The multiple sequence sets: problem and heuristic algorithms

“Sequence set” is a mathematical model used in many applications such as biological sequences analysis and text processing. However, “single” sequence set model is not appropriate for the rapidly increasing problem size. For example, very large genome sequences should be separated and processed chunk by chunk. For these applications, the underlying mathematical model is “Multiple Sequence Sets” (MSS). To process multiple sequence sets, sequences are distributed to different sets and then sequences on each set are processed in parallel. Deriving effective algorithm for MSS processing is challenging.     

The small world of German CEOs: a multi-method analysis of the affiliation network structure

Journal of Management and Governance - This paper seeks to understand the structure of corporate networks in the period following the dissolution of Deutschland AG (“Germany Inc.”). For...     

From Bureaucracy to Debureaucratization?

More than previous mild recessions, the current global crisis calls into question the merits of a model that held sway for almost three decades. Celebrated in the nineties in a “National Bestseller”, which even President Clinton considered to be a “blueprint” “for all officials to read”, the book—Reinventing Government—preached the reform of government in private sector ways. In stark contrast to Bureaucracy, which they considered “Bankrupt”. Authors Osborne and Gaebler (1993) promoted Debureaucratization, which they summed up as decentralization, deregulation, downsizing and outsourcing. It is time to revisit the assumptions of the Osborne-Gaebler model that has demonstrably failed. More than the model, however, the ways of its promotion in the market of ideas invites a word of caution. It prompted simplistic distortions, which typically followed from superficial analyses of Weber’s seminal opus (Timsit 2008:864–875). This paper reconsiders these two contrasting models, though not in “black” and “white”. Rather, the two are explored in dialectical terms, as outcomes of shifting ideologies, often taken to extremes.     

Morals, Ethics, and Integrity: How Codes of Conduct Contribute to Ethical Adult Education Practice

This article examines the similarities and differences in the concepts or in the usage of the terms “integrity”, “morals” and “ethics” to provide a framework for understanding why these concepts are the foundation of professional ethics and to promote a more thoughtful consideration of the need for codes of ethics for the field of adult education. The article reviews the original interpretations of these terms by the classic philosophers whose works are fundamental for a greater appreciation of contemporary ethics.     

Well paired-dominated graphs

A paired-dominating set is a dominating set whose induced subgraph contains at least one perfect matching. This could model the situation of guards or police where each has a partner or backup. We are interested in those where all “minimal” paired-dominating sets are the same cardinality. In this case, we consider “minimal” to be with respect to the pairings. That is, the removal of any two vertices paired under the matching results in a set that is not dominating. We give a structural characterization of all such graphs with girth at least eight.     

Governing Project-based Firms: Promoting Market-like Processes within Hierarchies

This article takes an empirical point of departure in an in-depth study of an R&D organization that was transformed into a strongly project-based organization. As demonstrated in the analysis, its mode of governance differed radically from traditional bureaucratic and cultural conceptions of governance. Instead the new “rules-of-the-game” introduced amounted to creating an institutional framework, promoting new individual responsibilities and enabling lower level market-like processes of self-organizing discovery. The specific set-up used, included anew organization structure, new responsibilities, etc and the use of “prices”, playing a role both in shaping incentives and guiding knowledge work. The interpretation put forward relies on combining economic theories of governance with more “fine-grained” organization theories, and suggests that there is some discretion for top managers to engage in the design of a market-promoting mode of governance for their project-based firms. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

On the existence of sports sentiment: the relation between football match results and stock index returns in Europe

We test for a relation between football match results and the specific national stock index returns during the period 1990–2006 by means of an event study approach. We employ two different econometric frameworks to cross-check our results and prevent them from being solely model driven: the constant mean model and a two-state Markov-switching market model. Both approaches find no significant results. Consequently, in a modified setup, we control for expectations about probable game results by applying a “surprise” variable, which is computed from betting odds and is integrated into a regression analysis. Again, there does not seem to be a connection between a specific national soccer team’s win or loss and stock index prices. In addition, through a few modifications in our empirical setup, we show how easy it would be to “produce” significant results. Our results are contrary to those of Ashton et al. (Appl Econ Lett 10:783–785, 2003) and Edmans et al. (J Finance 62(4):1967–1998, 2007) and support market efficiency.     

