Using Electronic Contact to Reduce Homonegative Attitudes,Emotions, and Behavioral Intentions Among Heterosexual Women and Men: A Contemporary Extension of the Contact Hypothesis

The current study experimentally examined the potential for a contemporary extension of the contact hypothesis, known as electronic contact, or E-contact, to reduce sexual prejudice, intergroup anxiety, and avoidant behavioral intentions among heterosexuals. It also extended the sexual minority contact literature by examining the role of participant and interaction partner sex as a possible boundary condition of this contact–prejudice relationship. To test our hypotheses, 140 heterosexual female and male university students were randomly allocated to interact with a homosexual or heterosexual, female or male E-contact partner, in a collaborative and text-only online interaction before completing the outcome measures. Overall, the results demonstrated that interacting online with a female, as opposed to a male, homosexual E-contact partner reduced heterosexual men’s feelings of intergroup anxiety, which in turn was associated with lower sexual prejudice and outgroup avoidance. For heterosexual women, however, E-contact did not influence the outcome variables. In the context of sexual prejudice, these results suggest that E-contact may be particularly useful as a prejudice-reduction strategy among individuals who typically require it most: heterosexual men.     

Sub-Optimal Acquisition Decisions under a Majority Shareholder System

The high separation of ownership from control achieved through the concurrent use of non-voting shares and stock pyramiding could favor acquisitions made to increase private benefits of the controlling shareholders rather than all shareholders wealth. A standard event study methodology is carried out on three different samples of Italian acquisitions during the 1989–1996 period in order to test this hypothesis. We find evidence that a worse market reaction characterizes acquiring firms with a higher separation of ownership from control, while more value-enhancing transactions are undertaken by those smaller in size and with higher prior-performance. An entrenchment effect seems to determine a significant U-shaped relationship between the market reaction and the ultimate shareholder ownership. When the sample is restricted to acquiring firms with a dual class equity structure we find that non-voting shares report significantly negative excess returns in contrast to significantly higher positive returns for voting shares. Such evidence seems to indicate that the average acquisition has been overpaid, as suggested by the negative market reaction of the non-voting shares, while it was expected to lead to higher private benefits to the majority shareholders, as suggested by the revaluation of the voting shares. Finally, the market reaction to acquisitions made within pyramidal groups seems to indicate that the price is set so as to transfer wealth towards the companies located at the upper levels, where majority shareholders own greater fractions of the companies cash flows.JEL Codes: G34, G14A previous version of this paper was presented at the 1999 EFMA Conference in Paris, 1999 EFA Conference in Helsinki, and 1999 Australasian Banking and Finance Conference in Sydney. We would like to thank for helpful comments and suggestions, in alphabetical order: Lorenzo Caprio, Mara Faccio, Katiuscia Manzoni, Giovanni Siciliano, Sandro Sandri, the two anonymous referees and the editor. We would also like to thank Mara Faccio for providing ownership data. All remaining errors are ours.     

Bayesian non-parametric inference for species variety with a two-parameter Poisson–Dirichlet process prior

Summary.  A Bayesian non-parametric methodology has been recently proposed to deal with the issue of prediction within species sampling problems. Such problems concern the evaluation, conditional on a sample of size n , of the species variety featured by an additional sample of size m . Genomic applications pose the additional challenge of having to deal with large values of both n and m . In such a case the computation of the Bayesian non-parametric estimators is cumbersome and prevents their implementation. We focus on the two-parameter Poisson–Dirichlet model and provide completely explicit expressions for the corresponding estimators, which can be easily evaluated for any sizes of n and m . We also study the asymptotic behaviour of the number of new species conditionally on the observed sample: such an asymptotic result, combined with a suitable simulation scheme, allows us to derive asymptotic highest posterior density intervals for the estimates of interest. Finally, we illustrate the implementation of the proposed methodology by the analysis of five expressed sequence tags data sets.     

看上去更像中国人

我不记得是从什么时候开始喜欢中国的,好像是某一天突然间对中国发生了浓厚的兴趣。当时我刚刚开始使用ICQ,渐渐地对上网聊天入了迷。很快好奇心和求知欲把我带出了国界——能够从网络上探寻异国文化的奥秘真是很奇妙,只要在键盘上敲敲字就可以和世界各地的人交朋友。至今我都不知道为什么会选择中国人作为我的第一个网友,也许是从他身上我发现了中国人的友善、好奇,从而对了解中国产生了浓厚的兴趣吧。我潜意识里觉得中国和意大利在很多方面非常相似,就好像是我的“第二故乡”一样。很快,我的中国网友越来越多了。我的首次中国之行始于2…