This study of the flow of online discussions examined how previous messages affected the current message along five dimensions: (1) evaluations (agreement, disagreement, or unresponsive actions); (2) knowledge content (contribution, repetition, or null content); (3) social cues (positive, negative, or none); (4) personal information (number of visits); and (5) elicitation (eliciting response or...

What is the weak instruments (WI) problem and what causes it? Universal agreement does not exist on these questions. We define weak instruments by two features: (1) 2SLS is badly biased toward the OLS estimate and alternative “unbiased” estimators such as LIML may not solve the problem and (2) the standard (first order) asymptotic distribution does not give an accurate framework for inference. ...

The main purpose of this descriptive-correlative study was to design the structural equation model of agricultural entrepreneurship development in villages of Kamfiruz district, Marvdasht County in Iran. The population of the study consisted of all 3106 families of 20 villages. According to the Bartlett et al. table, a sample of 197 households was selected using stratified random sampling techn...

Modeling how we choose among alternatives, or more generally, modeling preferences, is one of the core topics of study in Psychology. Preferences can be studied experimentally using a variety of procedures, one of the oldest being the method of paired comparisons. This method remains quite popular in areas such as psychophysics and consumer psychology. For a good overview of the method of paire...

Technologies for overcoming heterogeneities between autonomous data sources are key in the emerging networked world. In this paper we discuss the initial results of a formal investigation into the underpinnings of technologies for alleviating structural heterogeneity. At the core of structural heterogeneity is the data mapping problem: discovering effective mappings between structured represent...

Linear causal models known as structural equation models (SEMs) are widely used for data analysis in the social sciences, economics, and artificial intelligence, in which random variables are assumed to be continuous and normally distributed. This paper deals with one fundamental problem in the applications of SEMs – parameter identification. The paper uses the graphical models approach and pro...

A recent article in the Journal of Management gives a critique of a Bayesian approach to factor analysis proposed in Psychological Methods. This commentary responds to the authors’ critique by clarifying key issues, especially the use of priors for residual covariances. A discussion is also presented of cross-loadings and model selection tools. Simulated data are used to illustrate the ideas. A...

Evaluation of the success of professional virtual communities (VCs) has been the focus of many organizations. However, there are still few empirical studies conducted to examine online knowledge sharing behavior that has been thought as the most important element for VC success. In this study, by integrating two schools of thoughts (trust theory and self-efficacy expectation) with IS Success Mo...

Problem-based learning (PBL) is generally organized in three phases, involving collaborative and self-directed learning processes. The hypothesis tested here is whether learning in the different phases of PBL is cumulative, with learning in each phase depending on that of the previous phase. The scientific concepts recalled by 218 students at the end of each PBL phase were used to estimate the ...