Is there a future for social forecasting?

This paper examines the recent rise of, and interest in social forecasting. It reviews the various ways in which social forecasts are attempted: particularly through the techniques of modelling which have been taken from, and developed beyond the models used by the basic science and technologies. It then describes the shifts in thinking emerging from different beliefs and attitudes which seem to portend a new ideology in our global society. Finally the paper briefly addresses the crucial issue known as the ‘World Problematique’ and evaluates the role that social forecasting has to play in devising possible solutions, particularly from the viewpoint of industry, trade and commerce.     

Social forecasting: An integral part of corporate planning?

The increasing need for business to monitor the social dimensions of its environment and, hopefully make some forecasts of future trends has met with some constructive response from academics and consultants although not as yet on a very liberal scale. The published literature does not indicate to what extent companies in general attemp social forecasting and, where they do, the degree of integration which exists within their corporate planning systems. The authors, therefore, decided to survey a sample of British organizations to see if they could shed some light on these issues and thereby add some information to the excellent accounts of individual cases of social forecasting in, they suspect, the more advanced and atypical companies. The survey suggests a general picture of: awareness of the value of social forecasting; fairly widespread ignorance of the techniques which do exist, primitive though these may largely be; successful integration of social forecasting into the corporate planning systems of a substantial number of organizations but not in the majority.     

If we cannot forecast how can we plan?

The purpose of this article is to deal directly and explicitly with the issues and problems currently facing forecasting, planning and strategy and to discuss how the challenges of the 1980s can be realistically and effectively met. The article deals with the various environmental changes that have taken place and their implications for planners; presents empirical evidence, originating from the literature and the area of psychology concerned with human judgment processes; and outlines several new ideas which contribute towards integrating forecasting, planning and strategy and dealing with the turbulent enviroment of the future.     

Technology assessment: Need and motivation of industry

The problems of decision making when the decision concerns large-scale technical plants have increased, largely due to the difficulties of assessing environmental factors. Technology assessment is an approach which can assist in undertaking the necessary analysis which will expose the social impact, participation of affected groups, and the evaluation of political processes for large-scale technical developments. This paper examines the obstacles to the use of Technology assessment techniques by industry and in particular concentrates upon the problems of forecasting future technological change. The paper examines the view that TA is primarily a concept of political decision making and places the concepts of politics in the broadest sense, not merely in a narrow partly political framework. Finally, the paper examines the arguments for and against quantitative evaluation and claims that TA, used properly, can provide valuable qualitative as well as quantitative insights into the impact of processes upon the political, social and economic environment. Thus, suggesting that TA is a technique of forecasting which companies that are involved in the development of major, and therefore heavy resource-consuming, projects should consider the use of this technique as part of their appraisal process.     

Technological forecasting in six major U.K. companies

This study, although based upon a small sample, generally supports the recent evidence in the U.K. and the United States concerning the state of current practice in technological forecasting. The weight of this evidence points to the conclusion that the formal techniques of TF are not widely practiced, although the need for TF is generally accepted, and that those companies which are using these techniques do so with some reservation. Some companies in the U.K., however, do have considerable experience in technological forecasting, diffusion of the knowledge of which would be of benefit to the bulk of British industry.     

Estimating Social Influences from Social Networking Sites—Articulated Friendships versus Communication Interactions

Despite the ubiquity of social networking sites, the online social networking industry is in search of effective marketing strategies to better profit from their established user base. Social media marketing strategies build on the premise that the social network of online users can be predicted and social influences among online users can be estimated. However, the existence of various heterogeneous social interactions on social networking sites presents a challenge for social network prediction and social influence estimation. In this article we draw upon the literatures on self‐presentation on social networking sites and signaling in online social networking to categorize six heterogeneous online social interactions on social networking sites into two types—articulated friendships and communication interactions. This article provides empirical evidence for the differences between articulated friendships and communication interactions and the corresponding articulated and communication networks. In order to compare the impacts of the social influences based on these two networks, we utilize support vector machines to build a classifier to predict virtual community membership and we further estimate the marginal effects of these social influences using a two‐stage probit least squares method. We find significant explanatory power of social influences in predicting virtual community membership. Although the communication network is much sparser than the articulated network, social influences based on the communication network achieve similar performance as the articulated network. These findings provide important implications for social media marketing as well as the management of virtual communities.     

