Micro Multinational Enterprises and the Internationalization of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises: Contextual and Organizational Factors

Les principals teories de negocis internacionals afirmen que hi ha una relació positiva entre el grau d'internacionalització d'una empresa i el seu acompliment, atès que la internacionalització ofereix a les empreses l'oportunitat de créixer i millorar la seva competitivitat. Tot i les limitacions de recursos per expandir-se geogràficament, les PIMES han mostrat una alta i creixent propensió a internacionalitzar-se, demostrant que les empreses no han de ser grans per tenir èxit en els mercats estrangers. La pregunta general de recerca que aquesta tesi pretén respondre és: ¿quins factors contextuals i organitzacionals permeten a les PIMES internacionalitzar-se, superant les limitacions degudes a la seva reduïda grandària, adoptar modalitats d'entrada que requereixen un alt compromís de recursos, i maximitzar el rendiment? La tesi examina diferents factors contextuals i organitzacionals que incideixen en la relació entre el grau d'internacionalització i l'acompliment en el context específic de les PIMES i d'un subgrup de PIMES particularment interessant, les micro-multinacionals. Els estudis previs sobre la relació internacionalització-rendiment (I-R) s'han centrat en les grans empreses multinacionals, mentre que la internacionalització de les pimes que utilitzen modes d'entrada de major compromís ha rebut molt escassa atenció. La tesi proporciona una explicació teòrica i empírica de l'efecte moderador de diversos factors contextuals i organitzacionals en la relació I-R en diferents nivells d'internacionalització. Per a això, s'integren en el marc teòric de la tesi la literatura sobre la relació I-R amb les literatures relacionades amb les variables moderadores de tipus contextual (sector d’activitat) i organitzacionals (tipus de propietat, estratègies de diversificació geogràfica). Els resultats obtinguts confirmen que la relació I-R és específica al context i contingent en relació amb les característiques organitzatives i contextuals estudiades.Las principales teorías de negocios internacionales afirman que existe una relación positiva entre el grado de internacionalización de una empresa y su desempeño, dado que la internacionalización ofrece a las empresas la oportunidad de crecer y mejorar su competitividad. A pesar de las limitaciones de recursos para expandirse geográficamente, las PYMES han mostrado una alta y creciente propensión a internacionalizarse, demostrando que las empresas no tienen que ser grandes para tener éxito en los mercados extranjeros. La pregunta general de investigación que esta tesis pretende responder es: ¿qué factores contextuales y organizacionales permiten a las PYMES internacionalizarse, superando sus limitaciones de tamaño, adoptar modos de entrada que requieren un alto compromiso de recursos, y maximizar el rendimiento? La tesis examina diferentes factores contextuales y organizacionales que inciden en la relación entre el grado de internacionalización y el desempeño en el contexto específico de las PYMES y de un subgrupo de PYMES particularmente interesante, las micro-multinacionales. Los estudios previos sobre la relación internacionalización-desempeño (I-P) se han centrado en las grandes empresas multinacionales, mientras que la internacionalización de las pymes que utilizan modos de entrada de mayor compromiso ha recibido muy escasa atención. La tesis proporciona una explicación teórica y empírica del efecto moderador de varios factores contextuales y organizacionales en la relación I-P en diferentes niveles de internacionalización. Para ello, se integran en el marco teórico de la tesis la literatura sobre la relación I-P con las literaturas relacionadas con las variables moderadoras de tipo contextual (sector de actividad) y organizacionales (tipos de propiedad, estrategias de diversificación geográfica). Nuestros hallazgos confirman que la relación I-P es específica al contexto y contingente en relación con las características organizativas y contextuales estudiadas.Core international business theory asserts that there is a positive relationship between a firm’s degree of internationalization and its performance, given that internationalization offers firms the opportunity to grow and enhance their competitiveness, Despite resource constraints to expand geographically, SMEs have shown a high and growing propensity to internationalize, demonstrating that firms do not have to be large to be successful in foreign markets. The overarching research question this thesis aims to respond is: what contextual and organizational factors allow internationalizing SMEs overcome their size constraints, adopt higher commitment entry modes, and maximize performance? The thesis examines different contextual and organizational factors that influence the relationship between the degree of internationalization and performance in the specific context of SMEs and a particularly interesting subgroup among them, micro multinationals. Previous studies on the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship have focused on large MNEs while very little attention has been paid to internationalizing SMEs using higher commitment entry modes. The thesis provides a theoretical and empirical explanation of the moderating effect of several contextual and organizational factors on the I-P relationship at different levels of internationalization. To do so, the theoretical framework of the thesis integrates the literature on internationalization/ multinationality research with the corresponding literatures related to the contextual (industry) and organizational (ownership types, geographical diversification strategies). Our findings confirm that the I-P relationship is context-specific and it is contingent on the studied organizational and industry characteristics

