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This study explores how experts and novices in pedagogics expanded queries supported by the ERIC thesaurus, and how this was connected to the search effectiveness in an easy and a difficult search task. The expert group consisted of 15 undergraduates in pedagogy and the novice group of 15 students with no previous studies in this field. Their search logs were recorded and a pre‐ and post‐search interview was conducted. The results show that the number and type of terms selected from the thesaurus for expansion by experts improved search effectiveness, whereas there were no connections between the use of thesaurus and improvement of effectiveness among novices. The effectiveness of expansions varied between the facets of the queries. Thus, a vital condition for benefiting from a thesaurus in query expansion to improve search results is sufficient familiarity with the search topic. The results suggest also that it is not in the first place the number of terms used in expansion, but their type and quality that are crucial for search success.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the curvilinear effects of firm innovativeness (i.e. product, organisational and marketing innovation) on international expansion as well as the effect of expansion on performance in the developing countries (DCs) setting.

Research hypotheses are tested using survey data obtained from firms located in four South-East European DCs. Covariance-based structural equation modelling is used to test the proposed conceptual framework.

Empirical findings support the hypothesised U-shaped relationship between product innovation and organisational innovation and the level of international expansion of firms in developing markets. The authors found an inverse U-shaped relationship between marketing innovation and the level of international expansion. Furthermore, the existence of a strong positive link between the level of international expansion and firm performance is also confirmed.

While this research utilises a sample of firms from a homogenous group of DCs, further research could use a more heterogeneous sample and thus control the model for various contingency effects (e.g. environment turbulence, market structure and competitive dynamics).

When it comes to product and organisational innovation, international expansion is achieved only with a higher level of innovativeness. On the contrary, beyond a certain level, further investments in marketing innovation do not have additional positive effects on international expansion.

This study is one of the first that explicitly focuses on examining the non-linear effects of innovativeness on international expansion in the DC context.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the horizontal expansion of Burayu Town between 1990 and 2020. The study typically acts as a baseline for integrated spatial planning in small- and medium-sized towns, which will help to plan sustainable utilization of land.

Landsat5-TM, Landsat7 ETM+, Landsat5 TM and Landsat8 OLI were used in the study, along with other auxiliary data. The LULC map classifications were generated using the Random Forest Package from the Comprehensive R Archive Network. Post-classification, spatial metrics, and per capita land consumption rate were used to understand the manner and rate of expansion of Burayu Town. Focus group discussions and key informant interviews were also used to validate land use classes through triangulation.

The study found that the built-up area was the most dynamic LULC category (85.1%) as it increased by over 4,000 ha between 1990 and 2020. Furthermore, population increase did not result in density increase as per capita land consumption increased from 0.024 to 0.040 during the same period.

As a result of financial limitations, there were no high-resolution satellite images available, making it challenging to pinpoint the truth as it is on the ground. Including senior citizens in the study region allowed this study to overcome these restrictions and detect every type of land use and cover.

Data on urban growth are useful for planning land uses, estimating growth rates and advising the government on how best to use land. This can be achieved by monitoring and reviewing development plans using satellite imaging data and GIS tools.

The use of Random Forest for image classification and the employment of local knowledge to validate the accuracy of land cover classification is a novel approach to properly customize remote sensing applications.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between rapid internationalization and firm value in US restaurant companies. This study also identified the moderating role of available slack, potential slack and recoverable slack on the relationship of rapid internationalization and the firm’s value.

A hierarchical regression analysis with panel fixed effects was used in this study. Samples were drawn from publicly traded US restaurant companies, and span from 1993 to 2016 with 264 firm-year observations was used for the study’s analysis.

Drawing on Penrose’s seminal theory of firm-growth that a firm needs excess resources to grow and that the amount of slack resources directly influences a firm’s international growth, this study found that available slack alleviates the negative impact of rapid international expansion in achieving higher firm value.

This study is one of the few analyses that examined the speed of rapid international expansion in the service context. In addition, this study contributes to existing literature by examining three different slack resources with regards to the speed of international expansion. The findings of this study shed light on restaurant companies whose financial resources are critical for value-adding international expansion.

