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This study aimed to empirically examine the effectiveness of disclosing user comment history without disclosing personal identity as a nudge policy to refrain users from posting malicious content online.

The authors collected the number of comments and posters from the leading portal website in South Korea, Naver.com. To causally investigate the impacts of the new nudge policy on the number of comments and posters, the authors used the regression discontinuity design (RDD) approach.

The authors found that the new policy reduced all types of comments, including the number of malicious comments, self-deleted comments and current comments. This resulted in an overall decrease in the total number of posted comments, which is considered a side effect. In addition, the authors found that the effect of the nudge policy, which disclosed user comment history, has a stronger effect on older female users than their counterparts.

The study findings extend the current knowledge on a nudge policy being implemented by a website as a means to reduce malicious online content and how it impacts user content posting behaviors.

This study focuses on how a small and medium-sized enterprise's (SME's) main strategic orientation can affect SMEs' approach to innovation. The authors aim to answer the following simple yet important questions: how do SMEs with market orientation (MO) and those with entrepreneurial orientation (EO) differ in terms of innovation performance? Do MO and EO have conflicting effects on the process of innovation at SMEs? If so, how does this conflict affect the innovation performance of SMEs?

This study explores the effects of MO and EO on different types of technological innovation among SMEs using data collected from 124 INNOBIZ-certified manufacturing SMEs in South Korea. Logistic regression analysis and moderated regression analysis were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results demonstrate that MO and EO engender different kinds of technological innovations. MO stimulates “new-to-the-firm” product innovation, while EO drives “new-to-the-industry” innovation in processes and products. Furthermore, SMEs' overall innovation performance will suffer from the conflicting interplay between MO and EO.

The findings of this study encourage SMEs to concentrate SMEs' resources and learning efforts on one specific innovation orientation and only then to develop SMEs' ambidextrous managerial capabilities. This study offers academic contributions in that the study overcomes the limitations of past studies on the strategic orientation of SMEs by empirically confirming the dilemmas faced by SMEs and expands the theoretical understanding of the relationship between MO and EO.

The authors seek to advance the understanding of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) internationalization at the regional level and examine the role of home market institutions in this process.

The authors analyze hypotheses with data from SMEs in five country markets and from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. A cluster analysis establishes the regional diversification patterns (based on regional diversification scope, speed and rhythm) and a multinomial regression tests the effect of home market institutions on their adoption.

The results offer a refined picture of SME regional diversification by revealing three patterns: intra-regionally focused firms, late inter-region diversifiers and early inter-region diversifiers. They also suggest that the adoption of these patterns is determined by SMEs' home market institutions.

The authors develop a nuanced understanding of SME internationalization by building upon and expanding the regionalization rationale in the internationalization patterns literature. Additionally, the authors address the acknowledged, yet rarely investigated, country-level determinants of internationalization patterns.

This paper aims to present the numerical analysis of displacements, forces and bend angles of three different structural designs of a soft actuator using the finite element method. The results of this analysis help understand the physical behavior of the soft pneumatic actuator.

The soft actuator is designed using commercial modeling software, and the design of the actuator is analyzed using ABAQUS 19.0 with a standard implicit nonlinear analysis. There are three types of structural designs for actuators, namely, rectangular-base model, trapezoidal-base model and the trapezoidal model considered in the present study.

Maximum displacement, force and bend angle are observed in the rectangular-base model at various pressure levels.

The development of novel designs of the soft pneumatic actuator to undertake a comparative analysis of displacement, force and bend angle.

The paper tests if and to what extent lean management system adoption generates abnormal profitability, and how it accrues over time. Configurational approaches to lean management systems and “S-curve” effects in lean implementation are used to ground the paper's hypotheses and interpret its findings.

Using the emerging view of lean as enterprise-wide management systems, this quasi-experimental study uses a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the abnormal profitability (ROIC) attributable to lean management system adoption. The paper leverages a unique data set of lean adopters nested in a panel data set (19 years) of 2,088 industrial firms matched by industry and firm size. It applies a variety of regression methods (two-way fixed effect panel estimator, propensity score matching, instrumental variable two-stage-least squares) to estimate the size of the abnormal profitability attributable to lean management systems, addressing endogeneity issues related to non-random sampling, omitted variable bias and reverse causation. It also analyzes the cross-firm variability of such abnormal profitability and how it accrues over time.

For the average non-adopter in the sample (44.3 million euro revenues), lean adoption generates abnormal ROIC ranging from 1.4% to 3.9%. These results come into effect approximately three years after starting lean adoption and peak after eight years. While the average abnormal profitability attributable to lean adoption is sizable, it varies significantly across firms and over time. This significant variation is compatible with firms' diverse ability to understand the complex inner workings of lean systems, and to design and implement them so that they improve profitability.

The conceptualization of lean as enterprise-wide management system can be further refined to more effectively categorize the components of lean systems and investigate the nature of their relationships. Lean system adoption measurement can be fine-tuned to better capture cross-firm and longitudinal heterogeneity. Future work can explore other dependent variables of interest to different stakeholders including shareholders' value, employment and environmental and social sustainability.