Integration between flow scheduling and personnel allocation in a parallel line system in automotive industry

A state-of-the-art review over fifty years of flow shop scheduling research, written by Gupta and Stafford (2006), comes to the conclusion that the mathematical theory of flow shop scheduling “suffers from too much abstraction and too little application”. In this paper we will develop an extended mathematical model for flow shop scheduling with parallel lines and simultaneously a worker assignment to machines as well as a solution concept for practical use. Such production systems are realized by applying the BTO-(Build to order) concept, as can be found in the automotive or computer industry, which allows customers to make any changes to their vehicles or hardware configuration within a few days before final assembly. In these cases late configuration is an important task for the producer and a complex scheduling problem arises in this context.     

Tracing ‘driver’ versus ‘modulator’ information flow throughout large-scale,task-related neural circuitry

Primary objective: To determine the relative uses of neural action potential (‘spike’) data versus local field potentials (LFPs) for modeling information flow through complex brain networks. Hypothesis: The common use of LFP data, which are continuous and therefore more mathematically suited for spectral information-flow modeling techniques such as Granger causality analysis, can lead to spurious inferences about whether a given brain area ‘drives’ the spiking in a downstream area. Experiment: We recorded spikes and LFPs from the forelimb motor cortex (M1) and the magnocellular red nucleus (mRN), which receives axon collaterals from M1 projection cells onto its distal dendrites, but not onto its perisomatic regions, as rats performed a skilled reaching task. Results and implications: As predicted, Granger causality analysis on the LFPs—which are mainly composed of vector-summed dendritic currents—produced results that if conventionally interpreted would suggest that the M1 cells drove spike firing in the mRN, whereas analyses of spiking in the two recorded regions revealed no significant correlations. These results suggest that mathematical models of information flow should treat the sampled dendritic activity as more likely to reflect intrinsic dendritic and input-related processing in neural networks, whereas spikes are more likely to provide information about the output of neural network processing.     

A political economy of accounting standard setting

In recent years accounting researchers have identified “political” lobbying as a problem for accounting standard setting. This paper presents a simple game-theoretic analysis of the political process to identify situations where companies have incentives to lobby the political principal instead of participating in the usual due process of accounting standard setting. Analysis of the model suggests that “political” lobbying is more likely to happen in the EU than in the US. Furthermore it is suggested that if the relevant standard setters wish to achieve harmonization of accounting standards between the EU and the US, European companies have more lobbying leverage than their American counterparts because there are more European veto players than American ones.     

Modeling whether,what and how much to buy the right way: an empirical analysis with implications for model building

Whether, what and how much to buy are central decisions in consumer goods markets. Marketing research commonly uses a sequential approach where quantity decision is conditional on purchase incidence and brand choice (e.g., Ailawadi et al. in J Mark Res 44:450–467, 2007). This approach assumes separability between decisions and suffers from selectivity bias. The bias can be overcome by explicitly controlling for it (e.g., Zhang et al. in Rev Mark Sci 3(1), 2005) or by using one unifying utility function, a method considered “state of the art in analyzing purchase behavior in a single product category” (e.g., Song and Chintagunta in J Mark Res 44(4):595–612, 2007). However, this latter method puts restrictive assumptions on the influence of prices on choices, which may affect managerial implications derived from the model results. This study investigates the effect of selectivity bias by comparing the sequential approach—with and without explicitly controlling for endogeneity bias—to the unifying utility function approach. Based on household panel data from three categories, we illustrate the extent to which managerial implications from these frameworks differ. We show that the superiority of one framework versus the other depends on the specific category and its characteristics. The managerial implications of using the “wrong” framework are demonstrated by conducting two simulation studies; these show that price elasticities substantially deviate across frameworks.     

Soft Regionalism in Action: Examining Voluntary Regional Councils’ Structures,Processes and Programs

In the United States, the voluntary regional council is the dominant organizational form used by local, state and federal agencies to address regional issues. However, research addressing the details of their operations including their structures, processes and programs has been limited. This article reports on a survey of thirty of these regional councils that are located in large metropolitan areas. The findings indicate that these councils reflect a form of “soft regionalism.” Primarily, they facilitate, coordinate and energize, but they don’t have the more expansive capabilities of consolidations, regional governments and annexations.     