How to enter and expand in a newly emerged foreign market is less understood. Should multinational enterprises move fast or slowly? In this study, the authors take China as the context to investigate what factors will lead to a fast expansion strategy in a foreign market. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether fast expansion benefits firms’ performance in a rapidly emerging market.

Based on insights from field interviews, the authors developed a theoretical framework. Then, the authors collected data from surveys of managers of multinational enterprises from Western countries to test their hypothesis. This research context is based on the experience of multinational enterprises in China which opened up to foreign direct investment in 1979.

This study shows that internally, strategic long-term investment goals, top management team commitment and externally switching costs and the growth in the demand market which will push firms to expand fast in the newly emerged China market. Faster pace of expansion benefits the performance of multinational enterprises in a newly emerged market.

Based on the onsite interviews followed by the survey of top managers of multinational enterprises located in China, this study provides a fine-grained analysis of the importance of pace and its key antecedents. Thus, the results provide new insights to decision-makers of multinational enterprises when considering expanding in an emerging market at its early stages of growth.

This empirical study, from the international retailing perspective, examines the direction of retailers' further expansion after initial entry into overseas host market in the context of the luxury fashion retail market in China.

The research adopts qualitative multiple case studies.

After initial entry into China, luxury fashion retailers further expand their retail operations through three directional patterns: cautious, regional and countrywide expansions. The stepwise expansion from tier-1 to tier-2 and tier-3 cities remains popular; however, the importance of the tier system of Chinese cities has been weakened because tier-3 cities in affluent regions are perceived to have more potential than some tier-2 cities in less developed regions. The retailers assess a potential local market through interrelated criteria, including location and strategic importance, economic development, available store locations and staff, a high degree of urbanisation and tourism, debatable favourable policies and offers, and popularity of e- and m-commerce. There is a positive relationship between popularity of e- and m-commerce in a city and the potential of that city to run brick-and-mortar stores.

The paper offers an insight into the current international retailing literature by examining the direction of luxury fashion retailers' further expansion after their initial market entry. Particularly, the research considers a set of criteria which can be used to assess a potential local market, and the impact of e- and m-commerce on local market choices for brick-and-mortar stores.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize document expansion techniques for improving image representation and retrieval. This paper proposes a concise framework for tag-based image retrieval (TBIR).

The proposed approach includes three core components: a strategy of selecting expansion (similar) images from the whole corpus (e.g. cluster-based or nearest neighbor-based); a technique for assessing image similarity, which is adopted for selecting expansion images (text, image, or mixed); and a model for matching the expanded image representation with the search query (merging or separate).

The results show that applying the proposed method yields significant improvements in effectiveness, and the method obtains better performance on the top of the rank and makes a great improvement on some topics with zero score in baseline. Moreover, nearest neighbor-based expansion strategy outperforms the cluster-based expansion strategy, and using image features for selecting expansion images is better than using text features in most cases, and the separate method for calculating the augmented probability P(q|R_D) is able to erase the negative influences of error images in R_D.

Despite these methods only outperform on the top of the rank instead of the entire rank list, TBIR on mobile platforms still can benefit from this approach.

Unlike former studies addressing the sparsity, vocabulary mismatch, and tag relatedness in TBIR individually, the approach proposed by this paper addresses all these issues with a single document expansion framework. It is a comprehensive investigation of document expansion techniques in TBIR.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the effects of advertising based on economic cycles. To comprehend advertising effects in the restaurant industry from an economic cycle perspective, this study investigated both short- and long-run advertising effects under periods of economic contraction and expansion and compared those effects between the two economic periods.

The data were collected from the COMPUSTAT database for the restaurant industry (SIC 5,812) from 1979 to 2010. To estimate the economic cycles, the 2005 year-based real gross domestic product (GDP) was used from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Also, all variables were depreciated by the value of the US dollar in 2005. For estimation, a single equation error correction model was used to examine the short-term and long-term effects of advertising.

