Marketing Communication Intensity Across Industries

Marketing communication intensity (i.e., the ratio of advertising and promotional expenditures to sales) has been an important topic for both business managers and academics. Here, we investigate cross-sectional and time-series variation of communication intensity due to: type of offering (product versus service) and type of market (consumer versus industrial). Overall, we find that both of these factors affect variation of communication intensity across industries and over time. However, the effect of market type is much more dramatic than the effect of offering type. Such knowledge about patterns in communication intensity levels helps managers make decisions about how much to spend on advertising and promotion.     

论政治文明的文化选择

文化即人化,它是人类所创造的精神成果和物质成果的总和;文明是文化的结晶,是文化主体对人类文化中野蛮性、愚昧性不断扬弃的结果,是人类有目的、有选择地过滤人类文化、形成合理文化内核的过程。中国当前的政治文明建设,需要走出“精华”和“糟粕”的简单二分的误区,用外来文化中国化、传统文化现代化,来开辟中国文化发展之路。弱化暴力色彩,强化仁政效应,构建中国特色的政治文明。     

符号学视野下体育与少数民族的国家认同构建

体育与少数民族国家认同问题是一个重要的研究课题,学界目前主要就体育现象本身进行对比或论证少数民族国家认同,而缺乏符号学这一简约方法的深层次解读。国家认同是各种象征符号的集合。体育是一种天然的符号,具有丰富的文化象征含义。因而从符号学视野探究体育与少数民族国家认同具有重要的理论与现实意义。少数民族的国家认同核心是政治认同与文化认同,体育的物源符号化、自然寓意、伴随文本意义、元语言解读、共同记忆塑造功能,有力促进现代国家少数民族国家认同。认清体育符号的标出性历史反转趋势,采取适当宽幅的文化选择,加强体育元语言的解读,充分利用体育符号媒介作用,增强少数民族文化自觉与自信、强化中华“多元一体”认识,厘清国家政治边界,从而有力促进少数民族国家认同的构建。     

试论战后日本公共外交运作模式的演变

战后日本公共外交的运作模式经历了由基本运作模式向改良型运作模式的转变。在基本运作模式中,一国讯息由政府主导下的相关机构及人员发出,经对方国家的信息传播节点后抵达普通公众视野。这种方式在冷战结束后,越来越无法适应新的国际环境。动员更多的非政府行为体参与其中,构建跨国共同体网络,借助商业模式来传播本国的价值理念,以及将象征本国国家形象的组织嵌入对方基层社会之中,已成为冷战之后特别是21世纪以来日本公共外交运作模式进行改良的主要方向。通过在这些方向上的摸索,日本最终形成了“议程设置式公共外交”“商业模式公共外交”“嵌入式公共外交”三种改良型运作模式。虽然这些运作模式尚未完全成熟,且有些模式真正能在多大程度上影响别国政策还有待进一步检验,但其至少在国家形象的塑造上获得了成功,提升了别国民众对日本的好感度。     

The heterogeneous impact of pension income on elderly living arrangements: evidence from China’s new rural pension scheme

This paper investigates the impact of pension income on living arrangements of the elderly. Taking advantage of a unique opportunity due to the recent establishment and expansion of the New Rural Pension Scheme in China, we explicitly address the endogeneity of pension status and pension income through a fixed-effect model with instrumental variable approach by exploiting exogenous time variation in the program implementation at county level. We find an overall positive effect of pension income on independent living as well as considerable heterogeneity. The positive income effects of the NRPS are concentrated among the elderly with adult children living nearby, of higher socio-economic status, and with better health at baseline; for other groups, the effects are insignificant. We also find that more generous programs exhibit larger effects. Our results highlight that living arrangement is multidimensional in rural China.     