The Synergy and Substance of Organizational and Community Change in the Response to Crime and Conflict: The Emergence and Potential of Restorative Justice

The story of the one-hundredth monkey has generated new ways of thinking about cultural transformation. Different experiences and new understandings of justice have emerged in a variety of cultural contexts and led to a rather sudden multi-national shift in thinking about the collective response to crime, harm and conflict that raises broader theoretical questions about restorative justice as a social movement or innovation. This article will describe the restorative justice movement in an historical context and its emergence into a worldwide phenomenon. The authors also examine the role of communities, or “instrumental communities” in public organizations.     

Zeit und Zeitgeist in der Betriebswirtschaftslehre — dargestellt am Beispiel der betriebswirtschaftlichen Flexibilitätsdiskussion

Zusammenfassung  Gegenstand des vorliegenden Beitrags ist die Untersuchung der über 80 Jahre andauernden Flexibilit?tsdiskussion in der deutschen Betriebswirtschaftslehre. Eine quantitative und qualitative Analyse dieser Diskussion macht deutlich, dass die Zeit (bzw. die im Zeitablauf feststellbaren Entwicklungen oder Ereignisse) sowie der Zeitgeist (als Gesamtheit der eine Epoche kennzeichnenden Auffassungen, Ideen und Lebensformen) erkl?rende Variablen einer wissenschaftlichen Diskussion und ihrer Ergebnisse sein k?nnen. Schon der relativ lange Zeitraum der wissenschaftlichen Behandlung l?sst das Flexibilit?tsthema als „L?ngsschnittstichprobe“ zur Prüfung der oben genannten Hypothese geeignet erscheinen. So wird gezeigt werden, dass die Flexibilit?tsdiskussion durch externe Ereignisse ausgel?st wurde und im Zeitablauf immer wieder „neu“ an Dynamik gewonnen und sich an jeweils vorherrschende Themen und Probleme — den „Zeitgeist“ — ausgerichtet hat. Am Ende der Untersuchung stehen die folgenden Erkenntnisse:

Portfolio optimization: New capabilities and future methods

Summary  This paper addresses the problem of portfolio selection in finance. In many cases, currently available software to compute the efficient frontier runs into difficulty in problems with more than about 600 securities. To proceed beyond this size, it is often necessary to modify the problem in which case there is typically a loss of information. In this paper, we discuss a computer capability that can exactly compute mean-variance efficient frontiers of problems with up to 2,000 securities in very reasonable time (even if a problem’s covariance matrix is 100% dense). The paper also discusses an augmentation to the theory of portfolio selection that allows multiple objectives (such as dividends, liquidity, social responsibility, amount invested in R&D, and so forth) to be incorporated into the portfolio selection process. In such problems, the efficient set is no longer a “frontier,” but is now best described as a “surface” with the interesting property that it is composed of platelets (like on the back of a turtle). Moreover, the computer capability that can compute the exact efficient frontier of a mean-variance problem with up to 2,000 securities also has, after additional coding, the ability to compute exactly all platelets of the efficient surface of a tri-criterion portfolio problem with up to 400 securities.

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Zusammenfassung  In dieser Arbeit stellen wir einen leistungsf?higen Rechenalgorithmus vor, um den effizienten Rand (die nichtdominierten Alternativen) von Portfolio-Auswahlproblemen in der Finanzierung zu bestimmen. Wir bezeichnen den Berechnungsalgorithmus, der in Java programmiert ist, mit MPQ (multi-parametric quadratic programming). MPQ weist gegenüber bisherigen Berechnungsverfahren eine Reihe von Vorteilen auf: Es kann für umfangreiche Anwendungsf?lle genutzt werden, ist durch passable Rechenzeiten charakterisiert und kann die Menge effizienter Alternativen in einem Bruchteil bisher üblicher Rechenzeiten bestimmen.

