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In acquisitions of technology-based firms the focus is typically on the technology and the target firm's engineers and scientists. But a firm is a social entity with a range of important internal and external relationships that are essential to the exploitation of existing capabilities, and the development of new ones. These relationships need to be maintained, subsequent to acquisition, to preserve the target firm's ability to innovate and compete. I argue for the importance of the target firm's relationships with its customers, and show that the degree to which the acquisition creates or destroys value for the target firm's customers is a significant predictor of acquisition success.

This study explores whether targeted microcredit can effectively alleviate households’ multidimensional relative poverty (MdRP) in rural China in the new era following the poverty elimination campaign and discusses it from a gendered perspective.

This study applies a fixed-effects model, propensity score matching (PSM) and two-stage instrumental variable method to two-period panel data collected from 611 households in rural western China in 2018 and 2021 to explore the effects, mechanisms and heterogenous performance of targeted microcredit on households’ MdRP in the new era.

(i) Targeted microcredit can alleviate MdRP among rural households in the new era, mainly by reducing income and opportunity inequality. (ii) Targeted microcredit can promote women’s empowerment, mainly by enhancing their social participation, thereby helping alleviate households’ MdRP. The effect of the targeted microcredit on MdRP is more significant in medium-educated women households and non-left-behind women households. (iii) The MdRP alleviation effect is stronger in villages with a high degree of digitalization.

Learn from the experience of targeted microcredit. Accurately identify poor groups and integrate loan design into financial health and women empowerment. Particularly, pay attention to less-educated and left-behind women households and strengthen coordination between targeted microcredit and digital village strategies.

This study clarifies the effect of targeted microcredit on women’s empowerment and households’ MdRP alleviation in the new era. It also explores its various effects on households with different female characteristics and regional digitalization levels, providing ideas for optimizing microcredit.

Despite the well-recognized importance of recycled water, the study of industry-peer pressure on recycled water is relatively new. This study investigates how organizations experience and react to industry-peer pressure to set recycled water targets. Additionally, this study investigates the role of board chairs involved in sustainability committees in contributing to responses to industry-peer pressure.

Using Eviews 12, this study employed a pooled logistic regression model to analyze data from 1,346 firms on Taiwan and Taipei exchanges (2017–2020).

The findings revealed that frequency-based imitation drives recycled water target-setting diffusion. However, there is no direct relationship between outcome-based imitation and recycled water target-setting. Notably, outcome-based imitation drives the adoption of recycled water target-setting of firms with board-chair membership in sustainability committees.

This study faces certain data limitations. First, this study primarily focuses on water recycling. Future research could explore other ways to reduce water usage, such as using water-efficient equipment. Second, this study gathered information solely on the presence or absence of a board chairperson on the sustainability committee. Future researchers could explore the impact of the composition of sustainability committee on recycled water target-setting. Lastly, the sample used in this study is restricted to Taiwan's corporations that existed during 2017–2020. Future researchers may consider adopting a longitudinal design in other economies to address this limitation.

The findings of this study offer several guidelines and implications for recycled water target-setting and the composition of sustainability committees. It responds to an urgent call for solutions to water shortages when pressure from governments and nongovernmental organizations is relatively absent. The number of industry peers that have already set recycled water targets is indispensable for motivating firms to set their own recycled water targets. In terms of insufficient water-related regulatory pressure and normative pressure, this study found evidence suggesting that the direct motivation for setting recycled water targets stems from mimetic pressures via frequency-based imitation. The evidence in this study suggests that policymakers should require companies to disclose their peers’ recycled water target information, as doing so serves as an alternative means to achieving SDG 6.3.

