Individual Execution Research Articles

Cooperative autonomous obstacle avoidance control of spacecraft cluster via event-triggered reference governors

This paper conducts research on the design of a cooperative obstacle avoidance control mechanism for spacecraft cluster. It proposes an event-triggered reverse command regulator to address the current unidirectional obstacle avoidance mechanism, which only goes from the cluster reference command to the individual execution of spacecraft. The proposed mechanism enhances the survivability of spacecraft cluster in complex environments. By employing the designed event-triggered command regulator, the spacecraft can autonomously decide whether to execute a leader-following task based on whether the tracking error satisfies the performance requirements of the cluster closed-loop system. This allows the spacecraft to dynamically choose between task execution and temporarily “forgetting” the task to focus on collision avoidance, thereby increasing the collaborative flexibility of the spacecraft cluster. Furthermore, based on Lyapunov stability theory, the convergence of the proposed cooperative obstacle avoidance control algorithm is theoretically proven. Ultimately, simulation results demonstrate the real-time effectiveness of the designed cooperative obstacle avoidance solution.

Legal Construction that Strengthens Individual Legal Responsibility in Corporate Leadership Regarding Practices Social and Environmental Responsibility in Indonesia

<p><em>In the realm of corporate leadership, the integration of </em><em>Tanggung Jawab Sosial dan Lingkungan (TJSL) practices has gained increasing attention as organizations seek to align their operations with sustainable development goals. This paper delves into the legal constructs aimed at strengthening individual legal accountability within corporate leadership concerning TJSL practices. The study engages in a comprehensive analysis of the evolving legal landscape, highlighting mechanisms designed to foster responsible decision-making and governance within corporations. A focal point of the investigation is the examination of legal frameworks that establish a direct connection between individual executives and their fiduciary duties towards social and environmental considerations. The paper explores various jurisdictional approaches to holding corporate leaders accountable, ranging from fiduciary duties extensions to the incorporation of TJSL principles into directorial responsibilities. By scrutinizing case law, statutory provisions, and international standards, the research uncovers patterns in legal precedents that uphold the principle of individual accountability. Furthermore, the paper scrutinizes the challenges inherent in enforcing such legal constructs, especially in transnational contexts. It addresses issues of jurisdictional reach, cross-border liability, and the harmonization of diverse legal frameworks to ensure cohesive accountability standards. The study also assesses the role of corporate governance mechanisms, internal policies, and external incentives that interact with legal provisions to motivate proactive TJSL practices. </em><em>In conclusion, this paper sheds light on the transformative potential of legal mechanisms in fostering a culture of responsible corporate leadership aligned with social and environmental values. It emphasizes the synergy between legal mandates and ethical imperatives, ultimately contributing to the advancement of sustainable business practices within a global context.</em></p><p> </p>

Exploiting Anytime Algorithms for Collaborative Service Execution in Edge Computing

The diversity and scarcity of resources across devices in heterogeneous computing environments can impact their ability to meet users’ quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, especially in open real-time environments where computational loads are unpredictable. Despite this uncertainty, timely responses to events remain essential to ensure desired performance levels. To address this challenge, this paper introduces collaborative service execution, enabling resource-constrained IoT devices to collaboratively execute services with more powerful neighbors at the edge, thus meeting non-functional requirements that might be unattainable through individual execution. Nodes dynamically form clusters, allocating resources to each service and establishing initial configurations that maximize QoS satisfaction while minimizing global QoS impact. However, the complexity of open real-time environments may hinder the computation of optimal local and global resource allocations within reasonable timeframes. Thus, we reformulate the QoS optimization problem as a heuristic-based anytime optimization problem, capable of interrupting and quickly adapting to environmental changes. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our anytime algorithms rapidly yield satisfactory initial service solutions and effectively optimize the solution quality over iterations, with negligible overhead compared to the benefits gained.

