Optimal stopping for Brownian motion with applications to sequential analysis and option pricing

Herman Chernoff made fundamental contributions to analytical and computational methods for solving optimal stopping problems for Brownian motion. He also showed how these optimal stopping problems are closely related to some basic problems in sequential analysis and singular stochastic control. This paper gives a survey of these and related developments and describes some recent applications to option valuation in financial economics.     

Negotiation of identity and internal contradictions: the Terengganu and Kelantan Peranakan Chinese foodways compared

This study explores the Terengganu and Kelantan Peranakan Chinese foodways with special reference to two types of foods: daily and ancestral prayer foods. The principal focus is to illustrate the negotiation of identity through foodways as well as internal contradictions arising from this process of identity negotiation. These two groups of Peranakan Chinese are largely the product of acculturation by the local Malays through socio-cultural interactions, though the Kelantan Peranakan Chinese are also acculturated by the local Thai community. Their daily and ancestral prayer foods display contrasting identities that stem from the negotiating of their acculturated and primordial identities. The former displays a strong local cultural influence, while the latter displays a strong Chinese cultural influence. However, despite the pervasive influence of localisation in their daily foods, elements of hybridisation are visible in some occasionally prepared food items. Meanwhile, localised and hybrid food items are included in their ancestral prayer foods, which are supposed to express their primordial Chinese identity. These internal contractions illustrate the complexity of the negotiation of identity through foodways within a cross-cultural context.     

Estimates of trade-related adjustment costs in Syria

The scope and complexity of international trading arrangements in the Middle East, as well as their spotty historical record of success, underscore the urgent need for an adequate understanding of the relative costs and benefits of participation in preferential trading arrangements and, more generally, of changes in the domestic import regimes. This paper seeks to address this problem by providing estimates of the adjustment costs associated with two broad classes of hypothetical trade policy scenarios for Syria: participation in the proposed EU-Syria Association Agreement, and border tax-related changes affecting the domestic import regime. We find that the revenue consequences of the first scenario are likely to be low if an appropriate stepwise implementation of the agreement can be ensured; our analysis of the second scenario suggests that all border taxes can be eliminated, and the number of tariff bands reduced, while ensuring revenue neutrality, if a VAT of a reasonable size is introduced.     

From Narcissistic Exploitativeness to Bullying Behavior: The Mediating Role of Approval‐of‐aggression Beliefs

This study examined the role of approval‐of‐aggression beliefs in the relationship between narcissistic exploitativeness and bullying behavior in an Asian sample (N = 809) comprising elementary children and middle school adolescents. Narcissistic exploitativeness was significantly and positively associated with both bullying behavior and approval‐of‐aggression beliefs, and approval‐of‐aggression beliefs was significantly and positively associated with bullying behavior. Additionally, findings indicated that approval‐of‐aggression beliefs was a statistically significant mediator and 53 percent of the total effect of narcissistic exploitativeness on bullying behavior was mediated by approval‐of‐aggression beliefs. Approval‐of‐aggression beliefs did not moderate the association between narcissistic exploitativeness and bullying behavior. There are important theoretical implications as well as implications for prevention and intervention efforts targeting aggressive, bullying behavior among children and adolescents.     

Beyond the “Usual Suspects”? Reimagining Democracy With Participatory Budgeting in Chicago

This article examines whether democratic innovations in the United States attract citizens who are typically underrepresented within existing political institutions. We focus on participatory budgeting, an intervention where residents decide how to allocate a particular pot of public money. Taking “PB Chicago” as our case study, we use survey and interview data to examine whether organizers realized their stated goal of involving residents other than the “usual suspects.” We find that residents who voted in PB Chicago were more often white, college educated, and from higher‐income households relative to both the local population and politically active residents in Chicago. While these residents were not necessarily the most active across other stages of the PB Chicago process, we find little evidence that lower socioeconomic status and minority residents were accessing the civic learning and empowerment gains associated with participatory forms of democracy. Outreach made the process more inclusive but was insufficient to overcome several important structural constraints. Of particular note, the needs and interests of less privileged residents were not met by the narrow capital works focus of PB Chicago. We suggest that when implemented under such conditions, participatory budgeting risks deepening existing political and social inequalities.     

