS), and behavioural changes were evaluated by sucrose preference test (SPT) and forced swimming test (FST). CUMS-treated mice received curcumin at a concentration of 50, 100, or 200 mg/kg. The level of MiR-124 was measured by real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels were evaluated by western blotting. Results: CUMS induced depressive behaviour in mice, with increase in miR-124 and decrease in BDNF. Curcumin inhibited miR-124 expression and promoted BDNF in a dose-dependent manner in CUMS-treated mice. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor was the direct target of miR-124, decreasing the transcription of BDNF, but this was reversed by curcumin in vitro. MicroRNA-124 overexpression aggravated CUMS-induced depressive symptoms including loss of appetite, less sucrose consumption, shorter swimming time, and longer immobility time (p < 0.001). The effects were attenuated by curcumin. Conclusion: Curcumin alleviates CUMS-induced depressive behaviour by regulating miR-124/BDNF, suggesting that curcumin may a viable treatment option for depression

Equilibrium Analysis of Customer Attraction Games

We introduce a game model called "customer attraction game" to demonstrate the competition among online content providers. In this model, customers exhibit interest in various topics. Each content provider selects one topic and benefits from the attracted customers. We investigate both symmetric and asymmetric settings involving agents and customers. In the symmetric setting, the existence of pure Nash equilibrium (PNE) is guaranteed, but finding a PNE is PLS-complete. To address this, we propose a fully polynomial time approximation scheme to identify an approximate PNE. Moreover, the tight Price of Anarchy (PoA) is established. In the asymmetric setting, we show the nonexistence of PNE in certain instances and establish that determining its existence is NP-hard. Nevertheless, we prove the existence of an approximate PNE. Additionally, when agents select topics sequentially, we demonstrate that finding a subgame-perfect equilibrium is PSPACE-hard. Furthermore, we present the sequential PoA for the two-agent setting

Competition among Parallel Contests

We investigate the model of multiple contests held in parallel, where each contestant selects one contest to join and each contest designer decides the prize structure to compete for the participation of contestants. We first analyze the strategic behaviors of contestants and completely characterize the symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium. As for the strategies of contest designers, when other designers' strategies are known, we show that computing the best response is NP-hard and propose a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) to output the $\epsilon$-approximate best response. When other designers' strategies are unknown, we provide a worst case analysis on one designer's strategy. We give an upper bound on the utility of any strategy and propose a method to construct a strategy whose utility can guarantee a constant ratio of this upper bound in the worst case.Comment: Accepted by the 18th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2022

SegPrompt: Boosting Open-world Segmentation via Category-level Prompt Learning

Current closed-set instance segmentation models rely on pre-defined class labels for each mask during training and evaluation, largely limiting their ability to detect novel objects. Open-world instance segmentation (OWIS) models address this challenge by detecting unknown objects in a class-agnostic manner. However, previous OWIS approaches completely erase category information during training to keep the model's ability to generalize to unknown objects. In this work, we propose a novel training mechanism termed SegPrompt that uses category information to improve the model's class-agnostic segmentation ability for both known and unknown categories. In addition, the previous OWIS training setting exposes the unknown classes to the training set and brings information leakage, which is unreasonable in the real world. Therefore, we provide a new open-world benchmark closer to a real-world scenario by dividing the dataset classes into known-seen-unseen parts. For the first time, we focus on the model's ability to discover objects that never appear in the training set images. Experiments show that SegPrompt can improve the overall and unseen detection performance by 5.6% and 6.1% in AR on our new benchmark without affecting the inference efficiency. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on existing cross-dataset transfer and strongly supervised settings, leading to 5.5% and 12.3% relative improvement.Comment: Accepted to Proc. Int. Conf. Computer Vision (ICCV) 2023. Code is at: https://github.com/aim-uofa/SegPromp