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THE main purpose of this article is to discuss the problems and objectives of professional investment management. It is essential to concentrate on the more important aspects of investment decision‐making, as this subject has many far‐reaching ramifications. One problem which will be analyzed in some detail is how far professional managers are useful, as there is some misunderstanding about their basic functions in certain quarters. As will be shown later, we believe that they perform a very important and valuable service within the financial community.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of similarities and differences between small and medium technology enterprises of Zhongguancun in China and Silicon Valley in the USA in the following aspects of their activities: scale, diversity and the strength of entrepreneurial networks; quality of collaboration network; reputation in the sense of stakeholders’ perception at the local market; and foreign networks.

The study uses a survey method. The analysis of variance statistical technique was applied to each aspect.

The investigation reveals that Chinese companies have more stakeholders among relatives and friends, government, universities, accounting/law, as well as collaborate more with competitors and suppliers, while the US companies have more and collaborate diverse relations with its clients. In America, companies tend to trust their partners more than they do in China. For Chinese companies, the local government appraises business more than the USA. Employees from the US companies also take more pride in telling others that they are members of the business. Domestic customers positively rate business products. Chinese companies actually have better access to foreign resources than the USA and collaborate more with their foreign stakeholders.

Understanding the distinctive features of each regional system is crucial for the success of small and medium technology enterprises for both Chinese and US entrepreneurs.

This paper is a pioneer in the comparison and analysis of the two regions.

We searched JM from 1990 to 2005 to identify all studies that employed OLS regression.¹ The search resulted in 83 articles with 147 OLS regressions. Many authors specifically state that they used OLS and these were promptly included in the sample. Other authors acknowledged regression as a methodological procedure without explicitly specifying an estimation technique. To inquire whether OLS was used, we communicated with all of these authors. In all, 51 authors were contacted, with 44 responding. Of the 44 that responded 43 had used OLS; the only exception was subsequently excluded from the analysis. The remaining seven articles were checked once more, and consensus was reached that OLS had most likely been used. Therefore, they were also included in the study.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

This paper aims to analyse the effectiveness of European Works Councils (EWCs) as a mechanism of employee voice from the perspective of Hungarian workers in UK‐owned multinational companies (MNCs). In addition, it analyses the role of prevailing systems of employee voice in Hungary, such as trade unions and works councils, assessing their capacity to influence the work of the EWC.

Using a qualitative approach, the data are drawn from three case studies and comprise a series of semi‐structured interviews, whilst observational and archival data provide additional information. Interview participants primarily consisted of EWC representatives from the UK and Hungary, together with a number of central and local managers and trade union officials.

The data are presented using a five‐themed framework, devised to highlight a number of key themes and comparisons. Evidence suggests fundamental differences in the quality of EWCs, with some providing a better mechanism of voice than others. The level of consultation, managerial and employee attitudes, Eastern European working conditions, training and inadequate communication strategies form some of the major issues identified in the study. Furthermore, trade union involvement and the impact that local works councils have in general proved limited in enhancing the success of the EWC.

The implications for improving the Hungarian voice within the EWC forum are discussed.

The paper confirms existing issues surrounding EWCs, extending the existing field of literature and offering a unique insight into the impact of EWCs in Hungary.

In this paper, one combines information theory, and more especially the concept of entropy, with the statistical theory of decision to derive new criteria for pattern recognition. A generalized definition of entropy is considered as a risk function, and the generalized decision rules so obtained contain the family of the Bayesian decisions as special cases. These criteria may help to check the results obtained by usual techniques; they can be used in adaptive and learning systems, and more generally they can be useful in cybernetic systems.

Digital gaming has become one of the largest entertainment sectors worldwide, increasingly turning the medium into an attractive vehicle for the communication of advertising messages. As a result, the incorporation of products or brands in digital games or in-game advertising (IGA) is expected to grow steadily over the course of the following years. However, much work is still needed to determine and optimize the effectiveness of IGA. The goal of the chapter is to advance IGA effectiveness research by investigating the influence of three aspects of the context in which a game is played and the player’s involvement in response to this context on brand awareness.

To this purpose, three experiments were set up. The first experiment (between-subjects, N = 121) investigated the impact of the social setting in which a game is played, the second experiment (within-subjects, N = 31) examined the effect of the game controls that are used, and the third experiment (between-subjects, N = 62) analyzed the influence of the game story.

The findings of the experiments show that the game context can significantly influence the way in which people recall and recognize brands that are included within its environment and that examining the player’s involvement in response to this context can provide useful information regarding the processes underlying this effect.

These findings contribute to the knowledge of when, how, and in which games advertising can be incorporated in order to achieve games’ full potential as an advertising medium.

Organizing systems should have a decreasing informational entropy, and a meaningful modelling of this property is provided by the approach via the maximum entropy principle, in which the value of the entropy so achieved decreases as the number of constraints increases. As a result, self‐organizing systems could be characterized by a property of self‐creation of constraints. The approach can be extended to probability distributions which depend on an external distributed parameter. In this same information theoretic framework, it appears that the concept of negentropy (negative entropy) introduced by physicists a few decades ago, can be directly identified with informational entropy of deterministic functions (which can be thought of as related to entropy of forms).

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g., the mean or the median), the amalgam poverty line becomes a weighted average of the absolute poverty line and the reference income, where the weights depend on the policy maker’s preferences for aggregating the two components. The paper ends with an empirical illustration comparing urban and rural areas in the People’s Republic of China and India.

Uses a unified expression, called H_h,v^φ1^φ2 entropy to study the asymptotic properties of entropy estimates. Shows that the asymptotic distribution of entropy estimates, in a stratified random sampling set‐up, is normal. Based on the asymptotic precision of entropy estimates, optimum sample size allocations are developed under various constraints. Gives the relative precision of stratified and simple random sampling. Also provides applications to test statistical hypotheses and to build confidence intervals.