Gambling motivations and superstitious beliefs: a cross-cultural study with casino customers

The expansion of legalized commercial gaming in Macau has motivated stakeholders to explore opportunities in other Asian countries. However, there is a lack of research focusing on casino customers in these markets. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore gambling superstitious beliefs and motivations of those visiting a casino in South Korea, and how these factors are different across four ethnic groups. The researchers surveyed 323 casino customers in the lounge area on the casino floor, including Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans living abroad. This study found American gamblers could be characterized as more superstitious than Japanese gamblers, while the Chinese and American gamblers exhibited many similarities regarding the pattern of superstitious beliefs that they were most likely to endorse. The findings also suggest the culture and the area around the casino might be more important to Chinese, while novelty to Japanese and winning money to Korean gamblers are seen as most important. This study contributes to gambling literature by examining gamblers’ beliefs and motives in a different setting with more diverse populations than those in previous studies. The findings of this study will help casino operators properly develop and adjust strategies to thrive in the Asian marketplace.     

Backward capacity-filtering for electronics Fabs

In electronics Fabs such as semiconductor Fabs and liquid crystal display (LCD) Fabs, which are capital-intensive, finite-capacity planning is critical to achieving full-capacity production and on-time production. However, existing finite-capacity planning methods do not adequately reflect the actual capacity profiles of an electronics Fab. In this paper, we propose a new Fab-level capacity-filtering procedure to generate finite-capacity plan: a backward capacity-filtering procedure for generating finite-capacity release plan. When developing the Fab-level filtering procedures, we use stage-level capacity-filtering algorithms as a key building block. In this study, we enhance the previous capacity-filtering algorithms proposed by one of the authors in order to facilitate the practical requirements of electronics Fabs. We apply the proposed capacity-filtering method to a modern LCD–TFT Fab in Korea. Performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to existing methods.     

Older Adults’ Receipt of Financial Help: Does Personality Matter?

This study examined the role of personality traits in the receipt of financial help at older ages using the 2006 and 2008 waves of Health and Retirement Study data. An investigation of (1) how the five domains of personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) are associated with the receipt of financial help among older adults and (2) the relationship between personality traits and the source of financial help received was examined. Three sets of probit analyses were conducted. The results indicated that personality can predict financial help and the source of financial help. Specifically, older adults who exhibited relatively higher levels of neuroticism and agreeableness were more likely to receive financial help, whereas those who exhibited relatively higher levels of conscientiousness were less likely to receive financial help regardless of the source. Furthermore, older adults who had relatively higher levels of neuroticism were more likely to help themselves with individual sources such as credit cards whereas agreeable older adults were more likely to receive financial help from family members. These findings have implications for financial counseling, planning and education professionals, public assistance program directors, and policy makers. Understanding the effect of personality on financial decision-making can help with financial planning throughout life and inform outreach efforts for those in need of financial help.     

When Nonprofit Organizations Meet Information and Communication Technologies: How Organizational Culture Influences the Use of Traditional,Digital, and Sharing Media

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In contrast to previous studies that emphasized how resources and institutional forces influence nonprofit organizations...     

Analysis of dependently truncated data in Cox framework

Truncation is a known feature of bone marrow transplant (BMT) registry data, for which the survival time of a leukemia patient is left truncated by the waiting time to transplant. It was recently noted that a longer waiting time was linked to poorer survival. A straightforward solution is a Cox model on the survival time with the waiting time as both truncation variable and covariate. The Cox model should also include other recognized risk factors as covariates. In this article, we focus on estimating the distribution function of waiting time and the probability of selection under the aforementioned Cox model.     

What makes hybrid insourcing successful: A new public–private partnership model for social welfare services

Outsourcing has been a key policy tool for delivering a range of social services, and regarded as more effective than insourcing or direct government provision. At the same time, it has also caused many delivery issues such as principal‐agent problems, a lack of policy coordination, and poor‐quality welfare services. While the pendulum continues to swing between insourcing and outsourcing, we aim to propose a new public–private partnership model called the “hybrid insourcing model” and examine which factors influence the performance of the model. In South Korea, around 2010, the local government in Namyangju City was the first to implement the “Hope Care Center model,” a kind of hybrid insourcing model, which has been praised for its innovation and widely emulated by central and local governments. Our analysis utilizes data collected between December 2017 and January 2018 from public sector employees and civilian staff in Namyangju and a comparable city, A. From this, we draw a number of implications, both for theory and for policy. We argue that, for public–private partnerships, active cooperation and equality are the biggest factors in contributing to positive performance. These work alongside leaders with a clear vision and with employees' positive attitude.     

Cultivating employee creativity through strategic internal communication: The role of leadership,symmetry, and feedback seeking behaviors

Using a survey of 405 full-time employees, this study examined how organizations’ internal communication influenced by leadership communication at the supervisory- and senior-levels impacts employee creativity and how employees’ feedback-seeking behaviors mediate these relationships. The results suggest that leadership communication at the supervisory and senior levels positively influence symmetrical internal communication system. The analysis also shows that symmetrical internal communication and leadership communication cause employees to seek more feedback from different interpersonal sources including supervisors, coworkers, and peers in other departments, which in turn enhances creativity. This paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for public relations and internal communication.     

粤港澳大湾区西部核心产业创新空间提升规划思考 ——以顺德为例

在粤港澳大湾区一体化发展背景下,顺德以土地换产值的传统增长模式难以为继,制造业面临巨大的下行压力,根本原因是城市创新空间系统性、产学研协同创新转化、优质服务的创新空间不能匹配顺德日益增长的发展需求.本文结合产业创新空间相关基础研究,从内外部创新空间格局视角,重点梳理顺德产业创新空间方面的规划探索.从区域创新合作、多元创新协同、提升空间供给等方面总结既有经验并提出新的思考.     

Simultaneous edit-imputation and disclosure limitation for business establishment data

Business establishment microdata typically are required to satisfy agency-specified edit rules, such as balance equations and linear inequalities. Inevitably some establishments' reported data violate the edit rules. Statistical agencies correct faulty values using a process known as edit-imputation. Business establishment data also must be heavily redacted before being shared with the public; indeed, confidentiality concerns lead many agencies not to share establishment microdata as unrestricted access files. When microdata must be heavily redacted, one approach is to create synthetic data, as done in the U.S. Longitudinal Business Database and the German IAB Establishment Panel. This article presents the first implementation of a fully integrated approach to edit-imputation and data synthesis. We illustrate the approach on data from the U.S. Census of Manufactures and present a variety of evaluations of the utility of the synthetic data. The paper also presents assessments of disclosure risks for several intruder attacks. We find that the synthetic data preserve important distributional features from the post-editing confidential microdata, and have low risks for the various attacks.