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We propose a risk factor for idiosyncratic entropy and explore the relationship between this factor and expected stock returns.

We estimate a cross-sectional model of expected entropy that uses several common risk factors to predict idiosyncratic entropy.

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.

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.

The focus of this chapter is upon workplace coaching, one of the deepest forms of communication where true understanding is formed between two people in rich dialogue.

Two domains of personal learning are presented: the inner theatre, which includes multi-source feedback, and the outer theatre, which includes action-learning projects (Callan & Latemore, 2008).

Two transformative learning strategies are considered in detail: the therapeutic metaphor (Atkinson, 1995) and the intensive journal (Progoff, 1992). Four case studies are then examined where clients engage in transformative change.

The chapter concludes with cautions for the professional coach and insists that coaching needs to be deeply respectful. Authentic coaches facilitate change with their clients, not to do things to them.

Utilising a database that distinctly classifies firm-level ESG (environmental, social and governance) news sentiment as positive or negative, the authors examine the information flow between the two types of ESG news sentiment and stock returns for 20 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange between 2015 and 2021.

The authors use Shannonian transfer entropy to examine whether information significantly flows from ESG news sentiment to stock returns and a modified event study analysis to establish how stock prices react to changes in the two types of ESG sentiment.

Using Shannonian transfer entropy, the authors find that for the majority of the companies studied, information flows from the positive ESG news sentiment to stock returns while only a minority of the companies exhibit significant information flow from negative ESG news sentiment to returns. Furthermore, the study’s findings show significantly positive (negative) abnormal returns on the event date and beyond for both upgrades and downgrades in positive ESG news sentiment.

This study is among the first in an African context to investigate the impact of ESG news sentiment on stock market returns at high frequencies.

Entrepreneurs prioritise and act on purposeful endeavours instigated to actions by the visions of profits and benefits in the perceived opportunities. In the state of maximum entropy, with disorderliness and disequilibrium, entrepreneurs select the preferred pathway, through the profit-sensing mechanism, with the best probability of success to bet on. Therefore, this paper unpacks the forces at work in the mechanism to explain how entrepreneurs respond to opportunity and interpret the signals to coalesce into organised actions.

This research is primarily a conceptual paper on entrepreneurial action and the mechanism leading to that action. It refers to thermodynamic principles and biological cases to explain the forces at work using mostly analogical comparisons and similarities.

This paper aims to present an alternative theoretical scaffolding for entrepreneurship researchers to explore non-rational entrepreneurial behaviours and actions in uncertain, unstable and non-equilibrium environments, thereby creating new and competing hypotheses under the backdrop of adaptive evolution and thermodynamics phenomena.

The discussion featuring instinctively and naturally forming responses cannot fully explain the real entrepreneurial action as there is an element of free will and choices that are not discussed. While strategic choice and free-will shape decisions, they are preceded first by the attraction of the gradients and the biased motion in the direction of profit-attractant.

There remain essential links and issues not addressed in this “natural science”, constituting life science and physical science, oriented entrepreneurship research and exploration. Conceptualising opportunity-as-artefact and entrepreneurship as design, significant incidences of entrepreneurial actions can be explained by the presence of gradients stimulating entrepreneurial actions.

This viewpoint of information causality in opportunity-as-artefact casts a new look at the venerable question of what causes entrepreneurial actions. Shane and Venkataraman brought into focus this conversation, initiating the conceptual definition of opportunity. To have entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial opportunities must come first. Figuring the signals arising from these opportunities and cueing entrepreneurs to action is the main focus of this study.

Considering the “mechanism” at work and the thermodynamical forces at play, the entrepreneurial design process appears to hold considerable promise for future research development.

Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic paradigm represents one of the seminal ideas of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, its full potential has yet to be realized. For instance, cybernetics is relatively little used as an analytical tool in the social sciences. One reason, it is argued here, is that Wiener’s framework lacks a crucial element – a functional definition of information. Although so‐called Shannon information has made many valuable contributions and has many important uses, it is blind to the functional properties of information. Here a radically different approach to information theory is described. After briefly critiquing the literature in information theory, a new kind of cybernetic information will be proposed called “control information.” Control information is not a “thing” but an attribute of the relationships between things. It is defined as: the capacity (know‐how) to control the acquisition, disposition and utilization of matter/energy in purposive (cybernetic) processes. This concept is briefly elucidated, and a formalization proposed in terms of a common unit of measurement, namely the quantity of “available energy” that can be controlled by a given unit of information in a given context. However, other metrics are also feasible, from money to allocations of human labor. Some illustrations are briefly provided and some of the implications are discussed.

Emphasis on the potential roles diverse farm production systems could play in enhancing food consumption variety and nutritional well-being in rural developing countries has increased in recent times. However, there are paucities of empirical works connecting diversity in agricultural production and dietary diversity in Africa, and Nigeria in particular. The purpose of this paper is to, therefore, examine, among others, the causal link between farm production diversity and consumption of varied diets among farm households in Nigeria using a nationally representative panel data.

Unlike the simple food count measure, the authors adopt two-dimensional indices to assess food diversity, and estimated both fixed and random effects versions of panel data econometrics models with the two-dimensional indices as regressands.

Results show that food production system is less diverse with an average farm household consuming fairly varied foods across seasons. All the econometrics models estimated consistently established positive and statistically significant influence of farm production diversity on household dietary diversity. Higher food prices, especially rice and roots and tubers could substantially reduce dietary diversity with the negative effects likely to be more devastating for low-income farm households. The specificity of household being a net food seller had positive, although weak influence on dietary diversity.

The findings accentuate, among others, the need for strategies to promote farm production diversity, transform farm households to net-sellers of foods and enable them take advantage of food price signals to boost farm incomes as important pathway for diet quality improvement and reduction of food insecurity, malnutrition and related diseases in rural Nigeria

A common feature of certain kinds of data is a high level of statistical dependence across space and time. This spatial and temporal dependence contains useful information that can be exploited to significantly reduce the uncertainty surrounding local distributions. This chapter develops a methodology for inferring local distributions that incorporates these dependencies. The approach accommodates active learning over space and time, and from aggregate data and distributions to disaggregate individual data and distributions. We combine data sets on Kansas winter wheat yields – annual county-level yields over the period from 1947 through 2000 for all 105 counties in the state of Kansas, and 20,720 individual farm-level sample moments, based on ten years of the reported actual production histories for the winter wheat yields of farmers participating in the United States Department of Agriculture Federal Crop Insurance Corporation Multiple Peril Crop Insurance Program in each of the years 1991–2000. We derive a learning rule that combines statewide, county, and local farm-level data using Bayes’ rule to estimate the moments of individual farm-level crop yield distributions. Information theory and the maximum entropy criterion are used to estimate farm-level crop yield densities from these moments. These posterior densities are found to substantially reduce the bias and volatility of crop insurance premium rates.

The purpose of this study is to propose and test a model on the impact of diversity over performance using a Portuguese national wide comprehensively matched employee–employer dataset of small businesses.

The study uses structural equation modeling to analyze the relationships between variables. The study addresses the impact of top managers and employees' diversity on firm performance considering two dimensions of diversity: knowledge diversity and social diversity.

The study provides a clear understanding of how workforce diversity affects performance differently at the two hierarchical levels. Both employees' diversities have stronger relations to performance than the diversity of top managers. Results point out to idiosyncratic aspects of services firms' dynamics that should be further explored.

The study presents some limitations, since it uses data from a single country and the dataset provides limited variables.

The study offers evidence on the effects of diversity in small businesses alerting managers to acknowledge such influence when recruiting, selecting and training. With regard to services firms, managers should pay close attention to negative impacts of diversity over performance.

Never before to the authors' knowledge the managers' level diversity and employees' level diversity (considering two dimensions each) effect on performance have been addressed in a single national wide study.