Search results

The purpose of this paper is to unveil how family involvement in management teams of private Chinese companies affects professional managers’ psychological ownership and sense of “us”, in the hopes of understanding why their devotion cannot coexist with the higher level of commitment of family managers.

This paper includes two main studies. The first uses regression to analyze survey data provided by 165 professional managers working in Chinese private companies. The second is a scenario experiment in which 106 MBA candidates participate.

The study finds that there is a negative relationship between family management involvement and professional managers’ perceived relationship closeness to owners and psychological ownership of firms. It also finds that relationship closeness fully mediates the negative influence of family management involvement on managers’ psychological ownership.

This paper contributes to both the theoretical literature and management practice. From a theoretical perspective, it connects studies in indigenous sociological psychology with new literature on psychological ownership. The paper finds that personal relationships nurture the shared psychological ownership of managers by generating a sense of “us”, providing a new theoretical explanation for its formation process. Furthermore, this study offers an explanation for the negative signal effect of family involvement in management. From a practical perspective, this study finds that family involvement in management acts as a critical boundary condition for using personal relationships to stimulate professional managers.

The study aims to accomplish the short-term load forecasting for microgrids. Short-term load forecasting is a vital component of economic dispatch in microgrids, and the forecasting error directly affects the economic efficiency of operation. To some extent, short-term load forecasting is more difficult in microgrids than in macrogrids.

This paper presents the method of Dragonfly Algorithm-based support vector machine (DA-SVM) to forecast the short-term load in microgrids. This method adopts the combination of penalty factor C and kernel parameters of SVM which needs to be optimized as the position of dragonfly to find the solution. It takes the forecast accuracy calculated by SVM as the current fitness value of dragonfly and the optimal position of dragonfly obtained through iteration is considered as the optimal combination of parameters C and s of SVM.

DA-SVM algorithm was used to do short-term load forecast in the microgrid of an offshore oilfield group in the Bohai Sea, China and the forecasting results were compared with those of PSO-SVM, GA-SVM and BP neural network models. The experimental results indicate that the DA-SVM algorithm has better global searching ability. In the case of study, the root mean square errors of DA-SVA are about 1.5 per cent and its computation time is saved about 50 per cent.

The DA-SVM model presented in this paper provides an efficient and effective method of short-term load forecasting for a microgrid electric power system.

One of the important characteristics of the hotel business is uncertainty of lodging demand, which can jeopardize hotel operation and ultimately even threaten a hotel’s survival during an economic recession. The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach to determine optimal hotel investment issues under uncertain lodging demand.

Uncertainty of lodging demand is classified into two types: the impact of unexpected economic recession and the temporary imbalance between supply of hotel rooms and lodging demand. A jump-diffusion real option approach is proposed to analyze how these two types affect optimal investment timing and the potential value of new hotel projects. The case of hotel investment in Macao is used to illustrate the jump-diffusion real option approach.

The results of numerical analysis show that the uncertainty induced by temporary imbalance between supply of hotel rooms and lodging demand increases the threshold of investment and hotel value, while the uncertainty induced by unexpected economic recession has ambiguous effects on the value and optimal investment timing of new hotel projects.

The jump-diffusion real option approach increases managerial flexibility for managers when making investment decisions on new hotel projects, allowing greater value to be generated than is possible with the conventional discounted cash flow method.

The approach separates the impact of unexpected economic recession on lodging demand from that of “normal” fluctuations in lodging demand, and it considers the impact of both types of uncertainty on hotel investment.

This paper aims to study the physical and chemical characteristics of inkjet titanium dioxide inks for cotton fabric digital printing.

Different dispersing agents through the reaction of glycerol monooleate and toluene diisocyanate were prepared and then performed by using three different polyols (succinic anhydride-modified polyethylene glycol PEG 600, EO/PO Polyether Monoamine and p-chloro aniline Polyether Monoamine), to obtain three different dispersing agents for water-based titanium dioxide inkjet inks. The prepared dispersants were characterized using FTIR to monitor the reaction progress. Then the prepared dispersants were formulated in titanium dioxide inkjet inks formulation and characterized by particle size, dynamic surface tension, transmission electron microscopy, viscosity and zeta potential against commercial dispersants. Also, the study was extended to evaluate the printed polyester by using the prepared inks according to washing and crock fastness.

The obtained results showed that p-chloro aniline Polyether Monoamine (J) and succinic anhydride modified polyethylene glycol PEG 600 (H) dispersants provided optimum performance as compared to commercial standards especially, particle size distribution data while EO/PO Polyether Monoamine based on dispersant was against and then failed with the wettability and dispersion stability tests.

These ink formulations could be used for printing on cotton fabric by DTG technique of printing and can be used for other types of fabrics.

The newly prepared ink formulation for digital textile printing based on synthesized polyurethane prepolymers has the potential to be promising in this type of printing inks, to prevent clogging of nozzles on the printhead and to improve the print quality on the textile fiber.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of financial constraints on innovation in developing countries. It also examines how the effect of financial constraints varies by sector and with main firm characteristics such as size and age.

The study utilizes matched firm-level data from two sources; the World Bank Enterprise Survey and the Innovation Follow-Up Survey. From 11 African countries, 4,720 firms have been included in the sample. A recursive bivariate probit model is used.

The result shows that financial constraints adversely affect a firm’s decision to engage in innovative activities and the likelihood to have product innovation and process innovation. The results point out that the extent of the adverse effect of financial constraints on innovation differs across the sectors, firm size and age groups. A firm’s innovation is also explained by firm size, R&D, cooperation/alliance, the human capital of the firm, staff training, public financial support and export. At last, the probability of encountering financial constraints is explained by firms’ ex ante financing structure, amount of collateral, accounting and auditing practices and group membership.

Managers should strengthen the internal and external financing capacity to reduce financing constraints and their adverse effect on innovation.

A pending policy task for African leaders is to design and evaluate reforms that reduce the adverse effects of financial constraints on innovation.

This study contributes to the existing literature on financing of innovation by examining how and to what extent financial constraints affect innovation across various sectors, size and age groups.