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Challenges associated with ensuring the accuracy and reliability of cost estimation of highway construction bid items are of significant interest to state highway transportation agencies. Even with the existing research undertaken on the subject, the problem of inaccurate estimation of highway bid items still exists. This paper aims to assess the accuracy of the cost estimation methods employed in the selected studies to provide insights into how well they perform empirically. Additionally, this research seeks to identify, synthesize and assess the impact of the factors affecting highway unit prices because they affect the total cost of highway construction costs.

This paper systematically searched, selected and reviewed 105 papers from Scopus, Google Scholar, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Transportation Research Board (TRB) and Science Direct (SD) on conceptual cost estimation of highway bid items. This study used content and nonparametric statistical analyses to determine research trends, identify, categorize the factors influencing highway unit prices and assess the combined performance of conceptual cost prediction models.

Findings from the trend analysis showed that between 1983 and 2019 North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East contributed the most to improving highway cost estimation research. Aggregating the quantitative results and weighting the findings using each study's sample size revealed that the average error between the actual and the estimated project costs of Monte-Carlo simulation models (5.49%) performed better compared to the Bayesian model (5.95%), support vector machines (6.03%), case-based reasoning (11.69%), artificial neural networks (12.62%) and regression models (13.96%). This paper identified 41 factors and was grouped into three categories, namely: (1) factors relating to project characteristics; (2) organizational factors and (3) estimate factors based on the common classification used in the selected papers. The mean ranking analysis showed that most of the selected papers used project-specific factors more when estimating highway construction bid items than the other factors.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by analyzing and comparing the performance of highway cost estimation models, identifying and categorizing a comprehensive list of cost drivers to stimulate future studies in improving highway construction cost estimates.

Induction heating applications aided by power electronic control have become very attractive in the recent past. For cooking applications, power electronics circuits are very suitable to feed power to multi loads with an appropriate control technique. The purpose of this paper is to develop a three leg inverter to feed power to three loads simultaneously and independently.

Pulse density modulation control technique is used to control the output power independently with constant switching frequency.

Multi-load handling converter with independent power control is achieved with reduced number of switching devices (two switches/per load) with simple control strategy.

The proposed system is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink, and the thermal analysis is carried out in COMSOL multi-physics software. The hardware realisation is performed for a 1 kW prototype with 20 kHz switching frequency and 10 kHz pulse density modulation frequency. PIC16F877A microcontroller is used to validate the experimental results for various values of control signals (D_PDM). The simulation and experimental results are in good agreement and validates the developed system.

Social movements are made up of organized groups and individuals working together to accomplish shared objectives. Under what circumstances do active groups build and break their coalitions? Five conditions have been identified in the literature as influencing coalition formation: common identity, resources, organizational structure, historical connection, and institutional setting. Whereas coalition dynamics within a movement wave are best understood in terms of institutional opportunities and threats, further research is needed to determine how and to what extent these contextual elements influence coalitions. This chapter examines how threats posed by indiscriminate and selective repression affect the shape and structure of interorganizational coalitions during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong. The analysis relies on an original political event dataset and an organization-event network dataset. These datasets were produced utilizing syntactic event coding techniques based on Telegram posts, which Hong Kong protesters used to distribute information, plan future actions, and crowdsource news. Furthermore, Telegram provides detailed information about state activities, event-level coalitions, and violent groups, which is difficult to access from other sources. This study investigates the coalition networks across the movement's four stages, each of which was marked by a particular type and degree of repression. The findings indicate that indiscriminate and selective repression have varied effects on coalition networks. A wide coalition disintegrates as a result of indiscriminate repression. Selective repression, however, leads to the formation of coalitions around activist groups targeted by repression.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

This paper examines the relationship between supply chain network structures and firm financial performance and the moderating role of international relations. In this study, which is grounded in social capital theory and applies the perspective of systemic risk, the authors theorize the effects of supply chain network structures on firm performance.

The authors extracted data from two Chinese databases and constructed a supply chain network of the firms concerned based on nearly 4,300 supply chain relations between 2009 and 2018. The authors adopted the fixed effects model to investigate the relationship between supply chain network structures and firm financial performance.

The econometrics results indicate that network structures, including the degree, centrality, clustering coefficients and structural holes, are significantly related to firm financial performance. A significant and negative relationship exists between international relations and firm financial performance. The authors also find that international relations strongly weaken the relationship between supply chain network structures and firm financial performance.

This study, which collects secondary data from developing countries (e.g. China) and explores the impacts of supply chain network structures on firm stock performance, contributes to the existing literature and provides practical implications.

The authors seek to analyze the impact of weak corporate governance by top executives of a firm on the firm's earnings reports. This research is meant to further emphasize the impact of co-opted executives on a firm, primarily through their impact on earnings management.

Using financial data from 11,473 firm-year observations, the authors utilize ordinary least squares (OLS), 2-stage IV regressions, propensity score matching (PSM) and entropy balancing to analyze the impact of a co-opted top management team on discretionary accruals and restatements.

The authors find empirical evidence that firms with weak corporate governance from top executives are more likely to manipulate reported earnings and have lower financial reporting quality. The authors also find that the effect of co-opted executives on earnings management is weaker when a chief executive officer's (CEO’s) incentives are not aligned with those of top executives, suggesting that executives prevent earnings management due to reputational concerns. Co-opted chief financial officers (CFOs) increase the magnitude of earnings management in a firm but are not solely responsible for the authors' results.

