Maintaining your immune system--one method for enhanced longevity

The immune system is an important evolutionary invention to battle invaders in young and old organisms. Successful aging in humans who achieve nonagenarian status and beyond depends on how the immune system changes over time. Whether certain immune parameters vary with increased age is influenced by the genotype and lifestyle of the individual.     

Business groups' outward FDI: A managerial resources perspective

Outward FDI strategies are driven by firms' resource endowments, which in turn are conditioned by their home environment. In emerging economies, thus, the pattern of outward FDI is shaped by local firms' idiosyncratic contexts and the resources that these firms developed to fit the contexts. This includes business groups, a dominant organizational form in many emerging economies, competing with context-bound resources. When they wish to transcend their home context, they need internationally valuable resources, especially managerial resources, which may be quite different than the resources that enable domestic growth. This paper thus explores what resources drive this international growth in the case of Taiwanese business groups. Starting from Penrosian Theory, we focus on managerial resources that are shared across the member firms of a group, and thus shape the profile of the group. We find that international work experience favors internationalization while international education does not. Moreover, domestic institutional resources distract from internationalization, presumably because they are not transferable into other institutional contexts, and thus favor other types of growth.     

Second-order biases of the maximum likelihood estimates in von Mises regression models

This paper discusses issues related to the improvement of maximum likelihood estimates in von Mises regression models. It obtains general matrix expressions for the second-order biases of maximum likelihood estimates of the mean parameters and concentration parameters. The formulae are simple to compute, and give the biases by means of weighted linear regressions. Simulation results are presented assessing the performance of corrected maximum likelihood estimates in these models.     

Money Does Not Induce Risk Neutral Behavior,but Binary Lotteries Do even Worse

If payoffs are tickets for binary lotteries, which involve only two money prizes, then rationality requires expected value maximization in tickets. This payoff scheme was increasingly used to induce risk neutrality in experiments. The experiment presented here involved lottery choice and evaluation tasks. One subject group was paid in binary lottery tickets, another directly in money. Significantly greater deviations from risk neutral behavior are observed with binary lottery payoffs. This discrepancy increases when subjects have easy access to the alternatives' expected values and mean absolute deviations. Behavioral regularities are observed at least as often as with direct money payoffs.     

Aircraft seating comfort: the influence of seat pitch on passengers' well-being

One of the most important factors influencing aircraft seating comfort in economy class, is legroom. In an airline interior mock up, with the ability to adjust the seat pitch in a range of 28 inches to 43 inches, a study to investigate the influence of seat pitch on passengers' well-being was conducted. In a pre-study, aspects of subjective postural sensations and spatial perception were identified, and a questionnaire was developed. In the main study, 30 subjects rated at different seat pitch settings the spatial perception and the ability of adopting and changing sitting postures. As a result a functional relationship between overall well-being, the subjects' anthropometry and seat pitch was developed. Furthermore it was identified, that there is a maximum overall well-being at a seat pitch of 34 inches to 40 inches, depending on the passengers' anthropometry. A further enlargement of seat pitch, led to a reduction of well-being.     

Kirche coacht F��hrungskr?fte

In the paper we investigate whether coaching, which is carried out by qualified coaches of the Church, can provide the customers with added value. The survey results are based on interviews with managers of small and medium-sized organizations. It turns out that the interviewed persons have a very strong interest in coaching, which is carried out by representatives of the church. The customers point out, that coaches can talk with a Christian background new perspectives such as ethics, morals and values. It is also clear that coaching should not be intended by religious instruction, but must attach to problems that result from the marketing economic environment of the customers. It is shown in conclusion to note that variables with a possible implementation of coaching as a business area within the study area ??Church and economy??.     

On games under expected utility with rank dependent probabilities

Expected utility with rank dependent probabilities is a generalization of expected utility. If such preference representations are used for the payoffs in the mixed extension of a finite game, Nash equilibrium may fail to exist. Set-valued solutions, however, do exist even for those more general utility functions. But some set-valued solutions may have certain conceptual shortcomings. The paper thus proposes a new set-valued solution concept, called fixed sets under the best reply correspondence. All set-valued solution concepts are robust to perturbations of the expected utility hypothesis.