五河民歌的传承机制研究

民歌作为劳动人民最直接、最本真的情感表达和文化传承方式之一,其内在的传承机制是它能穿越历史传承至今的重要因素。通过对当下仍然存活在五河区域的五河民歌的实地考察,及对具有代表性的五河民歌的本体分析,试图找到五河民歌在传承和发展过程中所体现出的内在轨迹。     

Examining multiplicity and dynamics of publics’ crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data

The new reality of networked publics on social media calls for crisis communication practitioners and researchers to understand the narratives generated by publics on social media during organizational crises. As social media publics possess diverse, unique characteristics and communicative needs during a crisis, they form interpretative communities and co-create various symbolic interpretations of the crisis. Extending the public-centric and narrative perspective to the context of social media crises, we examined what crisis narratives were constructed by social media publics (i.e., multiplicity) and how these narratives changed by crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Using topic modelling based on large-scale Twitter data of the Chipotle E. coli crisis (N?=?40,610), we identified ten narratives subsumed under two themes (i.e., sharing-based and conversation-based) based on publics’ social constructions of their perceived risks and crisis experience. On the one hand, sharing-based narratives, heavily impacted by publics’ shared media coverage, reflected media crisis narratives and salient risk perceptions aligning with the news agenda. On the other hand, conversation-based narratives, fueled by publics’ opinion expression and emotional venting, demonstrated publics’ interpretations of their experience with the organization in the crisis with less salient but more diversified risk perceptions. Crisis managers are recommended to produce and deliver compelling narratives resonating with different groups of social media publics during crises.     

Benevolence-dominant,authoritarianism-dominant,and classical paternalistic leadership: Testing their relationships with subordinate performance

We propose a new typology of paternalistic leadership styles based on how leaders demonstrate authoritarianism and benevolence, the two essential components of this type of leadership. Benevolence-dominant paternalistic leadership refers to leaders' sole dependence on the use of benevolence without their strong assertion of authority, whereas authoritarianism-dominant paternalistic leadership is based mainly on authoritarianism itself; classical paternalistic leadership, which best fits early observations of paternalistic leaders, refers to the salient combination of both leadership components. We used two distinct samples and methods to test this typology and the association with subordinate performance. Across the two studies, a field investigation with Taiwanese military supervisor-subordinate dyads and a hypothetical scenario experiment with U.S. working adults, we found a positive relationship between classical paternalistic leadership and subordinate performance as strong as that between benevolence-dominant paternalistic leadership and performance. Our findings echo the phenomenon that paternalistic leaders tend to combine benevolence with authoritarianism to affect subordinate performance.     

Approximation strategy-proof mechanisms for obnoxious facility location on a line

In the facility location game on a line, there are some agents who have fixed locations on the line where an obnoxious facility will be placed. The objective is to maximize the social welfare, e.g., the sum of distances from the facility to all agents. On collecting location information, agents may misreport the locations so as to stay far away from the obnoxious facility. In this paper, strategy-proof mechanisms are designed and the approximation ratio is used to measure the performances of the strategy-proof mechanisms. Two objective functions, maximizing the sum of squares of distances (maxSOS) and maximizing the sum of distances (maxSum), have been considered. For maxSOS, a randomized 5/3-approximated strategy-proof mechanism is proposed, and the lower bound of the approximation ratio is proved to be at least 1.042. For maxSum, the lower bound of the approximation ratio of the randomized strategy-proof mechanism is proved to be 1.077. Moreover, a general model is considered that each agent may have multiple locations on the line. For the objective functions maxSum and maxSOS, both deterministic and randomized strategy-proof mechanisms are investigated, and the deterministic mechanisms are shown to be best possible.     

A continuous characterization of the maximum vertex-weighted clique in hypergraphs

For a simple graph G on n vertices with adjacency matrix A, Motzkin and Strauss established a remarkable connection between the clique number and the global maximum value of the quadratic programm: \(\textit{max}\{ \mathbf {x}^T A \mathbf {x}\}\) on the standard simplex: \(\{\sum _{i=1}^{n} x_i =1, x_i \ge 0 \}\). In Gibbons et al. (Math Oper Res 122:754–768, 1997), an extension of the Motzkin–Straus formulation was provided for the vertex-weighted clique number of a graph. In this paper, we provide a continuous characterization of the maximum vertex-weighted clique problem for vertex-weighted uniform hypergraphs.