MiFIR review: The right balance

Trading in shares in the European Union (EU) is fragmented across a large number of execution venues applying varying degrees of transparency. The review of the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR) aims at creating the right conditions for the establishment of an entity, the consolidated tape provider, that provides a consolidated picture of core trading data to the market. Co-legislators principally disagreed on whether or not such a consolidated picture should include close to real-time data on prices and volumes on all pre-trade transparent trading venues (pre-trade data). Authors argue that important use-cases require the inclusion of pre-trade data and that the provisional political agreement reached on 29th June rightly recognises this. The review of MiFIR also includes amendments to the conditions under which individual execution venues are required to publish such pre-trade data. While there are good reasons for allowing ‘dark trading’, too much dark trading could harm the quality of price formation for shares. There is no strong evidence that the ‘volume cap’ which caps certain variants of dark trading has positive effects. The authors argue in this paper that a holistic and data-based approach to capping dark trading can contribute to the quality of price formation for shares. The consolidated tape will provide relevant data for such an approach.

A Longitudinal Survey of Job Satisfaction among Pharmaceutical Executives: An Unconditional Latent Growth Curve Study

Cross-sectional studies have been done to explore job satisfaction (JS) among pharmaceutical executives. However, limited evidence of increment or decrement in JS is provided in cross-sectional studies. Latent growth curve models provide a computational framework for evaluating changes in perception and behavior using longitudinal data. Drawing from Locke’s theory of satisfaction, the study explored change in the perception of JS among pharmaceutical executives. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use a longitudinal design to explore the trajectory of change in JS among pharmaceutical marketing executives using unconditional latent growth curve analysis. Data were collected using an online survey questionnaire from a cohort sample of 1,023 pharmaceutical executives over 3 unequal time waves- T1 (406, June 2021) during COVID-19; and post-COVID periods-T2 (401, July 2022); and T3 (216, March 2023) using random sampling. Covariance-based structural equation modeling in EQS 6.4 was used for analysis. The model showed an acceptable fit. The mean score of JS was significant and positive (Intercept factor; M=2.265, p<0.01). The positive linear growth trend in JS was obtained (growth factor increment=4.594, p<0.01) at each time point. Initial satisfaction states of individual executives were not necessarily linked to changes in mean values over time. The study observed that JS has been on a positive growth trajectory since the COVID-19 pandemic. The study indicates improvement in working conditions by employers since the pandemic and/or coping strategies by employees. This study gives a simple guide to performing latent growth analysis in behavioral research. Keywords: Covid-19, Job satisfaction, Latent growth curve, Locke’s theory of satisfaction, Longitudinal study, Pharmaceutical marketing, Structural equation modeling.

Business Strategy and Cybersecurity Breaches

ABSTRACT This study examines whether a firm’s business strategy is an underlying determinant of cybersecurity breach likelihood. Based on organizational theory, firm strategy can focus on innovation or efficiency, with innovative strategy firms being more likely to have weaker, decentralized control systems, multiple technologies, and greater risk than firms with an efficiency-focused strategy. Following the Miles and Snow (1978) strategy topology, we predict and find that the prospector business strategy is associated with greater breach likelihood. We further explore IT awareness within the firm. Ex ante, it is unclear whether strategic IT policy formation is impounded into a firm’s strategy or can be impacted by individual executives and nonstrategy firm characteristics. We find that IT understanding at the executive or firm level can affect the relationship between strategy and breach likelihood. Collectively, our results indicate that business strategy is a useful indicator in evaluating firms’ cybersecurity activities.

An Incremental Inverse Reinforcement Learning Approach for Motion Planning with Separated Path and Velocity Preferences

Humans often demonstrate diverse behaviors due to their personal preferences, for instance, related to their individual execution style or personal margin for safety. In this paper, we consider the problem of integrating both path and velocity preferences into trajectory planning for robotic manipulators. We first learn reward functions that represent the user path and velocity preferences from kinesthetic demonstration. We then optimize the trajectory in two steps, first the path and then the velocity, to produce trajectories that adhere to both task requirements and user preferences. We design a set of parameterized features that capture the fundamental preferences in a pick-and-place type of object transportation task, both in the shape and timing of the motion. We demonstrate that our method is capable of generalizing such preferences to new scenarios. We implement our algorithm on a Franka Emika 7-DoF robot arm and validate the functionality and flexibility of our approach in a user study. The results show that non-expert users are able to teach the robot their preferences with just a few iterations of feedback.