Aspirations of Migrants and Returns to Human Capital Investment

Although there is adequate literature on the topic of state-employer collusion, this literature is barely underpinned in any theoretical framework. This article attempts to fill this theoretical lacuna by revisiting Gouldner’s (Patterns of industrial bureaucracy: a case study of modern factory administration, The Free Press, New York, 1954a) pioneering theoretical framework on patterns of bureaucracy, and extends his concept of mock bureaucracy to develop a new concept called ‘mock state bureaucracy’ to illustrate state-employer collusion in controlling workers in plants in developing third world economies. The article revisits and extends Gouldner’s (1954a) unit of analysis from the ‘firm’ level to the ‘state’ level and argues that the new concept mock state bureaucracy provides a better illustration of the state-employer collusion. The article argues that both ‘state’ and ‘employer’ are important units of analysis and they should be brought back to the centre stage of any discourse on employment relations of developing countries.     

Hybrid happening: Organizational reputations in corporate crises

Public relations professionals strive to develop mutually beneficial relationships among key publics that will result in favorable organizational reputations, but crises typically threaten those reputations. Much of public relations crisis research focuses on how to respond after a crisis, but drawing on Expectation Violation Theory (EVT), this research focuses on the expectations of stakeholders before a crisis and how they process information during a crisis. Drawing from reputation management research in marketing, it conceptualizes corporate reputations as encompassing associations related to corporate ability (CA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Reputation management research generally has investigated reputations as strong on either CA or CSR, but this research examines the effects of a “hybrid” reputation, which is strong in terms of both CA and CSR associations. The results of an experiment reveal that stakeholders’ responses during a crisis vary based on their expectations, how they perceive a hybrid reputation, and the crisis type. The study has theoretical implications regarding stakeholders’ information processing during a crisis, and it provides public relations professionals insights regarding how to cultivate and protect an organizational reputation.     

The Pyramid of Nonprofit Responsibility: The Institutionalization of Organizational Responsibility Across Sectors

Observers have noted that organizations in all sectors, whether business, nonprofit, or government, have been moving toward rationalized structures that presuppose and express empowered organizational actorhood. We draw upon neo-institutional theory in this paper to extend the argument: The arrival of organizational actorhood has precipitated a concomitant, cross-sectoral movement toward organizational social responsibility. Whereas existing research has tended to theorize the social responsibilities of businesses, we develop a pyramid conceptual schema to array the social responsibilities of nonprofits. We then document the coevolution of organizational actorhood and responsibility across both sectors with a metastudy of nearly 200 extant surveys. We chart the institutionalization of a slate of formal structures that express organizational actorhood (i.e., mission statements, vision statements, and strategic plans) and that profess and define organizational social responsibilities (i.e., core values, ethics codes, and responsibility communications). We close with implications and future directions for organizational studies and research on corporate social responsibility.     

How many people participated in candlelight protests? Counting the size of a dynamic crowd

The recent controversy about the size of crowds at candlelight protests in Korea raises an interesting question regarding the methods used to estimate crowd size. Protest organizers tend to count all participants in the event from its start to finish, while the police usually report the crowd size at its peak. While several counting methods are available to estimate the size of a crowd at a given time, counting the total number of the participants at a protest is not straightforward. In this paper, we propose a new estimator to count the total number of participants that we call the size of a dynamic crowd. We assume that the arrival and departure times of the crowd are randomly observed and that the number of the attendees in the crowd at a specific time is estimable. We estimate the number of total attendees during the entire gathering based on the capture-recapture model. We also propose a bootstrap procedure to construct a confidence interval for the crowd size. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method with simulation studies and the data from Korea''s March for Science, a global event across the world on Earth Day, April 22, 2017.