The financial benefits of adopting lean can be reaped to the extent to which managers embrace lean as a philosophy and implement it pervasively in the organization. A firm can use the study's estimates as a basis for making calculations about the returns of investment in lean adoption. The paper also shows that “getting the lean system right” makes a significant difference in terms of abnormal profitability, which is twice as large for the best lean adopters..

Compared with the promises of many lean proponents and supporters, the paper provides a more realistic view of what to expect from lean adoption in terms of profitability. Adopting lean as a comprehensive, enterprise-wide management system is not a universal panacea, but a complex endeavor, characterized by multiple complex decisions that require considerable capabilities, coordinated efforts and consistency of action.

Differently from extant research, this study does not study the correlation between the adoption of lean operation practices and financial performance but focuses on the abnormal profitability generated by the adoption of lean as a pervasive, enterprise-wide management system. Its research design allows to identify the differential profitability attributable to lean adoption and documents that it accrues non-linearly.

Many European countries suspended mandatory conscription after the Cold War, and especially between 2000 and 2010. However, with the changing security situation in Europe, more and more countries are considering the re-introduction of the draft. That is why, it is important to evaluate the impact of conscription on draftees, including its effect on fertility outcomes. Additionally, fertility is of particular interest because birth rates have been below replacement levels in most European countries at least in the last two decades. This, combined with the increase in life expectancy, has contributed to aging population and raises concerns about the future economic prospects and sustainability of the continent. Military service could be related to fertility in several ways. Compulsory service for men would affect the marriage market and subsequently child-bearing outcomes. For example, men who serve in the military would have to delay higher education at least by a year, given that they plan to continue their education after high school. One possibility is that this leads to older men meeting younger women if partners meet at college. Alternatively, in case the partners know each other prior to the draft, service could delay marriage by up to a year due to the conscription, postponing planning and having children, and potentially having fewer children as women might be less able or less willing to have a child after a certain age. Finally, some men who plan and would otherwise continue their education might choose to not do so or to further postpone it once they disattach from studying during their service. For some men, this might influence their marital and subsequent fertility outcomes. In either of these scenarios, a draft or its suspension is likely to be connected to fertility.

This study examines the effect of the suspension of the draft in Spain in December 2001 on three fertility outcomes of men that would have been drafted in the absence of the suspension. The author performs the analysis in a difference-in-differences framework. Potential concerns and policy implications are also discussed.

The findings suggest that after the suspension of the draft, individuals started to have their first child earlier given that they decide to have children. Consistent with the overall time trend, they became less likely to have a child and started to have fewer children. However, the age at birth of the first child decreased while the number of children and the likelihood of having a child increased for men relative to women, after compared to before the suspension of the mandatory draft.

The author extends prior literature by investigating the effect of the abolition of compulsory military service in Spain in December 2001 on fertility. This is novel is several ways. First, to the best of the author’s knowledge, previous literature has examined the effect of this Spanish reform only on labor market outcomes prior to men's conscription. Second, even for other countries that terminated the compulsory draft, fertility has been under-studied, providing an opportunity for further exploration. Third, this analysis is based on rich Census data, representative of the population in Spain. Finally, given the inconclusive findings of previous studies for other countries and the proposed re-introduction of the draft in some parts of Europe, additional evidence of the effect of the conscription has important policy implications necessary for the evaluation of future military service policy decisions.

This study aims to explore the effect of mental health in terms of depression, anxiety, stress, fear of COVID-19 and quality of life (QoL) on the reluctance to be vaccinated in a population of Palestinian adults living in occupied Palestinian territories and Israel.

The authors recruited 1,122 Palestinian adults who consented to participate in the study; 722 were females, and the mean age of the sample was 40.83 (SD 8.8). Depression, anxiety, and stress scale (DASS), World Health Organization QoL-BREF, FCov-19 and reluctance to the vaccine scale were administered; hierarchical regression analysis was applied to test vaccine reluctance as a dependent variable, and mental health, fear of COVID-19 and QoL as independent variables. This study hypothesized influence of such variables on the vaccine choice with differences due to the participants’ geographical locations.

Findings showed an effect of mental health, particularly depression, QoL and fear of COVID on vaccine reluctance, with depression and fear of COVID in the West Bank and Gaza, while in Israel, QoL played a role in vaccination choices.

The future needs to be comprehended more thoroughly to discover mutations and fluctuations over time in vaccine hesitancy and the increasing role of psychological distress, diminished QoL and fear of Covid-19. Online recruitment might not have allowed the study to include the most disadvantaged strips of the Palestinian population.

Human rights perspectives must be considered in public health and public mental health policies to ensure the QoL and well-being for the Palestinian population during and following the pandemic.

The crumbling of the Palestinian health-care system exacerbated the sense of dread among the population and made them less likely to vaccinate. The pandemic-like spread of Covid-19 prompts a plea for the global community to actively advocate for the urgent re-establishment of equity, autonomy and durability of the medical infrastructure in the occupied territories and equal entitlements for the Palestinians in Israel.