Verification Column

Temporal logics for hyper properties provide an elegant way to express properties of sets of executions traces. In contrast to classical temporal logics like LTL or CTL, they can express relations of individual execution traces of a system. Among others, they can formalize information-flow principles and other security requirements that are not definable in LTL or CTL. The article by Bernd Finkbeiner provides an overview of temporal logics for hyperproperties. The first part provides an introduction tp HyperLTL and algorithmic problems (satisfiability, model checking, monitoring, synthesis). The second part gives an overview of the landscape of the different variants of hyperlogics and their relative expressiveness.

Executive Financial Literacy and Corporate Performance: Evidence from Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises in China

AbstractBased on the survey data from the China National SME Survey Database in 2019, we analyze the relationship between executive financial literacy and the performance of Chinese small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). We find that executive financial literacy helps improve corporate performance, especially for companies with weak external supervision and low competitive pressure. After controlling for the effects of the variables at the individual executive and enterprise levels, addressing possible endogenous problems in the analysis, robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses indicates that our findings remain unchanged. We further show that executive financial literacy improves corporate performance by alleviating corporate financing constraints and improving corporate risk management. Our findings have important policy implications for stimulating the vitality of economy and promoting high‐quality economic development.

Executives’ Prior Employment Ties to Interlocking Directors and Interfirm Mobility

This paper explores how executives’ prior employment ties to interlocking directors, or those who hold additional board seats or executive positions at outside firms, influence individual executive interfirm mobility. As organizational boundary spanners, interlocking directors may be able to influence executive outcomes both within and outside of executives’ current firms. But given natural constraints on internal promotion for executives, we suggest most executives will tend to leverage ties to interlocking directors to access external opportunities, as manifested by movement to outside firms. Analysis of interfirm mobility among a sample of Standard & Poor’s 1500 executives between 2000 and 2014 offer support for this idea. We find a positive association between individual executives’ prior employment ties to interlocking directors and their hazard of movement to outside firms, including to the other firms where these directors serve. At the same time, we argue and find that the strength of this latter relationship will further depend on directors’ competing motivations owing to their specific positions in the focal and interlocking firms. Whereas holding a lead position on the focal firm’s board (i.e., as chairperson or lead independent director) weakens this relationship, holding the position of chief executive officer in the interlocking firm strengthens it. Our theory and findings highlight the unique and important role of interlocking directors in executive interfirm mobility and, in doing so, contribute novel insights regarding how ties to boundary spanners can influence individual outcomes for those to whom they are linked.Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1638 .

The Influence of Emotion Regulation on Estimation Strategy Execution in Individuals with Trait Anxiety.

Previous studies have shown that some negative emotions hinder estimation strategy execution. However, these studies rarely investigate the influence of negative emotions on the estimation strategy execution in individuals with trait anxiety. The present study examines the relationship between negative emotions and trait anxiety in individuals’ estimation strategy execution. Moreover, it looks into the influence of different emotion regulation strategies on their estimation strategy execution. In October 2010, 803 college students were evaluated using the Trait Anxiety Scale. From these participants, individuals with high and low trait anxiety were selected to complete the double-digit multiplication estimation task. The results showed that the estimation strategy’s execution speed in individuals with high trait anxiety was slower than those with low trait anxiety under negative emotions (t (113) = −2.269, p = 0.025, d = 0.427). Both expression inhibition and cognitive reappraisal could significantly improve the execution speed of the estimation strategy in low trait anxiety (p < 0.001). For individuals with high trait anxiety, cognitive reappraisal regulating negative emotions can promote the estimation strategy’s execution speed (p = 0.031). However, the use of expression inhibition has no significant effect on estimation strategy execution (p = 0.101). In summary, the present study revealed that different emotion regulation strategies moderated the arithmetic strategy execution of individuals with trait anxiety, and cognitive reappraisal had a better effect in individuals with high trait anxiety.

