conclusions the research revealed that nonsmokers showed better mental health and dyadic adjustment than smokers, thus suggesting that smoking endangers and can impair the tranquility of families and that smoking also threatens the dyadic adjustment of couples. background the mental health and dyadic adjustment of smokers is a matter of serious concern which brings many demerits on mental healt...

The objective of this article is to prepare a time-inhomogeneous intensity model for valuing cash-flow CDOs, which explicitly incorporates the credit rating of the firms in the collateral portfolio as the indicator of the likelihood of default. Our model can prove very useful for the pricing, structuring, rating and risk management of CDO notes, whenever the legal structure of the transaction, ...

Reputations of electronic parties are important for their economic viability in business settings. Potential clients of e-services cannot rely solely on their own experiences to gain knowledge about e-services’ reputations. Plainly aggregating rating comments from other clients can often be misleading. Therefore, we are presenting a reputation aggregation model which seeks for the subgroup of r...

The trend of social information processing sees e-commerce and social web applications increasingly relying on user-generated content, such as rating, to determine the quality of objects and to generate recommendations for users. In a rating system, a set of reviewers assign to a set of objects different types of scores based on specific evaluation criteria. In this paper, we seek to determine,...

The movie distribution company Netflix has generated considerable buzz in the statistics community by offering a million dollar prize for improvements to its movie rating system. Among the statisticians and computer scientists who have disclosed their techniques, the emphasis has been on machine learning approaches. This article has the modest goal of discussing a simple model for movie rating ...

Generally, information provision and certification have been identified as the major economic functions of rating agencies. This paper analyzes whether the “watchlist” (rating review) instrument has extended the agencies’ role towards a monitoring position, as proposed by Boot, Milbourn, and Schmeits (2006). Using a data set of Moody’s ratings between 1982 and 2004, we find that the overall inf...

In an expansive multi-billion international film industry, online reviews inform audiences which films may be the most appealing, determining in part the success a film or franchise. Online reviewers and even review aggregations are biased by social or financial factors; this bias clouds the value of movie reviews by prioritizing and propagating highly visible user’s ratings of films, as compar...

the purpose of the present study is to develop appropriate scoring scales for each of the defined stages of the writing process, and also to determine to what extent these scoring scales can reliably and validly assess the performances of efl learners in an academic writing task. two hundred and two students’ writing samples were collected after a step-by-step process oriented essay writing ins...