The authors' results suggest that the top executive team provides an important first defense in the prevention of earnings management and corporate wrongdoing. Co-option of the top executive team may be an important consideration when doing research into corporate governance.

In conventional discourses on sustainability, the relationship between economics and ecology is central. A number of nations' economies benefited from responsible tourism following these conferences. By supporting local businesses and attractions, ‘green’ tourism helps communities achieve their natural and cultural objectives while also preserving their limited resources. In terms of sustainable travel, Kerala was an early leader. This study looks at RT initiatives in various stages, with an emphasis on green tourism's sustainable responsible travel practises. The green economic development bottom line method was used for this descriptive research. These results highlight the difficulties inherent with RT implementation. Our review of secondary data shows that the first rollout of RT was unsuccessful, but that subsequent stages showed great promise. In order to create sustainable tourism on a worldwide scale, the study also highlights the necessity for more research in other culturally distant places.

One of the two main tasks of innovation leadership, a practice to inspire and enable creativity and innovation in organisations, is to construct a creativity-enabling organisational environment. One form of this main task is using developmental interactions, like mentoring, as innovation leadership practices. A hackathon is one type of innovation contest with three designed phases: pre-hackathon, hackathon event and post-hackathon, involving multiple stakeholders with distinct roles, such as hackers and mentors. In a hackathon, the central activity of mentors is to support the hackers’ innovation process, especially in idea creation and concept development. The mentor role has not been focal in hackathon studies; thus, this chapter addresses the role, impact, and ways to acknowledge the mentors as an integral, contributing innovation leadership practice in hackathons. As an empirical study, this chapter presents the results of a public sector case in a Swedish multi-disciplinary municipality conducting intra-organisational hackathons in three different collocations. The chapter contributes to the literature on innovation leadership at the team level with mentorship in innovation contests in the public sector context by revealing the dual-role tension of innovation leadership in mentor activities in the hackathon event phase from both the hackers’ and mentors’ viewpoints, and the necessity of mentor-benefitting training in pre-hackathon phase.

This study aims at building a framework for the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) response under the social media environment. The elaboration likelihood model was adopted to explain how message source credibility and message appeal jointly influence the eWOM response process, while source credibility provides a central route and message appeal plays a peripheral route for information processing.

This study used a scenario design to test the decision behavior in the Facebook environment through message content manipulation. A convenience sampling method was adopted in this study. We collected 203 valid questionnaires and tested this research model with LISREL 8.8. This study used a two-stage structural equation modeling data analysis method with LISREL 8.8, by which the measurement model was assessed through confirmatory factor analysis for the reliability and validity of the research model, and the causal relationship among factors was assessed through exploratory factor analysis .

The results showed that 53% variance of eWOM responses could be explained by message source credibility and emotional message appeal from the elaboration likelihood model perspective. Message source credibility plays a central role in the social media environment. The model was further tested with a demographic profile analysis for both gender and age. It is found that a female user is influenced by both source credibility and emotional appeal, but a male user is only influenced by message source credibility. The mature age group is more responsive to eWOM messages.

The sample might not represent all social networking sites (SNS) users. The participants represent a small segment of the Facebook population around the globe. Secondly, this research design could be improved by using more recreational messages to test the effects of message appeal and message source credibility. Thirdly, the mobile phone is a type of physical product rather than an experiential product. Future studies could try to identify the same eWOM determinants with different SNS functions, for example, the inbox message function. Similarly, Facebook users are allowed to use both text and pictures to disseminate promotional messages.

This study provides an insight for SNS administrators regarding the determinants of driving more customer responses toward a message. Message source credibility and message appeal are identified as the antecedents for eWOM responses in SNS. Companies could make use of this finding to improve their marketing communication strategy in SNS. The finding can inform administrators of the importance of focusing on both customers’ psychological state and message attributes during the dissemination of promotional messages to improve the efficiency of the promotional effort. Companies aimed at receiving different types of eWOM responses in SNS may need to consider other factors for creating their promotional messages.

Previous studies have mainly identified factors influencing eWOM responses from the people-centered variables such as personal traits and social relationships. This study proposes that the eWOM response is a dual information processing process that can be explained by the ELM. When a user processes information in SNS, he follows both the central route and the peripheral route (i.e. source credibility and message appeal) which can influence the eWOM response. It is the first time that the source credibility is investigated as the central route in ELM model.

Present a method to impute missing data from a chaotic time series, in this case lightning prediction data, and then use that completed dataset to create lightning prediction forecasts.

Using the technique of spatiotemporal kriging to estimate data that is autocorrelated but in space and time. Using the estimated data in an imputation methodology completes a dataset used in lightning prediction.

The techniques provided prove robust to the chaotic nature of the data, and the resulting time series displays evidence of smoothing while also preserving the signal of interest for lightning prediction.

The research is limited to the data collected in support of weather prediction work through the 45th Weather Squadron of the United States Air Force.

These methods are important due to the increasing reliance on sensor systems. These systems often provide incomplete and chaotic data, which must be used despite collection limitations. This work establishes a viable data imputation methodology.

Improved lightning prediction, as with any improved prediction methods for natural weather events, can save lives and resources due to timely, cautious behaviors as a result of the predictions.

Based on the authors’ knowledge, this is a novel application of these imputation methods and the forecasting methods.