Financial Gain (financial + gain)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


A classification of computer security incidents based on reported attack data

JOURNAL OF INVESTIGATIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND OFFENDER PROFILING, Issue 2 2005
Maria Kjaerland
Abstract Previous studies of computer criminals have attempted to differentiate between offenders, but have not used data from the actual attacks. Drawing on theories from investigative psychology as well as information security, the current study differentiates 2755 computer security incidents using information about Method of Operation (MO), Impact, and Source Sector from reported attacks. Multivariate statistical analyses were applied on the data-matrix of 22 variables and showed the co-occurrences of various aspects of computer security incidents. A radex structure emerged where the high frequency variables were positioned in the centre of the data-plot. Based on a previously developed taxonomy of cyber intrusions, the results of the analysis showed that it was possible to draw inferences about the less informative category of Objective, from information about Attacker, Tools, Access, and Results. By applying the division-lines indicating the Objectives of Challenge/Status, Destruction, Political Gain and Financial Gain on the SSA-plot, it was shown how the taxonomies could be further developed by taking into account the relationships between the categories. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Corporate giving in the USA: a model for meeting Russia's expanding social needs?

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NONPROFIT & VOLUNTARY SECTOR MARKETING, Issue 3 2004
Karen King
In the USA, corporations make substantial contributions to public-serving organisations with no expectation of financial gain. This paper explores the factors that have encouraged corporate giving in the USA and compares them to circumstances in the emerging capitalist economy of Russia. The outlook for the emergence of a corporate giving model in Russia similar to that of the USA is poor, but improving. To make it work, organisational recipients of corporate generosity need to trust their benefactors, and corporations need to believe that their contributions of surplus profits make good business sense. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications [source]


Prescreening of choice options in ,positive' and ,negative' decision-making tasks

JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DECISION MAKING, Issue 4 2001
Irwin P. Levin
Abstract Research on prescreening processes in decision making was extended by manipulating task valence in a series of three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, half the subjects had the ,positive' task of screening and then selecting someone to hire for a job and half had the ,negative' task of screening and then selecting someone to fire, where the choice options (worker descriptions) were the same in each task. In Experiment 1 some subjects were instructed to list options they would include for further consideration and some were instructed to list options they would exclude from further consideration. More options were screened out in the inclusion condition than in the exclusion condition and in the firing task than in the hiring task. Subjects in Experiment 2 were allowed to decide for themselves whether to use inclusion or exclusion in screening options. The main results from Experiment 1 were replicated. Also, subjects in the hiring task were more likely than subjects in the firing task to select inclusion as a strategy for prescreening options. In Experiment 3 the positive task involved adding stocks to a portfolio following an unexpected financial gain and the negative task involved disposing of stocks following a financial setback. Again, more options were screened out by subjects selecting the inclusion strategy than by exclusion subjects, but differences between the positive and negative tasks were not found. Results were explained in terms of a ,status quo' bias for adding or deleting options that transcends task differences and a positivity bias in judging people that distinguishes judgments in different task domains. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


"I Never Wanted to Be a Quack!"

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2010
The Professional Deviance of Plaintiff Experts in Contested Illness Lawsuits: The Case of Multiple Chemical Sensitivities
When medical practitioners act as expert witnesses for the plaintiff in contested illness lawsuits, they can be stigmatized by their professional community. Drawing on ethnographic research surrounding the condition multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) in Australia, this article focuses on: how plaintiff experts specialize; their rationale for deviance from the professional norm; and structural constraints to medical advocacy. By diagnosing and treating the condition as organic, these experts oppose the accepted disease paradigm of the medical community and therefore face professional isolation and peer pressure. They rationalize their continued advocacy within a moral discourse, which includes a professional aspiration toward altruism, an ethical commitment to "truth," and the explicit emphasis that financial gain is not a motivation. For their deviance the experts have been confronted with professional disillusionment and emotional drain. Ultimately, the medical profession is disenfranchising experts who may be vital characters in the quest for understanding about environmental illnesses. [source]


Contractual agreements for coordination and vendor-managed delivery under explicit transportation considerations

NAVAL RESEARCH LOGISTICS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Issue 5 2006
egül Toptal
Abstract We consider the coordination problem between a vendor and a buyer operating under generalized replenishment costs that include fixed costs as well as stepwise freight costs. We study the stochastic demand, single-period setting where the buyer must decide on the order quantity to satisfy random demand for a single item with a short product life cycle. The full order for the cycle is placed before the cycle begins and no additional orders are accepted by the vendor. Due to the nonrecurring nature of the problem, the vendor's replenishment quantity is determined by the buyer's order quantity. Consequently, by using an appropriate pricing schedule to influence the buyer's ordering behavior, there is an opportunity for the vendor to achieve substantial savings from transportation expenses, which are represented in the generalized replenishment cost function. For the problem of interest, we prove that the vendor's expected profit is not increasing in buyer's order quantity. Therefore, unlike the earlier work in the area, it is not necessarily profitable for the vendor to encourage larger order quantities. Using this nontraditional result, we demonstrate that the concept of economies of scale may or may not work by identifying the cases where the vendor can increase his/her profits either by increasing or decreasing the buyer's order quantity. We prove useful properties of the expected profit functions in the centralized and decentralized models of the problem, and we utilize these properties to develop alternative incentive schemes for win,win solutions. Our analysis allows us to quantify the value of coordination and, hence, to identify additional opportunities for the vendor to improve his/her profits by potentially turning a nonprofitable transaction into a profitable one through the use of an appropriate tariff schedule or a vendor-managed delivery contract. We demonstrate that financial gain associated with these opportunities is truly tangible under a vendor-managed delivery arrangement that potentially improves the centralized solution. Although we take the viewpoint of supply chain coordination and our goal is to provide insights about the effect of transportation considerations on the channel coordination objective and contractual agreements, the paper also contributes to the literature by analyzing and developing efficient approaches for solving the centralized problem with stepwise freight costs in the single-period setting. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006 [source]