Recycled water target-setting might be challenging. Water recycling practices may face strong resistance and require substantial additional resources (Zhang and Tang, 2019; Gao et al., 2019; Gu et al., 2023). Therefore, this study suggests that firms should ensure the mindfulness of board members in promoting the welfare of the natural environment when making recycled water target-setting decisions. To reap the second-mover advantage, firms must consider the conditions in which board members can more effectively play their role. Corporations may help their chairpersons in setting recycled water targets by recruiting them as members of sustainability committees. Meanwhile, chairpersons tend to activate accurate mental models when the water conservation performance of pioneering industry peers is strong enough to indicate the potential benefits of adopting recycled water target-setting. Investors’ and stakeholders’ understanding of how the composition of sustainability committees is related to recycled water target-setting may help to identify the potential drivers of firms’ water responsibility. Investors and stakeholders should distinguish firms in terms of the board chair’s membership of their sustainability committee and focus on water-use reduction outcomes in the industry. This study provides insights into circumstances whereby chairpersons help to restore the water ecosystem.

This study explains how frequency-based and outcome-based imitation are two prominent mechanisms underlying the industry-peer pressure concerning recycled water target-setting. Moreover, this study fills literature gaps related to the moderating roles of board-chair membership in sustainability committees concerning industry-peer pressure on recycled water target-setting.

This paper aims to explore the development of investment decision tools by understanding the rationality behind the disposition effect. We suspect that not all disposition decisions are irrational. The decisions should be evaluated based on the bounded rationality of the individuals’ target and tolerance level, which is not covered in previous literature. Adding the context of individual preference (target and tolerance) in their decision could improve the classic measurement of disposition effect.

The laboratory web experiment is prepared to collect the responses in holding and selling the stocks within 14 days. Two groups of Gen Z investors are observed. The control group makes a decision based on their judgment without any system recommendation. In contrast, the second group gets help inputting their target and tolerance. Furthermore, the framing effect is also applied as a reminder of their target and tolerance to induce more holding decisions on gain but selling on loss.

The framing effect is adequate to mitigate the disposition effect but only at the early day of observation. Bounded rationality explains the rationality of liquidating the gain because the participants have reached their goal. The framing effect is not moderated by days to affect the disposition effect; over time, the disposition effect tends to be higher. A new measurement of the disposition effect in the context of bounded rationality is better than the original disposition effect coefficient.

Gen Z investors need a system aid to help their investment decisions set their target and tolerance to mitigate the disposition effect. Investment firms can make a premium feature based on real-time market data for investors to manage their assets rationally in the long run. Bounded rationality theory offers more flexibility in understanding the gap between profit maximization and irrational decisions in behavioral finance. The government can use this finding to develop a suitable policy and ecosystem to help beginner investors understand investment risk and manage their assets based on subjective risk tolerance.

The classic Proportion Gain Realized (PGR) and Proportion Loss Realized (PLR) measurements cannot accommodate several contexts of users’ targets and tolerance in their choices, which we argue need to be re-evaluated with bounded rationality. Therefore, this article proposed new measurements that account for the users’ target and tolerance level to evaluate the rationality of their decision.

We explore the impact of equity liquidity on a firm’s dynamic leverage adjustments and the moderating impacts of leverage deviation and target instability on the link between equity liquidity and dynamic leverage in the UK market.

In applying the two-step system GMM, we estimate our model by exploring suitable instruments for the dynamic variable(s), i.e. lagged values of the dynamic term(s).

Our analyses document that a firm’s equity liquidity has a positive impact on the speed of adjustment (SOA) of its leverage ratio back to the target ratio in the UK market. We also demonstrate that the positive relationship between liquidity and SOA is more pronounced for firms whose current position is relatively close to their target leverage ratio and whose target ratio is relatively stable.

This study provides important implications for both firms’ managers and investors. Particularly, firms’ managers who wish to increase the leverage SOA to enhance firms’ value need to give great attention to their equity liquidity. Investors who want to evaluate firms’ performance could also consider their equity liquidity and leverage SOA.

We are the first to enrich the literature on leverage adjustments by identifying equity liquidity as a new determinant of SOA in a single developed country with many differences in the structure and development of capital markets, ownership concentration and institutional characteristics. We also provide new empirical evidence of the joint effect of equity liquidity, leverage deviation and target instability on leverage SOA.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a whole set of methods for underwater target detection, because most underwater objects have small samples, low quality underwater images problems such as detail loss, low contrast and color distortion, and verify the feasibility of the proposed methods through experiments.

