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1 – 10 of 250Mohammadreza Tavakoli Baghdadabad
We propose a risk factor for idiosyncratic entropy and explore the relationship between this factor and expected stock returns.
Abstract
Purpose
We propose a risk factor for idiosyncratic entropy and explore the relationship between this factor and expected stock returns.
Design/methodology/approach
We estimate a cross-sectional model of expected entropy that uses several common risk factors to predict idiosyncratic entropy.
Findings
We find a negative relationship between expected idiosyncratic entropy and returns. Specifically, the Carhart alpha of a low expected entropy portfolio exceeds the alpha of a high expected entropy portfolio by −2.37% per month. We also find a negative and significant price of expected idiosyncratic entropy risk using the Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions. Interestingly, expected entropy helps us explain the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility earn low expected returns.
Originality/value
We propose a risk factor of idiosyncratic entropy and explore the relationship between this factor and expected stock returns. Interestingly, expected entropy helps us explain the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility earn low expected returns.
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Liangzhi Yu and Yao Zhang
This study aims to examine the potential of Information Ethics (IE) to serve as a coherent ethical foundation for the library and information science profession (LIS profession).
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the potential of Information Ethics (IE) to serve as a coherent ethical foundation for the library and information science profession (LIS profession).
Design/methodology/approach
This study consists of two parts: the first part present IE’s central theses and the main critiques it has received; the second part offers the authors' own evaluation of the theory from the LIS perspective in two steps: (1) assessing its internal consistency by testing its major theses against each other; (2) assessing its utility for resolving frequently debated LIS ethical dilemmas by comparing its solutions with solutions from other ethical theories.
Findings
This study finds that IE, consisting of an informational ontology, a fundamental ethical assertion and a series of moral laws, forms a coherent ethical framework and holds promising potential to serve as a theoretical foundation for LIS ethical issues; its inclusion of nonhuman objects as moral patients and its levels of abstraction mechanism proved to be particularly relevant for the LIS profession. This study also shows that, to become more solid an ethical theory, IE needs to resolve some of its internal contradictions and ambiguities, particularly its conceptual conflations between internal correctness, rightness and goodness; between destruction, entropy and evil; and the discrepancy between its deontological ethical assertion and its utilitarian moral laws.
Practical implications
This study alerts LIS professionals to the possibility of having a coherent ethical foundation and the potential of IE in this regard.
Originality/value
This study provides a systemic explication, evaluation and field test of IE from the LIS perspective.
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Brad C. Meyer, Daniel Bumblauskas, Richard Keegan and Dali Zhang
This research fills a gap in process science by defining and explaining entropy and the increase of entropy in processes.
Abstract
Purpose
This research fills a gap in process science by defining and explaining entropy and the increase of entropy in processes.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a theoretical treatment that begins with a conceptual understanding of entropy in thermodynamics and information theory and extends it to the study of degradation and improvement in a transformation process.
Findings
A transformation process with three inputs: demand volume, throughput and product design, utilizes a system composed of processors, stores, configuration, human actors, stored data and controllers to provide a product. Elements of the system are aligned with the inputs and each other with a purpose to raise standard of living. Lack of alignment is entropy. Primary causes of increased entropy are changes in inputs and disordering of the system components. Secondary causes result from changes made to cope with the primary causes. Improvement and innovation reduce entropy by providing better alignments and new ways of aligning resources.
Originality/value
This is the first detailed theoretical treatment of entropy in a process science context.
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Kai Liu, Yuming Liu, Yuanyuan Kou and Xiaoxu Yang
The mega railway infrastructure projects are faced with complex environments and multi-level management challenges. Thus, the mega railway infrastructure project management system…
Abstract
Purpose
The mega railway infrastructure projects are faced with complex environments and multi-level management challenges. Thus, the mega railway infrastructure project management system not only needs to focus on its composition, but also needs to consider changes and impacts of internal and external environment.