Keeping them Honest: Public and Elite Perceptions of Ethical Conduct among Australian Legislators

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2000
Ian McAllister
Public confidence in politicians across all democratic countries has fallen to historic lows in recent years. In Australia, around one in three voters believe that legislators use their public office for financial gain, and only one in four believe that legislators have a high moral code. Governments in many countries have attempted to deal with this problem by establishing codes of ethical conduct for legislators. This paper examines what standards citizens expect from their politicians and, in turn, what standards politicians themselves regard as important. The data come from the 1996 Australian Election Study survey which asked voters and elected representatives what importance they attributed to the eight principles laid out in the federal parliament's own ethical guide. The results show that voters expect higher standards from legislators than do legislators themselves, particularly with regard to the proper use of public resources and rejecting favouritism. A range of hypotheses are tested to account for citizen and elite beliefs about legislators' ethical conduct. The results show that stronger democratic culture and political skills are important for the public, and lengthy exposure to political parties and democratic institutions for the elite. [source]


Combining Economic and Conjoint Analysis to Determine Optimal Academic Services

DECISION SCIENCES JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE EDUCATION, Issue 1 2004
Mona Whitley Howard
ABSTRACT In today's era of global competition, organizations must manage their functions and activities in a manner such that they are responsive to customers' needs and can provide excellence in service to the customer while also being efficient and cost conscious. These issues are extremely common in corporate organizations, but such concerns are equally relevant in service industries, including institutions of higher education. This study is conducted at a private, undergraduate institution of higher education. We utilize focus group evaluation and conjoint analysis combined with economic analysis in the form of a newly designed preferred utility economic cost diagram to pick the ideal services that should be provided to enrolled students at the institution. The package of ideal services accounts for preferred utility expressed by students and a new methodology (preferred utility function) to balance these against financial considerations to optimize services and financial gains for a college adult education program. This combination of focus groups and mathematical techniques can be easily employed by educational institutes. [source]


Factors affecting the meat quality of veal

JOURNAL OF THE SCIENCE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURE, Issue 10 2006
Tania M Ngapo
Abstract Over the last 50 years the veal industry has seen a number of changes, in particularly in production systems with the introduction and acceptance of grain-fed and heavier calves and the progressive move from individual pens to group housing. Reasons for the changes are multi-faceted of which two important players are the well-being of the animal and the public perception of the industry. Regardless of the reasons for the changes, breeders strive to attain veal conforming to the rigorous standards reflecting consumer demands. Consequently a multitude of publications exists on production factors in veal farming. However, many of these reports stop at the ,farm gate', or more correctly, the slaughterhouse, where carcass characteristics in particular are assessed. Changes in production systems generally aim to improve feed efficiency and weight gains, but often overlook meat quality aspects which ultimately dictate financial gains. This review aims to summarise the existing and available literature on factors affecting the quality of veal meat. The topics covered include the effects of breed, sex, weight or age, diet composition and dietary treatments, environment and pre-slaughter handling, and processing factors such as stunning, electrical stimulation, ageing and packaging. Copyright © 2006 Crown in the right of Canada. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Facts, Fiction, and the Fourth Estate

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 5 2004
"Jimmy's World", The Washington Post
This paper examines the reaction of the market to news that the Washington Post had won a Pulitzer Prize for a story that was demonstrably false. The reaction to the stock price of the Post as well as the stock prices of other newspapers is examined using dummy variables for two days, four days, and six days. The results show that while the decline in the Post's stock price was relatively small, the t-statistics for all of the dummy variables are significant. The paper also examines the McChesney (1987) hypothesis that the nature of the newspaper business is such that it is difficult for the residual claimants of the paper to receive the financial gains of important news stories. These rents, he points out, are distributed to others. We look to see whether or not residual claimants of that newspaper can be harmed if that newspaper publishes a false story and receives large amounts of bad publicity for its error. [source]


The UK Research Assessment Exercise: Performance Measurement and Resource Allocation

AUSTRALIAN ACCOUNTING REVIEW, Issue 1 2010
Jane Broadbent
This paper is a personal reflection on the nature and implications of research assessment in the UK. It reflects on the extent to which the dual functions of performance measurement and resource allocation interact. It provides a description of the 2001 and 2008 Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) in the United Kingdom (UK). It also refers to the developments undertaken at the time of writing to develop the successor exercise , the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The paper illustrates the changes that have taken place over time in order to address perceived weaknesses in the structures of the RAE that have led to particular types of game playing. The RAE is a form of management control that has achieved its success by the alignment of individual and institutional interests. Success in the RAE produces both financial and reputational gains for Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) that they are willing to pay for. Hence, the RAE has provided financial gains for academics who can deliver success. The peer-evaluation process in the UK research assessment is a key characteristic of the UK approach. While this is seen as expensive, it has maintained the legitimacy of the RAE. The accounting and finance academic community has engaged with the exercise and retained some control over the assessment process. A question is raised as to whether UK accounting and finance is likely to be subsumed in larger Business School submissions in the future. [source]