The improved RGHS algorithm to enhance the original underwater target image is proposed, and then the YOLOv4 deep learning network for underwater small sample targets detection is improved based on the combination of traditional data expansion method and Mosaic algorithm, expanding the feature extraction capability with SPP (Spatial Pyramid Pooling) module after each feature extraction layer to extract richer feature information.

The experimental results, using the official dataset, reveal a 3.5% increase in average detection accuracy for three types of underwater biological targets compared to the traditional YOLOv4 algorithm. In underwater robot application testing, the proposed method achieves an impressive 94.73% average detection accuracy for the three types of underwater biological targets.

Underwater target detection is an important task for underwater robot application. However, most underwater targets have the characteristics of small samples, and the detection of small sample targets is a comprehensive problem because it is affected by the quality of underwater images. This paper provides a whole set of methods to solve the problems, which is of great significance to the application of underwater robot.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which a sample of US-based higher education institution’s (HEI’s) climate targets and associated climate action planning efforts align with the definitions of and practices associated with science-based targets (SBTs) that are typically used to organize corporate climate efforts. This analysis will be used to explore similarities and tease out differences between how US-based HEIs and corporations approach sustainable target setting and organize sustainable action.

The degree of intersection between a sample of HEI climate action plans from Ivy Plus (Ivy+) schools and the current SBT initiative (SBTi) general corporate protocol was assessed by using an objective-oriented evaluative approach.

While there were some areas of overlap between HEI’s climate action planning and SBTi’s general corporate protocol – for instance, the setting of both short- and long-term targets and large-scale investments in renewable energy – significant areas of difference in sampled HEIs included scant quantitative Scope 3 targets, the use offsets to meet short-term targets and a low absolute annual reduction of Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

This paper unites diverse areas of literature on SBTs, corporate sustainability target setting and sustainability in higher education. It provides an overview of the potential benefits and disadvantages of HEIs adopting SBTs and provides recommendations for the development of sector-specific SBTi guidelines.

Technology acquisition is a common phenomenon of acquiring external knowledge, but we have a limited understanding of conditions in which the acquirer integrates the target or not. On one hand, the acquirer may have a policy to integrate the target to benefit from its prior knowledge. On the other hand, the target may face challenges in continuing its knowledge creation and the acquirer may want to provide it autonomy to not disrupt it. This paper aims to identify conditions in which targets tend to be less integrated after acquisitions, allowing them to maintain more autonomy and contribute more to knowledge creation.

We test our arguments in the empirical setting of the global biopharmaceutical industry using a difference-in-difference approach on a longitudinal dataset of matched patents. We examine self-cites received by patents belonging to acquirers and the targets before and after the acquisitions.

We find that, on average, the targets’ prior patents do not receive more self-cites after the acquisition. We conclude that this is because their R&D activities are disrupted, suggesting a higher level of post-acquisition integration. However, more nuanced findings reveal that it may not be the case all the time. When the target has more research experience, is international or is specialized in complementary technologies, prior patents of targets continue to receive more self-cites after the acquisition. It indicates that the targets in such conditions continue knowledge creation, suggesting a lower level of post-acquisition integration.

Our findings contribute to post-acquisition integration research. While post-acquisition integration downside is common, we present conditions in which such a downside may be less likely. We highlight that the context of an acquisition may be an important determinant of the extent of integration of the target. Moreover, we supplement the integration research (cultural, structural and human resource and leadership perspectives of integration) by adding a knowledge-based perspective to it. Such dynamics have important implications for acquirers and targets in deriving value from the acquisition.

Throughout the world of the Less Developed Countries (LDC’s) there exists a complex maze of export promotion and incentive schemes which reflect the mental agility of economists, lawyers and legislators, in providing special favours and benefits for the export sector.

This paper features a study of the dividend policies of the larger listed British companies. It focusses on the sample companies' usage of target payout ratios. A company with a target payout is defined as one which has a policy of attempting to pay out a fixed proportion of available earnings as dividends. In particular, it examines the extent of the usage of explicit target payouts, the range of target payouts adopted and the frequency of changes in such targets. It also examines the factors which are perceived to have an influence on the company's choice of these targets. Finally, it extends and parallels previous work by Partington (1984) on the use of target payouts by Australian companies.