Management and the social environment

Most social change in the past 50 years in the U.K. has been associated with the relatively slow maturing of a highly industrialized society. There are now clear signs that Britain is entering an ‘age of discontinuity’ and that, increasingly, social change will reflect transition from an industrialized to a post-industrial stage of development. This transition will inevitably involve a transfer of power in society, away from the industrial organization and on to other institutions—the state itself, organized labour, consumer organizations and various pressure groups. In the context of such changes it becomes more and more imperative that business organizations should take social factors into account in decision making and that managers should acquire new knowledge and techniques to enable them to contribute to this process. The role of the management educator should be to heighten social awareness among managers, to stimulate a need for knowledge of the social environment and of social change, to indicate where and how such knowledge can be acquired, and to help managers develop skills and techniques of analysis and decision-making appropriate to social data.     

The effect of the future on today's decisions

What is the effect of the future on today's decisions? The future plays a part in all of our decisions whether we utilize formal forecasting techniques or not. Some of the uncertainty of the future can be reduced by applying one or more of the techniques of trend extrapolation, subjective opinion of experts, and construction of scenarios. The results, to be useful to decision makers, must be pertinent, credible and capable of realization.     

Managing the external financing constraints of social enterprises: A systematic review of a diversified research landscape

Social enterprises, located between non-profit organisations and for-profit firms, often struggle to acquire external funding. An increasing amount of research on the external financing of social enterprises stems from a fragmented body of the literature anchored in a variety of subject areas (e.g. entrepreneurship, public sector management, general management and strategy). We systematically review 204 academic articles published between 1998 and 2021 to bridge the knowledge gaps in these subject areas by: (1) mapping the field of the external financing of social enterprises at the individual, organisational and institutional levels; (2) synthesising the findings to develop an overarching framework; and (3) discussing theoretically sound future research avenues. We find that research at the individual level focuses primarily on investors’ perspective of the ideal characteristics of a social entrepreneur. Research at the organisational level often addresses the dual logics of social enterprises and their impact on the successful financing of these businesses and the role of investor–investee collaboration. Research at the institutional level can be clustered into cultural, economic, political and legal factors. Overall, we stress the need for research that adopts an overarching view by considering all three levels of analysis simultaneously and using organisational and economic theories.     

CEO网络嵌入性与企业价值

以社会网络理论为理论依据,本文构建了CEO网络嵌入性与企业价值关系的概念模型,提出CEO网络嵌入性与企业价值变化正相关的假设。运用结构方程方法的模型发展策略,选取2009年A股非金融保险业上市公司为样本,对概念模型与实证数据进行契合,得到一个在统计上与样本数据能够良好适配的理论模型。通过对模型进行实证检验,证实了本文所提出的理论假设和概念模型的合理性。     

基于修剪平均的神经网络集成时序预测方法

由于复杂时序存在结构性断点和异常值等问题，往往导致预测模型训练效果不佳，并可能出现极端预测值的情况。为此，本文提出了基于修剪平均的神经网络集成预测方法。该方法首先从训练数据中生成多组训练集，然后分别训练多个神经网络预测模型，最后将多个神经网络的预测结果使用修剪平均策略进行集成。相较于简单平均策略而言，修剪平均策略不容易受到极值的影响，能够使集成模型获得鲁棒性强的预测效果。在实证研究中，本文构造了两种神经网络集成预测模型，分别为基于修剪平均的自举神经网络集成模型(Trimmed Average based Bootstrap Neural Network Ensemble, TA-BNNE)和基于修剪平均的蒙特卡洛神经网络集成模型(Trimmed Average based Monte Carlo Neural Network Ensemble, TA-MCNNE)，并采用这两种模型对NN3竞赛数据集进行预测，结果表明在常规和复杂数据集上，修剪平均策略比简单平均策略具有更好的预测精度。此外，本文将所提出的集成模型与NN3的前十名模型进行比较，发现两种模型在全部数据集上均超过了第6名，在复杂数据集上的表现均超过了第1名，进一步验证本文所提方法的有效性。     

