Yu-Min Huang

Chaotic responses to COVID-19, political polarization, and pervasive misinformation raise the question of whether some or many individuals exercise irrational moral judgment. We provide the first mathematically correct test for transitivity of moral preferences. Transitivity is the most prominent rationality criterion of the behavioral, biological, and economic sciences. However, transitivity is conceptually, mathematically, and statistically difficult to evaluate empirically. We tested three parsimonious, order-constrained, probabilistic characterizations: First, the weak utility model treats an individual's choices as noisy reflections of a single, deterministic, underlying transitive preference; second, a variant severely limits the allowable response noise; and third, by the general random utility hypothesis, individuals' choices reveal uncertain, but transitive, moral preferences. Among 28 individuals, everyone's data were consistent with the weak utility model and general random utility model, thus supporting both operationalizations. Tightening the bounds on error rates in noisy responses yielded a poorly performing model, thus rejecting the model according to which choices are highly consistent with a single transitive preference. Bayesian model selection favored probabilistic transitive preferences and hence the equivalent random utility hypothesis. This suggests that there is some order underlying the apparent chaos: Rather than presume widespread disregard for moral principles, policymakers may build on navigating and reconciling extreme heterogeneity compounded with individual uncertainty.

Companies that use online group-buying to get new business expansion opportunities at a price advantage are failing. Therefore, there is a need to develop new marketing strategies for group-buying companies to achieve market share and consumer favor. Given that consumers are society members, we used the social interaction theory to investigate the combination of factors that stimulate consumers’ purchase intentions. Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis was performed to evaluate different strategy configurations of social interaction elements, perceived quality, benefits and trust to promote purchase decisions from 406 group-buying consumer questionnaires. We revealed four pathways with different configurations that can prompt consumers to make group-buying decisions: information strategy, Word-of-Mouth strategy, sense of community strategy, as well as combining Word-of-Mouth and sense of community strategy. These strategies provide viable approaches through which group-buying companies can rationally use marketing programs to promote consumers’ purchase intentions.

The intertemporal stability of research and development investment is a key issue in successfully promoting the continuation of innovation activities under high uncertainty in entrepreneurship. R&D smoothing helps firms to navigate the uncertainties of the external environment and maintain the stability of their investments in innovation. Chief executive officers are the most important decision-makers in firms' strategic planning. However, overconfident CEOs may overlook the importance of their firms' strategic actions on innovative activities. Drawing on upper echelons theory, this paper examines how CEO overconfidence affects firms' R&D smoothing. Using a sample of firms listed in China's Growth Enterprises Market between 2013 and 2020, this study finds that CEO overconfidence has a significant negative impact on R&D smoothing. Furthermore, our findings reveal that firms' internal control quality and institutional investor monitoring can mitigate the negative association between CEO overconfidence and R&D smoothing. Our findings provide new insights into the micro-level theoretical explanations for R&D smoothing and offer practical implications for technology-based entrepreneurial firms.

Over the centuries people have always faced the deaths of their beloved ones in their families and suffer from grief over them. William Shakespeare in Hamlet offers his ideas of how a son faces his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, ideas of whether purgatory exists and ideas of which eschatology is correct in the English Reformation, either Catholic or Protestant. In this essay, I examine two traces and one reversal in the play and ask many what-if questions through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. In my argument, Shakespeare misspeaks to his readers in the atmosphere of Protestant Elizabethan England the meanings of death in Prince Hamlet’s perspective in order to reverse his readers’ way of seeing and to make them experience Prince Hamlet’s Catholicism as the form of the opposite, by which they can become theologians themselves and meet God behind His mask. In employment of Derrida’s center-freeplay structurality, I believe that it is through Prince Hamlet’s subversive character that Ghost King Hamlet is the first center into which Prince Hamlet comes as freeplay in the structurality of father and son, and Prince Hamlet is the second center into which the other characters come as freeplay in the structurality of the court, intertwined with the structurality of the religion where no existence of purgatory in Lutheranism comes as center into which the existence of purgatory in Catholicism comes as freeplay, by the structurality of authorship where author comes as center into which the play Hamlet comes as freeplay.