Design/methodology/approach
This study attempts to introduce the concept of dissipative structure from the perspective of complexity theory and constructs a positive entropy and negentropy flow index system for mega railway infrastructure project management system in order to analyze the factors of management system more deeply. The Brusselator model is used to construct the structure of the mega railway infrastructure project management system, and the entropy method is used to calculate the positive entropy and negentropy values to verify whether the management system is a dissipative structure.
Findings
A plateau railway project in China was used as an example for an empirical study, not only its own characteristics are analyzed, but also the role of constraints and facilitation of the internal and external environment. Based on the research results, several effective suggestions are put forward to improve the stability and work efficiency of mega railway infrastructure project management system.
Originality/value
This study demonstrates that mega railway infrastructure project management system has the characteristics of dissipative structure. It can provide theoretical support for the development of mega railway infrastructure project management system from disorderly state to orderly state.
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Alina Steblyanskaya, Mingye Ai, Artem Denisov, Olga Efimova and Maksim Rybachuk
Understanding China's carbon dioxide (
Abstract
Purpose
Understanding China's carbon dioxide (
Design/methodology/approach
In this study using the input and output (IO) table's data for the selected years, the authors found the volume of
Findings
Results show that in the industries with a huge volume of
Originality/value
“Transport, storage, and postal services” and “Smelting and processing of metals” industries in China has the second place concerning emissions, but over the past period, emissions have been sufficiently reduced. “Construction” industry produces a lot of emissions, but this industry does not carry products characterized by large emissions from other industries. Authors can observe that Jiangsu produces a lot of
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Jiangjun Wan, Yuxin Zhao, Miaojie Chen, Xi Zhu, Qingyu Lu, Yuwei Huang, Yutong Zhao, Chengyan Zhang, Wei Zhu and Jinxiu Yang
The construction industry accounts for a large proportion of the economy of developing countries, but the connotation and influencing factors of high-quality development (HQD) are…
Abstract
Purpose
The construction industry accounts for a large proportion of the economy of developing countries, but the connotation and influencing factors of high-quality development (HQD) are still unclear. This study aims to gain a more comprehensive insight into the current development status of the regional construction industry under China's HQD orientation and the obstructive factors affecting its development and to provide informative suggestions for its HQD prospects.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, the construction industry of 16 cities in the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle (CCEC), a new region in southwest China, was used as the research object to collect data from the 2006–2019 yearbooks, construct an evaluation index system for HQD of the construction industry, derive the development level of the construction industry using the entropy value method and spatial autocorrelation method and then apply the barrier Diagnostic model was used to compare and analyze the impact level of each index.
Findings
In terms of the time dimension, the development of the construction industry in CCEC is characterized by “high in the twin core and low in the surrounding area”, with unbalanced and insufficient development; in terms of spatial correlation, some factors have positive aggregation in spatial distribution, but the peripheral linkage decreases; through barrier analysis, the impact of different barrier factors is different.
Originality/value
This paper will help governments and enterprises in developing countries to make urban planning and management policies to fundamentally improve the development of the construction industry in underdeveloped regions.
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Samet Güner, Halil Ibrahim Cebeci and Emrah Aydemir
Social media is widely used to capture citizens' opinions and topics deemed important. The importance or interest social media users attribute to a topic is traditionally measured…
Abstract
Purpose
Social media is widely used to capture citizens' opinions and topics deemed important. The importance or interest social media users attribute to a topic is traditionally measured by tweet frequency. This approach is practical but overlooks other user engagement tools such as retweets, likes, quotes, and replies. As a result, it may lead to a misinterpretation of social media signals. This paper aims to propose a method that considers all user engagement indicators and ranks the topics based on the interest attributed by social media users.
Design/methodology/approach
A multi-criteria decision-making framework was proposed, which calculates the relative importance of user engagement tools using objective (information entropy) and subjective (Bayesian Best-Worst Method) methods. The results of the two methods are aggregated with a combinative method. Then, topics are ranked based on their user engagement levels using Multi-Objective Optimization by Ratio Analysis.