“互联网+医疗健康”背景下考虑患者反馈机制的药品质量监管策略研究

药品质量关乎公众生命健康、国民经济发展、社会稳定和国家安全，一直以来都是政府和全社会关注的热点问题之一。"互联网+医疗健康"背景下药品流通速度加快使得药品安全问题影响范围扩大，因此，建立患者反馈机制是促进互联网药品质量监管的有效方式。考虑患者反馈机制下如何设计互联网药品质量监管策略的问题，基于演化博弈理论，构建了政府部门、药品生产商、医药电商和患者参与的药品质量监管四方演化博弈模型，通过分析各博弈主体策略选择的稳定性，并基于Lyapunov第一法则对复制动态系统十六种均衡点进行稳定性分析，研究了促进药品生产商提供高质量药品的政府监管策略和患者反馈机制，并利用Matlab 2017仿真分析了各关键要素对策略演化的影响。研究结果表明：1）患者倾向于失真评价或投诉率较低时，医药电商更倾向于选择药品质量不检测，不利于互联网药品质量安全；2）患者失真评价下，不存在药品生产商提供高质量药品的稳定策略组合，而真实评价下有效的反馈机制和监管机制可使互联网药品质量安全具有稳定性；3）提高患者评价（正面评价或负面评价）带给医药电商和药品生产商的声誉价值增加或声誉损失，将会使药品生产商选择提供高质量药品做为稳定策略；4）降低患者失真评价和投诉维权行为的增加，均可增强药品生产商提供高质量药品的稳健性。最后，结合演化博弈模型和仿真分析结果，为完善药品质量监管机制提出了对策与建议。     

电子商务环境下的存储策略优化研究:固定存储还是分类随机存储

库位推荐与拣货过程效率的提升是降低仓库运营成本的两个重要方面。而仓库的存储策略会对仓库运营总成本产生重要影响。本文首先在分类随机存储策略与固定存储策略下构建了库位推荐与拣货路径联合优化的混合整数规划模型;其次,基于快销品行业、医药行业和图书行业下的订单结构特点,采用修正的差分进化算法对两种存储策略进行了对比分析。结论表明：存储策略的优劣不仅与订单结构有关,同时也与单位存储成本与单位拣货成本的比重有关。当比重不高于0.25时,三种行业均是固定存储策略的总成本更低;（2）当比重介于0.25和0.26之间时,快销品行业和医药行业均是固定存储策略的总成本更低,而图书行业下是分类随机存储的成本更低;（3）当比重介于0.26和0.27之间时,快销品行业下是固定存储策略的总成本更低,而图书和医药行业下是分类随机存储的总成本更低。（4）当比重不低于0.27时,三种行业下均是分类随机存储策略的总成本更低。本文可以为不同行业下的仓库存储策略的选择提供一定的参考价值。     

Planning and social change

During his ten years experience of corporate planning in industry the author became increasingly concerned about the relationship between planning and social change. This article, based on a talk given to the Social and Ecological Study Group of the Society for Long Range Planning, explores an approach to environmental appraisal which might make businesses and government agencies more responsive to the needs of a changing society and their products and services correspondingly more socially desirable. The author is currently leading a multidisciplinary team on a study of urban deprivation in Birmingham.     

嵌入战略因子的VaR模型改进研究

传统VaR模型是一种衡量短期投资风险的常用工具,但其衡量长期风险的有效性仍然有所欠缺。并且,传统VaR方法基于历史数据对未来风险进行估算的基础性假定已引起诸多学者的质疑。据此本文提出基于战略考虑的VaR模型改进问题。首先提出战略因子这一综合评价企业战略的概念,然后利用德尔菲法和模糊层次分析法求出其具体表达式,最后基于实证数据的拟合将其嵌入到原有VaR模型中,得到改进后的战略在险值(Strategic Value-at-Risk, SVaR)模型。实证检验的结果表明,改进后得到的SVaR模型预测的长期风险值要比原VaR模型更加准确。     

Forecasting the impact of social change

Economic forecasting is now no longer sufficient in itself in the business world. A wide variety of pressures related to social change have an important bearing on outcomes in the present environment. In making these points, the author of this article argues for the need for greater sensitivity to social changes if business forecasting is to be meaningful.     