The results demonstrated the importance for public mental health to consider the multiple levels implied in the vaccine refusal in Palestine and Israel among the Palestinian population.

This paper aims to design an AI-based drone that can facilitate the complicated and time-intensive control process for detecting healthy and defective solar panels. Today, the use of solar panels is becoming widespread, and control problems are increasing. Physical control of the solar panels is critical in obtaining electrical power. Controlling solar panel power plants and rooftop panel applications installed in large areas can be difficult and time-consuming. Therefore, this paper designs a system that aims to panel detection.

This paper designed a low-cost AI-based unmanned aerial vehicle to reduce the difficulty of the control process. Convolutional neural network based AI models were developed to classify solar panels as damaged, dusty and normal. Two approaches to the solar panel detection model were adopted: Approach 1 and Approach 2.

The training was conducted with YOLOv5, YOLOv6 and YOLOv8 models in Approach 1. The best F1 score was 81% at 150 epochs with YOLOv5m. In total, 87% and 89% of the best F1 score and mAP values were obtained with the YOLOv5s model at 100 epochs in Approach 2 as a proposed method. The best models at Approaches 1 and 2 were used with a developed AI-based drone in the real-time test application.

The AI-based low-cost solar panel detection drone was developed with an original data set of 1,100 images. A detailed comparative analysis of YOLOv5, YOLOv6 and YOLOv8 models regarding performance metrics was realized. Gaussian, salt-pepper noise addition and wavelet transform noise removal preprocessing techniques were applied to the created data set under the proposed method. The proposed method demonstrated expressive and remarkable performance in panel detection applications.

Despite several research efforts tackling construction project risks globally, tertiary education building projects are not devoid of experiencing risks with cascading effects on projects. In the past decades, there has been increasing application of linear assessments of risks in construction risk management practices. However, this study aims to assess the influence of risk factors on the success of tertiary education building projects using a structural equation modelling approach. This study will further reinforce the risk factors that require attention because risk factors are not linear but interdependent.

A quantitative research method was undertaken in this study, where data collection was achieved via a structured questionnaire survey. In total, 452 questionnaires were administered to client representatives, consultants and contractors involved in executing tertiary education building projects across five public tertiary education institutions in Ondo State, Nigeria. Of 452 questionnaires, 279 were found usable for the analysis, implying a response rate of 61.73%. The Cronbach α test, average variances extracted and composite reliabilities values show high reliability and internal consistency of the instrument used for data gathering. Furthermore, the study adopted percentile, mean, correlation, regression analysis and structural equation modelling for analyzing the data collected upon which the study’s inferences were based.

The study found that three out of six criteria for measuring the success of tertiary education building projects were significantly affected by risk factors while using the structural equation modelling technique. With this non-linear method of assessment, completion to time was significantly impacted by environmental risk factors. In addition, safety performance was also significantly influenced by logistic, environmental and legal risk factors; furthermore, logistics, design and environmental risks significantly affected profit. However, completion to cost, standard/quality and end-user satisfaction was not significantly affected by the risk factors in tertiary education building projects.

The quantitative data used for the analysis are limited to the tertiary education building projects from selected five tertiary education institutions in Ondo State; therefore, the results do not indicate all tertiary institutions in Nigeria. In addition, the findings are based on building projects that were procured through a competitive tendering arrangement only and thus considered a limitation for this study.

Not all the risks significantly influence the tertiary education building projects. Therefore, risk factors with a significant effect on the success indicators of tertiary education building projects should be prioritized for a successful project. While risk factors have not affected the completion to cost per se, the study implies that the resultant effect of risks on other success indicators could have a cascading effect on these projects in terms of cost and time overruns. These results may assist during the project risk management while also addressing complexity and uncertainty to avoid chaos in a tertiary education building projects.

The study found significant construction risk factors impacting the success of tertiary education building projects using a non-linear methodology, an extension beyond the usual linear method of assessment of risk impacts on the project performance.

Exploiting an innovative measure of corporate culture based on machine learning and earnings conference calls, this study aims to investigate how corporate culture is influenced by hostile takeover threats. To sidestep endogeneity, this study uses a unique measure of takeover vulnerability principally based on the staggered implementation of state legislations, which are plausibly exogenous.

In addition to the standard regression analysis, this study also executes a variety of other empirical tests such as propensity score matching, entropy balancing and an instrumental variable analysis, to demonstrate that the results are robust. The final sample includes 27,663 firm-year observations from 4,092 distinct companies from 2001 to 2014.

This study documents that more takeover exposure weakens corporate culture considerably, consistent with the managerial myopia hypothesis. Threatened by the takeover risk, managers tend to behave myopically and are less likely to make long-term investments that promote strong corporate culture in the long run. Additional analysis focusing on a culture of innovation, which is especially vulnerable to managerial myopia, produces similar evidence.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the effect of takeover susceptibility on corporate culture using a distinctive metric of corporate culture based on textual analysis.