Monitorable hyperproperties of nonterminating systems

Runtime monitoring for a hyperproperty is aimed at giving a verdict of satisfaction or violation on the whole system under monitoring, and not on its individual execution traces. Indeed, a monitor for a hyperproperty should naturally be able to observe prefixes of several different traces of the system and establish the relationships among them at run time. The traces of nonterminating systems, however, are of infinite length, and the monitor cannot normally observe anything other than the prefixes of only one single running trace. In this paper, we study the feasibility of monitoring nonterminating systems against hyperproperties. To do so, we introduce single-trace monitorability as a novel conception of a monitorable hyperproperty, and illustrate that the members of only one particular, small class of hyperproperties are monitorable if no prior knowledge about the system under monitoring is available. The concept of single-trace monitorability is then generalized to the environments where the monitor has access to an under/over-approximation of the set of the traces that may occur at run time. We investigate the closure properties of the set of monitorable hyperproperties given an approximation, and study the relationships among the proposed notions of monitorability.

Top Management Team Incentive Dispersion and Earnings Quality*

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the relation between the dispersion in pay‐performance sensitivities (PPS) among top management team (TMT) members and earnings quality. Prior research suggests that the PPS from executives' equity compensation induce earnings manipulation incentives. Most of this research, however, focuses on the PPS of individual executives, even though the financial reporting process requires the coordination among a broad range of executives. Focusing on the dispersion in PPS among TMTs, we develop a model that shows that, due to the coordination incentives embedded in compensation arrangements, managers with more closely aligned PPS will be more willing to work together to manipulate earnings as the rewards are shared more evenly among them. We empirically test the implications from our model and find a positive relation between PPS dispersion and earnings quality. We further find that the stock price reaction to firms' reported earnings relates to the earnings manipulation incentives based on PPS dispersion. Our results suggest that differences in PPS among TMT members hamper the coordination necessary to manipulate earnings and that investors are aware of this impact. Our study has important implications related to compensation‐related disclosures (e.g., those under section 953a of the Dodd‐Frank Act of 2010) and their potential impact on investors' understanding of earnings quality.

THE REPUTATION FACTOR: IT MATTERS WHAT PEOPLE THINK OF YOU

AbstractThe authors detail why the reputations of executives are so important, and how executives can learn more about what people really think of them. Case studies of individual executives are presented from a variety of settings, such as the Executive Vice President of a major pharmaceutical company; head of the New York Legal Assistance Group, the founder of the nonprofit Rapid Results Institute, president of a large telecommunications company, and Chief Executive Officer/CEO of AXA XL’s North American Group’s Property/Casualty business. The authors explain that “managers’ reputations are a very important aspect of a working culture about which its management disciplines provide little information and over which they exercise little control.” The authors further suggest such techniques as engaging in self‐examination, plus, in their words: Collaborative work assessment with colleagues, and Experiments in Collaborative Achievement. This work is crucial, because in organizations of all types, as the authors relate, “social agencies, businesses, volunteer organizations, government or the military – the lives of its members are significantly affected by how well its leaders perform their jobs in getting its goals realized and, in the process, make life rewarding (or miserable) for the people who are dedicating a major portion of their lives to achieve those goals.”

Enabling Processing Power Scalability with Internet of Things (IoT) Clusters

Internet of things (IoT) devices play a crucial role in the design of state-of-the-art infrastructures, with an increasing demand to support more complex services and applications. However, IoT devices are known for having limited computational capacities. Traditional approaches used to offload applications to the cloud to ease the burden on end-user devices, at the expense of a greater latency and increased network traffic. Our goal is to optimize the use of IoT devices, particularly those being underutilized. In this paper, we propose a pragmatic solution, built upon the Erlang programming language, that allows a group of IoT devices to collectively execute services, using their spare resources with minimal interference, and achieving a level of performance that otherwise would not be met by individual execution.

Motor Imagination of Lower Limb Movements at Different Frequencies.