公众参与下政府与游戏企业发展策略的演化博弈分析

游戏企业选择设置防沉迷机制行为策略是应对青少年沉迷网络游戏等不良社会影响的有效举措，公众的监督和政府部门的监管是构建良好社会风气的重要保障。本文针对我国越来越多青少年沉迷虚拟网络游戏而影响社会风气的问题，考虑政府监管与公众的监督，构建政府、公众、游戏企业的三方演化博弈模型，并建立复制动态方程，得到不同情形下政府、公众和游戏企业的演化稳定策略；并通过数值分析的方法，分析监管成功率对政府与游戏企业防沉迷机制选择的影响。研究表明，监管成功率对游戏企业策略选择起着重要影响。不同情形下，政府可以根据所掌握的相关信息对游戏企业采取不同策略进行有效监管。从短期角度来看，无论政府采取何种策略，公众与游戏企业会考虑自身利益而选择"不监督"和"不设置防沉迷机制"；从长期角度来看，在没有政府监管情况下，公众与游戏企业依然会主动选择"监督"和"设置防沉迷机制"。     

Managing the Risk of Aggressive Dog Behavior: Investigating the Influence of Owner Threat and Efficacy Perceptions

Aggressive behavior in pet dogs is a serious problem for dog owners across the globe, with bite injuries representing a serious risk to both people and other dogs. The effective management of aggressive behavior in dogs represents a challenging and controversial issue. Although positive reinforcement training methods are now considered to be the most effective and humane technique to manage the risk of aggression, punishment‐based methods continue to be used. Unfortunately, there has been little scientific study into the various factors influencing whether dog owners choose to use positive reinforcement techniques to manage aggression in their dogs. As such, current understanding of how best to encourage and support dog owners to use these methods remains extremely limited. This article uses a survey methodology based on protection motivation theory (PMT) to investigate the factors that influence owner use of positive reinforcement methods to manage aggressive behavior, in an attempt to understand potential barriers and drivers of use. In addition, the article provides an initial exploration of the potential role of wider psychological factors, including owner emotional state, social influence, and cognitive bias. Findings show that the perceived efficacy of positive reinforcement methods and the perceived ability of owners to effectively implement the technique are both key factors predicting future intentions and current reported use. Future interventions should focus on enhancing owner confidence in the effective use of positive reinforcement techniques across multiple scenarios, as well as helping owners manage their own emotional responses when they encounter challenging situations and setbacks.     

Risk assessment for handling hazardous substances within the European industry: Available methodologies and research streams

After the Seveso disaster occurred more than 40 years ago, there has been an increasing awareness of the potential impacts that similar accident events can occur in a wide range of process establishments, where the handling and production of hazardous substances pose a real threat to society and the environment. In these industrial sites denominated “Seveso sites,” the urgent need for an effective strategy emerged markedly to handle hazardous activities and to ensure safe conditions. Since then, the main challenging research issues have focused on how to prevent such accident events and how to mitigate their consequences leading to the development of many risk assessment methodologies. In recent years, researchers and practitioners have tried to provide useful overviews of the existing risk assessment methodologies proposing several reviews. However, these reviews are not exhaustive because they are either dated or focus only on one specific topic (e.g., liquefied natural gas, domino effect, etc.). This work aims to overcome the limitations of the current reviews by providing an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the risk assessment methodologies for handling hazardous substances within the European industry. In particular, we have focused on the current techniques for hazards and accident scenarios identification, as well as probability and consequence analyses for both onshore and offshore installations. Thus, we have identified the research streams that have characterized the activities of researchers and practitioners over the years, and we have then presented and discussed the different risk assessment methodologies available concerning the research stream that they belong to.     

基于LSTHAR模型的投资者关注对股市波动影响研究

有限关注理论认为投资者关注有限，无法掌握市场上所有信息，这会使股票出现暂时的错误定价，引起市场波动，因此投资者关注可能包含预测波动的有益信息。鉴于百度指数能较好代理中国投资者的主动性关注，本文提出将其作为逻辑平滑转移结构的转移变量，引入已实现波动的异质自回归类模型，以刻画投资者关注的变化对未来市场波动的非线性影响。基于华夏上证50ETF高频价格数据的实证表明：新模型相比于异质自回归类基础模型，有显著更优的拟合效果和显著更强的预测性能，即投资者关注的非线性引入对波动率预测有显著贡献。本文还发现，相比于引入移动端百度指数和总体百度指数，引入电脑端百度指数对模型预测性能的改进明显更大，表明电脑端百度指数代表的投资者关注对市场波动有更大的影响。研究结论对投资者风险管理和投资决策有实际指导意义。