Systematic evaluation has had a strong impact on many data analysis domains, for example, TREC and CLEF in information retrieval, ImageCLEF in image retrieval, and many challenges in conferences such as MICCAI for medical imaging and ICPR for pattern recognition. With Kaggle, a platform for machine learning challenges has also had a significant success in crowdsourcing solutions. This shows the importance to systematically evaluate algorithms and that the impact is far larger than simply evaluating a single system. Many of these challenges also showed the limits of the commonly used paradigm to prepare a data collection and tasks, distribute these and then evaluate the participants’ submissions. Extremely large datasets are cumbersome to download, while shipping hard disks containing the data becomes impractical. Confidential data can often not be shared, for example medical data, and also data from company repositories. Real-time data will never be available via static data collections as the data change over time and data preparation often takes much time. The Evaluation-as-a-Service (EaaS) paradigm tries to find solutions for many of these problems and has been applied in the VISCERAL project. In EaaS, the data are not moved but remain on a central infrastructure. In the case of VISCERAL, all data were made available in a cloud environment. Participants were provided with virtual machines on which to install their algorithms. Only a small part of the data, the training data, was visible to participants. The major part of the data, the test data, was only accessible to the organizers who ran the algorithms in the participants’ virtual machines on the test data to obtain impartial performance measures.
Co-creation as a joint collaborative process between organizations and customers offers new models and sources of creativity and innovation for businesses to differentiate their value from the value their competitors offer. However, a successful co-creation strategy involves understanding the shared interests of the parties and resolving tensions between internal and external stakeholders. Yet, this aspect of the strategy remains largely understudied. In this study, we take an interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from organizational behavior and marketing fields, and examine shared and conflicting tensions involved in co-creation in the context of sports entertainment. Based on data collected through semi-structured interviews from athletic administration and fans at a Division I University in the USA, our findings suggest a tug of war that is played out through contrasting managerial strategies based on involvement and control.
During the financial crisis that first hit the U.S. economy and soon became a world crisis, investors reduced their holdings of foreign equities, and, at the same time, they increased their holdings of short-term government bonds. The paper analyzes, within the context of a DSGE model, the hedging properties of foreign bond and foreign equity holdings during a crisis, when the degree of uncertainty is high. I show that uncertainty generates portfolio dynamics and that they differ depending on the source of uncertainty. Investors increase their holdings of foreign government bonds and, at the same time, reduce their holdings of foreign corporate equities, when uncertainty originates from aggregate demand. When instead uncertainty originates from aggregate supply, it is optimal for investors to reduce their holdings of foreign bonds and increase their holdings of foreign equity. These findings are supported by the recently developed theories that consider the collapse of aggregate demand the main cause of the “Great Slump” that started in 2007.
This paper investigates the characteristics and performance of family investment holdings across the world. Their unique combination of family wealth and expertise and investments in stock markets make them a special asset class for retail investors. We find that families are strongly involved in terms of stake and management both in their holdings and the holding’s investments. We further document a significant outperformance of family investment holdings globally and in Europe and a more contained performance on Asian markets. Holding characteristics and the economic environment appear to have some limited influence on performance.
This paper investigates the impact of the presence of “over-boarded” directors on the audit committee on earnings management in Europe. Our study is based on a sample of 1420 firms from 15 European countries for the period 2006-2014. For the full sample, we find that the presence of “overlap” directors decreases earnings management, but the presence of “over-boarded” directors (i.e. “busy” directors and “overlap” directors at the same time) increases earnings management. However, “overlap” directors have favorable consequences on earnings management for small firms only, while earnings management is reduced in large firms when “busy” directors are sitting on the audit committee. Finally, “busy” directors and “overlap” directors reduce earnings management in weak institutional contexts, especially for small firms. In contrary, there is no significant effect for large firms in strong institutional context. Our results confirm that the composition of the audit committee has different economic consequences in different institutional and economic contexts and should, therefore, be interesting for European regulators who propose various requirements for listed companies to improve the efficiency of corporate governance.
Our study examines the nomological network of active procrastination in comparison with passive procrastination. In particular, we examine the effects of the five factor model with the aim to understand which personality traits predict academic procrastination. We also test the effect of passive and active procrastination on academic performance to study the unique contribution of each type of procrastination. In a sample of 178 university students in Switzerland, we find that extraversion and neuroticism are related to active procrastination. Furthermore, active procrastination predicts GPA to a much greater extent than the five factor model and passive procrastination.
Cet ouvrage est le deuxième de la série « L'innovation entre le risque et la réussite ». Son objectif est d’esquisser le profil d’une entreprise innovante capable de maintenir et déployer sa compétitivité. L’entreprise innovante, un objet mal identifié analyse les principales caractéristiques d’un tel type de firme d’après la littérature scientifique sur le sujet et des exemples puisés dans le contexte organisationnel fait de petites et grandes entreprises. L’ouvrage présente cinq principaux leviers qui définissent la main (in)visible de l’entreprise innovante. Il considère l’innovation comme un processus basé sur les connaissances et met en évidence les dimensions humaine, sociale et durable dudit phénomène. Le lecteur, qu’il soit dirigeant d’entreprise, manager, collaborateur ou étudiant, trouvera dans cet ouvrage un éclairage actualisé sur les concepts « d'innovation » et « d'entreprise » tous deux multi-facettes et fortement évolutifs.
Large scale infrastructure expansions in hotels are exposed to uncertainty. Since the costs involved in these expansion projects are high and often irreversible, hotels would benefit from analyses that incorporate uncertainty along with traditional valuation techniques like the discounted cash flow (DCF) method. Decision tree analysis (DTA) and real options analysis (ROA) have been in use for the past couple of decades to handle uncertainties and optimize investment decisions. DTA provides a distinct approach to strategic investments that quantitatively takes into account the uncertainties involved in the investments. Under uncertainty, the decision about whether to expand is analogous to the decision about whether to exercise an American call option. By using ROA to the hotel expansion scenario, managers can in-corporate and quantify, flexibility and timing in their analysis. The objective of this chapter is to detail the DCF, DTA and ROA methodologies and their applications specific to hotel expansion investments.