Motor imagination (MI) is the mental process of only imagining an action without an actual movement. Research on MI has made significant progress in feature information detection and machine learning decoding algorithms, but there are still problems, such as a low overall recognition rate and large differences in individual execution effects, which make the development of MI run into a bottleneck. Aiming at solving this bottleneck problem, the current study optimized the quality of the MI original signal by “enhancing the difficulty of imagination tasks,” conducted the qualitative and quantitative analyses of EEG rhythm characteristics, and used quantitative indicators, such as ERD mean value and recognition rate. Research on the comparative analysis of the lower limb MI of different tasks, namely, high-frequency motor imagination (HFMI) and low-frequency motor imagination (LFMI), was conducted. The results validate the following: the average ERD of HFMI (−1.827) is less than that of LFMI (−1.3487) in the alpha band, so did (−3.4756 < −2.2891) in the beta band. In the alpha and beta characteristic frequency bands, the average ERD of HFMI is smaller than that of LFMI, and the ERD values of the two are significantly different (p=0.0074 < 0.01; r = 0.945). The ERD intensity STD values of HFMI are less than those of LFMI. which suggests that the ERD intensity individual difference among the subjects is smaller in the HFMI mode than in the LFMI mode. The average recognition rate of HFMI is higher than that of LFMI (87.84% > 76.46%), and the recognition rate of the two modes is significantly different (p=0.0034 < 0.01; r = 0.429). In summary, this research optimizes the quality of MI brain signal sources by enhancing the difficulty of imagination tasks, achieving the purpose of improving the overall recognition rate of the lower limb MI of the participants and reducing the differences of individual execution effects and signal quality among the subjects.

A tale of two presidencies: Trump and Biden on the National Mall

ABSTRACT The 2020 U.S. presidential campaign was about much more than an electoral contest between Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden. Instead, this election cycle revealed two opposing views of the U.S. presidency and a bitter debate over whether it should be understood as an institution defined by and subservient to the U.S. Constitution or as a position dictated by the whims of one individual. In this essay, I examine two corresponding yet contrasting episodes in January 2021 to demonstrate the tensions between viewing the U.S. presidency as an institution versus an individual. Ultimately, I suggest that attending to the institutional nature of the U.S. presidency reveals how the norms of a presidential rhetorical culture are built, perpetuated, and at times dismantled by individual chief executives over time and in place.

The reputation costs of executive misconduct accusations

We examine how sexual harassment accusations against individual executives affect the stock returns of the affiliated organization. Taking an upper echelons and abuse of power perspective, we ident...

CEO Sports Hobby and Firms' Tax Aggressiveness

ABSTRACTRecent accounting research suggests that individual executives play a significant role in shaping a firm's tax planning. Building on psychology research that finds sports interests reflect an individual's risk-taking preferences, we develop a novel measure of innate and non-pecuniary CEO risk attitudes based on the riskiness of CEOs' sports hobbies and examine whether the measure is associated with corporate tax aggressiveness. We find that firms managed by CEOs with riskier sports hobbies are more aggressive in their tax planning. This association is more pronounced for CEOs with greater financial incentives and greater power in making decisions. Our results are robust to using alternative measures of CEO sports risks, and after accounting for the self-selection of the disclosure of CEO sports hobbies.Data Availability: Public sources cited in the paper.JEL Classifications: H26; M41; G41; G34.

Experimental investigation and optimisation of α–β brass at elevated temperatures using Taguchi approach

ABSTRACT Brass is a mixture of copper and zinc with a wide range of engineering uses like gears, bearings, locks, plumbing, hinges, hose coupling valves and so on. It is most used for all types of household utensils due to various properties such as electrical and thermal conductivity, workability, low melting point durability, good corrosion resistance and low friction. In the present work, tensile test has been conducted on Universal Testing Machine (UTM) for alpha–beta brass. The parameters like temperature (600,700,800)0 C, orientation (0, 45, 90)° and strain rate (0.1,0.01,0.001) mm/min have been considered and the mechanical properties like Ultimate Tensile Strength (UTS), and Strength Coefficient (K) are calculated. For optimisation, ANOVA technique in taguchi robust design is used in each procedure under UTS and strength coefficient conditions to determine the extent of parameter’s effect on individual execution trademarks. It is observed that the mechanical conductivity of brass has been improved at level 1 of temperature, level 2 of orientation and level 3 of strain rates in strength coefficient and in ultimate tensile strength, at level 1 of temperature, level 3 of orientation and level 3 of strain rates. It was practically observed that the obtained test data results are within the range.