Bivariate Beta-LSTM

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) infers the long term dependency through a cell state maintained by the input and the forget gate structures, which models a gate output as a value in [0,1] through a sigmoid function. However, due to the graduality of the sigmoid function, the sigmoid gate is not flexible in representing multi-modality or skewness. Besides, the previous models lack modeling on the correlation between the gates, which would be a new method to adopt inductive bias for a relationship between previous and current input. This paper proposes a new gate structure with the bivariate Beta distribution. The proposed gate structure enables probabilistic modeling on the gates within the LSTM cell so that the modelers can customize the cell state flow with priors and distributions. Moreover, we theoretically show the higher upper bound of the gradient compared to the sigmoid function, and we empirically observed that the bivariate Beta distribution gate structure provides higher gradient values in training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of bivariate Beta gate structure on the sentence classification, image classification, polyphonic music modeling, and image caption generation.Comment: AAAI 202

Efficient Error Control for Scalable Media Transmission over 3G Broadcast Networks

Abstract. Broadcast and mobile phone technologies have now combined to provide wireless multimedia services. 3GPP2 has introduced the Broadcast and Multicast Services (BCMCS) architecture in a 3G wireless network. BCMCS are capable of supplying multimedia content, which requires successive frames to arrive within a specific time interval. We analyze the execution time of Reed-Solomon decoding, which is the MAC-layer forward error correction scheme used in cdma2000 1xEV-DO BCMCS, under different air channel conditions. The results show that the time constraints of MPEG-4 cannot be guaranteed by Reed-Solomon decoding when the packet loss rate (PLR) is high, due to its long computation time on current hardware. To alleviate this problem, we propose three error control schemes. Our static scheme bypasses Reed-Solomon decoding at the mobile node to satisfy the MPEG-4 time constraint when the PLR exceeds a given boundary. Our second, dynamic scheme corrects errors in a best-effort manner within the time constraint, instead of giving up altogether when the PLR is high. The third, video-aware dynamic scheme fixes errors in a similar way to the dynamic scheme, but in a priority-driven manner which improves the quality of the final video. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of our schemes compared to the original FEC scheme

Counterfactual Fairness with Disentangled Causal Effect Variational Autoencoder

The problem of fair classification can be mollified if we develop a method to remove the embedded sensitive information from the classification features. This line of separating the sensitive information is developed through the causal inference, and the causal inference enables the counterfactual generations to contrast the what-if case of the opposite sensitive attribute. Along with this separation with the causality, a frequent assumption in the deep latent causal model defines a single latent variable to absorb the entire exogenous uncertainty of the causal graph. However, we claim that such structure cannot distinguish the 1) information caused by the intervention (i.e., sensitive variable) and 2) information correlated with the intervention from the data. Therefore, this paper proposes Disentangled Causal Effect Variational Autoencoder (DCEVAE) to resolve this limitation by disentangling the exogenous uncertainty into two latent variables: either 1) independent to interventions or 2) correlated to interventions without causality. Particularly, our disentangling approach preserves the latent variable correlated to interventions in generating counterfactual examples. We show that our method estimates the total effect and the counterfactual effect without a complete causal graph. By adding a fairness regularization, DCEVAE generates a counterfactual fair dataset while losing less original information. Also, DCEVAE generates natural counterfactual images by only flipping sensitive information. Additionally, we theoretically show the differences in the covariance structures of DCEVAE and prior works from the perspective of the latent disentanglement

Identification of TUBB2A by quantitative proteomic analysis as a novel biomarker for the prediction of distant metastatic breast cancer

