Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how current US senators utilize their Facebook pages to promote positive relationships with their public in terms of relationship maintenance strategies: positivity, openness, access, assurance, sharing of tasks, and networking. Interactivity of their Facebook pages is also examined.

Content analysis was conducted for 89 Facebook pages of the US senators of the 112th Congress. Levels of six relationship maintenance strategies and interactivity of the Facebook pages were examined.

Among six relationship maintenance strategies, positivity and openness are the most frequently used strategies while access and assurance are the least observed. In total, 70 percent of the senators’ Facebook pages show a low level of interactivity.

The study is limited to the samples of the current US senators.

This study provides a useful insight for political public relations practitioners that features associated with relationship management strategies can be employed to develop better social network sites for political actors, in order to build or enhance relationships with public.

Despite the importance of relationship management among political actors/organizations and public, and potential to establish relationships via social networking sites, only a few studies have tried to explore the relationship maintenance strategies on social network sites in the political arena.

From 1953 to 1961, the South Korean economy grew slowly; the average per capita GNP growth was a mere percent, amounting to less than $100 in 1961. Few people, therefore, look for the sources of later dynamism in this period. As Kyung Cho Chung (1956:225) wrote in the mid‐1950s: “[South Korea] faces grave economic difficulties. The limitations imposed by the Japanese have been succeeded by the division of the country, the general destruction incurred by the Korean War, and the attendant dislocation of the population, which has further disorganized the economy” (see also McCune 1956:191–192). T.R. Fehrenbach (1963:37), in his widely read book on the Korean War, prognosticated: “By themselves, the two halves [of Korea] might possibly build a viable economy by the year 2000, certainly not sooner.”

The purpose of current study aims to provide a different perspective on customer-based brand equity (CBBE) and integrate this with previous brand equity theory to contribute to the brand equity literature.

Proposed hypotheses were verified using structural equation modelling (SEM) with multiple datasets. Study 1 collected data from 574 foreign tourists and 624 domestic tourists of culinary tourism. Study 2 used 1,020 customers from anti-epidemic restaurants, and Study 3 investigated 464 hotel customers’ perceptions of customer-based brand equity.

Building on the mediation-moderation model, the present study posits that perceived quality relates to brand loyalty through brand image and brand awareness of using 2,682 participants. Specifically, we argue that this indirect relationship exhibits a difference moderated pattern in which motivation and hedonic function are most likely to benefit from revisit destinations for tourists when they are moderate. We further explored the new anti-epidemic concepts of COVID-19 and identified restaurant operation as an important moderator that influences customer image of restaurant revisit.

Until now, no tourism and hospitality studies have addressed these unsolved problems in an integrated manner. This study was to investigate the brand equity development process.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of the separation between control and cash flow rights (control-ownership disparity) on the earnings management practices of Chinese firms. The notable features of Chinese firms are those of concentrated ownership and the severe disparity that exists between the control and cash flow rights of controlling shareholders.

This study measures the level of Chinese firms’ earnings management by adopting two different methods of measurement: accrual-based earnings management (AEM) and real activity earnings management (REM). The authors also consider the possible trade-off effects between these two types of measurements. The data set in this study encompasses over 2,000 Chinese firms, using data from 2003 to 2015.

The results indicate that controlling shareholders are more likely to engage in AEM as their cash flow rights are more concentrated, while they are less likely to use REM as the disparity of control-cash flow rights increases. Further, this inverse relationship between REM and control-cash flow rights disparity becomes more pronounced in the case of a low cash flow rights group. As REM generally causes distortions in firms’ operations, it is possible that the controlling shareholders are more likely to constrain the use of REM as the disparity is perceived to grow. This result may indicate a reduced agency problem between controlling and minority shareholders due to the developing and/or existing ownership dispersions, which are mainly driven by recent reforms applied to Chinese capital markets. However, we do not entirely exclude the possibility of other types of expropriations by the controlling shareholders. It appears that the controlling shareholders are still able to exert a significant level of control, even following a substantial ownership dispersion, and they may seek alternative expropriation methods, including but not limited to intercorporate loan or related party transactions as the disparity of control-cash flow rights increases.

Although the Chinese economy is experiencing a series of reforms to infuse market forces into capital markets, little has been known about the effects of ownership-control disparity in Chinese firms. Our findings highlight the importance of the country specific context in this vein of research.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the effectiveness of major deterministic and stochastic volatility-based option pricing models in pricing and hedging exchange-traded dollar–rupee options over a five-year period since the launch of these options in India.

The paper examines the pricing and hedging performance of five different models, namely, the Black–Scholes–Merton model (BSM), skewness- and kurtosis-adjusted BSM, NGARCH model of Duan, Heston’s stochastic volatility model and an ad hoc Black–Scholes (AHBS) model. Risk-neutral structural parameters are extracted by calibrating each model to the prices of traded dollar–rupee call options. These parameters are used to generate out-of-sample model option prices and to construct a delta-neutral hedge for a short option position. Out-of-sample pricing errors and hedging errors are compared to identify the best-performing model. Robustness is tested by comparing the performance of all models separately over turbulent and tranquil periods.

The study finds that relatively simpler models fare better than more mathematically complex models in pricing and hedging dollar–rupee options during the sample period. This superior performance is observed to persist even when comparisons are made separately over volatile periods and tranquil periods. However the more sophisticated models reveal a lower moneyness-maturity bias as compared to the BSM model.

The study concludes that incorporation of skewness and kurtosis in the BSM model as well as the practitioners’ approach of using a moneyness-maturity-based volatility within the BSM model (AHBS model) results in better pricing and hedging effectiveness for dollar–rupee options. This conclusion has strong practical implications for market practitioners, hedgers and regulators in the light of increased volatility in the dollar–rupee pair.

Existing literature on this topic has largely centered around either US equity index options or options on major liquid currencies. While many studies have solely focused on the pricing performance of option pricing models, this paper examines both the pricing and hedging performance of competing models in the context of Indian currency options. Robustness of findings is tested by comparing model performance across periods of stress and tranquility. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is one of the first comprehensive studies to focus on an emerging market currency pair such as the dollar–rupee.

The purpose of this paper is to present a system that analyzes trustworthiness and ranks applications to improve the search experience.

The system adopts pointwise mutual information to calculate comment semantics. It examines subjective (signed opinions, anonymous opinions and star ratings) and objective factors (download numbers, reputation ratings) before filtering, ranking and displaying). The authors invited three experts to check three categories and compared the results using Spearman and two statistics.

A high correlation between the proposed system and the expert ranking system suggests that the system can act as decision support.

First, the authors have only tested the correlation between the proposed system and an expert ranking system; user satisfaction was not evaluated. The authors plan to conduct a later survey to gather user feedback. Second, the ranking system evaluates applications using fixed weights and disregards time. Therefore, in the future, the authors plan to enable their system to weight recent records over older ones.

User discussion forums, although helpful, have drawbacks. Not all reviews are trustworthy, and forums provide no filtering mechanisms to combat information overload. The solution to this is the authors’ system that crawls a forum, filters information, analyzes the trustworthiness of each comment and ranks the application for the user.

This paper develops a formula to analyze the trustworthiness of opinions, enabling the system to act as decision support when no professional advice is available.