The results of this study indicated that both the short- and long-term effects of advertising on sales growth were more obvious in contraction periods than in expansion periods. However, the short-run effects of advertising on brand equity did not significantly differ between expansion and contraction periods. Further, the long-term effects of advertising on brand equity were greater in expansion periods than in contraction periods. The findings suggest that restaurant firms should not reduce their advertising budgets during periods of economic contraction to take advantage of superior sales growth outcomes during these periods.

The results of this study provide restaurant managers with useful practical implications. During economic contraction periods, restaurant managers should not reduce advertising budgets to take an ascendant position in terms of sales growth. Though the net positive effect at year t + 1 of contraction periods was smaller than that of expansion periods for sales growth, this is temporal and the long-run positive effect on sales growth spreads into future periods. Thus, a counter-cyclical advertising strategy could compensate for reduced sales from weak customer demands during economic contraction periods.

There have been many empirical studies on the advertising effect in the literature. However, this study examined whether the effects of advertising differ between economic expansion and contraction periods. This specificity is helpful for industrial practitioners as well as academic researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to present new basis functions suitable to parameterize two‐dimensional static potentials or (magnetic) fields and to show their application in practical cases.

Regular multipole solutions of the potential equation in plane elliptic coordinates are found by separation. The resulting set of functions is reduced to complete subsets suitable for expanding regular potentials or irrotational source‐free fields. Approximate regular plane solutions of the potential equation in local toroidal coordinates are computed by R‐separation and power series expansions in the inverse aspect ratio. The harmonic signals induced in a coil rotating in such a toroidal multipole field are computed from the induction law by similar expansions.

The elliptic expansions are useful in a larger area than circular multipole expansions and give better fits. The toroidal expansions permit one to estimate the effect of the curvature of magnets on the field and give better adapted expansions. However, while the scalar multipoles for the potential are orthogonal the vector fields derived for the two‐dimensional field are not.

Derivations presuppose analytical fields.

Field data obtained from numeric field calculations or measurements do not represent exactly analytic fields. Application of the expansion requires care and checks.

The paper presents novel approaches for parameterizing longitudinally uniform cylindrical or toroidally uniform potentials and fields.

This paper aims to discuss the benefits and disadvantages of the law on the expansion of the jurisdiction of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) Court. The major role of DIFC Courts in the Arab community is to handle cases related to commerce and business. For a long time, the court had been acting only in their geographical area until a new law was enacted to extend their jurisdiction all over the world. Afterward, a lot of criticism emerged as for why and how the court will benefit from such actions. The law has drawn a harsh response, although most benefits have also been experienced since the court received quite a large number of new signings. Interaction at the world business forum has benefited the economy of Dubai thanks to the law.

The following study focuses on a description of such benefits and drawbacks. The study does not evaluate a factual process of expansion but indicates the most distinct evidence of positive, as well as negative consequences of the expansion.

It is appropriate to make a general comment on the fact that the expansion of DIFC Court is not sufficiently effective at the current stage. Needless to say, it contains numerous positive aspects, but the gaps are evidently essential because they place the entire Court in a hard circumstance. The Court does not have a well-developed legal framework for its new area of jurisdiction as long as its limited volume of prior precedent is a distinct sign of the Court’s dependence on the UAE’s Law. In such way, DIFC Court will not be able to address issues within new fields of jurisdiction, as it simply lacks an expertise and international law in its legal framework. Moreover, the jurisdiction over new areas of international business was not verified with a plain system of mediation, which is why a current expansion of DIFC Court has to be recognized as redundant. However, its advantages are tending to produce their effects provided that the Court manages to address its current problems.

The study has described the basic benefits and drawbacks of DIFC Court expansion. To speak about the main benefits, they can be depicted as appliance of the common law, unification of English language for proceedings, presence of a preliminary arbitration and guarantees of award enforcement. In a similar way, the drawbacks of the expansion have been issued. The study has identified such drawbacks as lack of international and sophisticated expertise, untested legal framework, strong influence of forum non conveniens, and existence of a limited volume of prior precedent. The paper has not assessed a success of a factual expansion of DIFC Court jurisdiction, but it has managed to fulfill its primary purpose. Thus, the paper has identified a certain tendency concerning the expansion.