Background Metastasis of breast cancer to distal organs is fatal. However, few studies have identified biomarkers that are associated with distant metastatic breast cancer. Furthermore, the inability of current biomarkers, such as HER2, ER, and PR, to differentiate between distant and nondistant metastatic breast cancers accurately has necessitated the development of novel biomarker candidates. Methods An integrated proteomics approach that combined filter-aided sample preparation, tandem mass tag labeling (TMT), high pH fractionation, and high-resolution MS was applied to acquire in-depth proteomic data from FFPE distant metastatic breast cancer tissues. A bioinformatics analysis was performed with regard to gene ontology and signaling pathways using differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) to examine the molecular characteristics of distant metastatic breast cancer. In addition, real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and invasion/migration assays were performed to validate the differential regulation and function of our protein targets. Results A total of 9441 and 8746 proteins were identified from the pooled and individual sample sets, respectively. Based on our criteria, TUBB2A was selected as a novel biomarker candidate. The metastatic activities of TUBB2A were subsequently validated. In our bioinformatics analysis using DEPs, we characterized the overall molecular features of distant metastasis and measured differences in the molecular functions of distant metastatic breast cancer between breast cancer subtypes. Conclusions Our report is the first study to examine the distant metastatic breast cancer proteome using FFPE tissues. The depth of our dataset allowed us to discover a novel biomarker candidate and a proteomic characteristics of distant metastatic breast cancer. Distinct molecular features of various breast cancer subtypes were also established. Our proteomic data constitute a valuable resource for research on distant metastatic breast cancer.This work was supported by the Industrial Strategic Technology Development Program (#10079271 and #20000134), funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE, Korea); the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI), funded by the Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (Grant Number: HI17C0048); the Basic Science Research Program through the Seoul National University Hospital Research Fund (26-2016-0020); and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (Grant Number: 2018R1A1A1A05077484)

Gravitational-wave Electromagnetic Counterpart Korean Observatory (GECKO): GECKO Follow-up Observation of GW190425

One of the keys to the success of multimessenger astronomy is the rapid identification of the electromagnetic wave counterpart, kilonova (KN), of the gravitational-wave (GW) event. Despite its importance, it is hard to find a KN associated with a GW event, due to a poorly constrained GW localization map and numerous signals that could be confused as a KN. Here, we present the Gravitational-wave Electromagnetic wave Counterpart Korean Observatory (GECKO) project, the GECKO observation of GW190425, and prospects of GECKO in the fourth observing run (O4) of the GW detectors. We outline our follow-up observation strategies during O3. In particular, we describe our galaxy-targeted observation criteria that prioritize based on galaxy properties. Armed with this strategy, we performed an optical and/or near-infrared follow-up observation of GW190425, the first binary neutron star merger event during the O3 run. Despite a vast localization area of 7460 deg^2, we observed 621 host galaxy candidates, corresponding to 29.5% of the scores we assigned, with most of them observed within the first 3 days of the GW event. Ten transients were discovered during this search, including a new transient with a host galaxy. No plausible KN was found, but we were still able to constrain the properties of potential KNe using upper limits. The GECKO observation demonstrates that GECKO can possibly uncover a GW170817-like KN at a distance less than 200 Mpc if the localization area is of the order of hundreds of square degrees, providing a bright prospect for the identification of GW electromagnetic wave counterparts during the O4 run.Comment: 35 pages, 19 figures Accepted for publication in Ap

Topic-Focus Structure and Quantification of Dou 'all'

This paper examines a type of dou quantification found in wh-questions such as ta dou mai le shenme? ‘What are all the things that he bought?’ This type is different from the well-known dou quantification in that the leftness condition cannot be applied to the former. I propose that the former type of quantification is subject to the topic-focus structure rather than to the syntactic structure, which means that the domain of the quantification is determined in relation to 'old' and 'new' information of a sentence. Sentences including dou can be divided into topic and focus, and each part is mapped onto the restrictor and the nuclear scope in a tripartite structure of dou quantification. This analysis accounts for the reason why a list answer is appropriate to questions with dou, why wh-words in the questions cannot be quantity expressions, and why wh-words should either have a plural interpretation or take the plural form. This analysis also explains the distribution of dou, i.e., dou should c-command a focused phrase. Finally, I point out that the analysis can extend to declaratives which are rare but still observable, and that the two types of dou quantification can arise simultaneously