Findings
The proposed approach was used to determine citizens' priorities in transport policy, and the findings are compared with those obtained solely based on tweet frequency. The results revealed that the proposed multi-criteria decision-making framework generated more comprehensive and robust results.
Practical implications
The proposed method provides a systematic way to interpret social media signals and guide institutions in making better policies, hence ensuring that the demands of users/society are properly addressed.
Originality/value
This study presents a systematic method to prioritize user preferences in social media. It is the first in the literature to discuss the necessity of considering all user engagement indicators and proposes a reliable method that calculates their relative importance.
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Peter Wanke, Jorge Junio Moreira Antunes, Antônio L. L. Filgueira, Flavia Michelotto, Isadora G. E. Tardin and Yong Tan
This paper aims to investigate the performance of OECD countries' long-term productivity during the period of 1975–2018.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the performance of OECD countries' long-term productivity during the period of 1975–2018.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employed different approaches to evaluate how efficiency scores vary with changes in inputs and outputs: Data Envelopment Analysis (CRS, VRS and FDH), TOPSIS and TOPSIS of these scores.
Findings
The findings suggest that, during the period of this study, countries with higher freedom of religion and with Presidential democracy regimes are positively associated with higher productivity.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that uses efficiency models to assess the productivity levels of OECD countries based on several contextual variables that can potentially affect it.
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Ali Asghar Sadabadi, Fatemeh Mohamadi Etergeleh, Kiarash Fartash and Narges Shahi
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social acceptance of renewable and non-renewable energies in Iran using the social acceptance pyramid.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social acceptance of renewable and non-renewable energies in Iran using the social acceptance pyramid.
Design/methodology/approach
Today, social acceptance is considered a very important phenomenon in the development, implementation and achievement of energy policy goals. Low acceptance will make it difficult to achieve energy development goals; therefore, social acceptance must be taken into account when making policy. Firstly, the model criteria, using data obtained from questionnaires, are weighted by the Shannon entropy method and, finally, four sources of fossil, nuclear, wind and solar energy were ranked by means of VIKOR, Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS).
Findings
The results show that, in Iran, the social acceptance criterion and trust sub-criterion are the most important criteria for energy acceptance. The results of the ranking of options based on multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques show that, given Iran's specific energy requirements, social acceptance of fossil energy is higher than wind, solar and nuclear, and wind, solar and nuclear energy come later in the rankings.
Originality/value
This research contributes to the literature in two ways: Firstly, social acceptance is considered a very important phenomenon in the development, implementation and achievement of energy policy goals; thus social acceptance must be taken into account when making policy. The results of the ranking of options based on MCDM techniques show that, given Iran's specific energy requirements, social acceptance of fossil energy is higher than wind, solar and nuclear, and wind, solar and nuclear energy come later in the rankings. Also, the social acceptance criterion and trust sub-criterion are the most important criteria for energy acceptance in Iran.
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Muhammad Farid Ahmed and Stephen Satchell
The purpose of this paper is to provide theory for some popular models and strategies used by practitioners in constructing optimal portfolios. King (2007), for example, advocated…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide theory for some popular models and strategies used by practitioners in constructing optimal portfolios. King (2007), for example, advocated adding a diversification term to mean-variance problems to create better portfolios and provided clear empirical evidence that this is beneficial.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors provide an analytical framework to help us understand different portfolio construction practices that may incorporate diversification and conviction strategies; this allows us to connect our analysis to ideas in psychophysics and behavioural finance. The critical psychological ideas are cognitive dissonance and entropy; the economics are based on expected utility theory. The empirical section uses the theory outlined and provides the basis for constructing such portfolios.
Findings
The model presented allows the incorporation of different strategies within a mean-variance framework, ranging from diversification and conviction strategies to more ESG-oriented ones. The empirical analysis provides a practical application.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this model is the first to bridge the gap between portfolio optimisation and the psychological ideas mentioned in a coherent analytical framework.
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