     

Perspective on comparative corporate governance: understanding corporate governance patterns

 The purpose of this study was to examine the perspective of international comparative research on corporate governance. The problems of stock ownership and corporate control in large corporations are the basis of any discussion on corporate governance. In large corporations of major capitalist countries, the subject of corporate control is changing from a single individual or family to the system of impersonal possession, depending on various factors of stock ownership between corporations and the interlocking directorship. These are the common bases that started the corporate governance problem. After these aspects are recognized, it is important to identify the difference in patterns of corporate governance in each country. First, I clarify the common direction of the development of “stock ownership and corporate control” seen in large corporations of major capitalist countries. Second, I look at the Anglo-American, Japanese, and South Korea patterns, and consider the differences or the distinctiveness of the classification by country in a concrete system of stock ownership and corporate control.     

Improving an exact approach for solving separable integer quadratic knapsack problems

We consider the specially structured (pure) integer Quadratic Multi-Knapsack Problem (QMKP) tackled in the paper “Exact solution methods to solve large scale integer quadratic knapsack problems” by D. Quadri, E. Soutif and P. Tolla (2009), recently appeared on this journal, where the problem is solved by transforming it into an equivalent 0–1 linearized Multi-Knapsack Problem (MKP). We show that, by taking advantage of the structure of the transformed (MKP), it is possible to derive an effective variable fixing procedure leading to an improved branch-and-bound approach. This procedure reduces dramatically the resulting linear problem size inducing an impressive improvement in the performances of the related branch and bound approach when compared to the results of the approach proposed by D. Quadri, E. Soutif and P. Tolla.     

Career Patterns in the U.S. Army Officer Corps

In order to examine the careers of high attaining personnel in a large organizational labor market, variation in 5,114 U.S. Army officer careers is shown to be reducible to a small number of career rhythms with similar speeds in attainment of promotions and credentials. Early promotion to captain, early awarding of a temporary higher rank during war, and career entry close to the onset of war are consistently associated with “star” careers. This finding suggests that career outcomes are driven by temporal proximity to exogenous events like wars and cumulative advantage processes in which benefits accrue to early achievements.     

The interplay between psychometric and sociometric data and the willingness to adopt innovations

Due to high failure rates of new products, marketers are seeking ways to actively manage the diffusion of innovations. It is well accepted that individuals, who exert a remarkably strong influence on others and are usually called opinion leaders, play an important role in the diffusion process. In marketing, such opinion leaders are typically identified by self-designation, which can be biased. A second option to identify opinion leaders is the use of sociometric data which becomes increasingly available. In this paper we examine the effect of social position on the perceived opinion leadership and the resulting behavioral intention in terms of adoption behavior. In an empirical study, we examine the adoption of a new drug called “Byetta” and find that sociometric opinion leadership is an antecedent of the psychometric characteristic. Our results also confirm that such opinion leaders are more likely to adopt innovations. We also find that opinion seekers, individuals who often sought information or opinions from interpersonal sources, can be more easily identified with psychometric data. They are more restrictive in terms of adoption. Interestingly, both types are active as market mavens and thus may either advocate the adoption of the innovation or may be frankly conservative regarding the new product adoption. If opinion seekers can, however, be persuaded to adopt the innovation, they may also serve as an important multiplier. This has several implications for pharmaceutical firms that try to optimize their sales force—influencing opinion leaders may indeed start and fasten the adoption process of innovative products. But it is also necessary to allay opinion seekers’ doubts since they might slow down the adoption process. The identification of opinion leaders might not only be based on difficult to obtain psychometric data, but also on sociometric data from social networks, which is becoming more and more available.     

Corporate social responsibility and corporate governance in Italian SMEs: the experience of some “spirited businesses”

The study proposes to individuate the relationship between social engagement, social statements and governance of SMEs. Does an adhesion to the philosophy and to the practices of CSR, which are reflected in a firm’s mission and accountability, positively influences its governance? If so, is this influence more or less significant for SMEs with respect to large-sized firms? This paper winds itself around these questions and describes the principle findings that have emerged from a qualitative investigation focused on a selected group of “cohesive” Italian SMEs, in which their management complies with both economic and social issues. The empirical study finds that the diffusion of CSR is tied above all to the entrepreneur’s values and orientation and to the company embeddedness to the local socio-economic environment. The concluding reflections trace the features of a territorial model of socially responsible orientation centered on the best practices of SMEs who are excellent examples of “spirited businesses” and are part of a network (which includes institutions, trade associations, non-profit organizations, etc.) that contributes to the diffusion of an orientation towards CSR and to sustainability across the territory.