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This paper empirically examines how consumers react when a company marks a product with a gay label. The company under scrutiny is one of the largest video game developers in the world, and the labeled product is a popular video game character. We use a regression discontinuity design to exploit the quasi-experimental setting. The main finding was significant drop in demand for this character and a return to previous levels after approximately 3 months. Possible mechanisms and dynamics were explored by analyzing demand for other characters and by surveying consumers. The results are consistent after performing robustness checks based on grid search, subsampling, and placebo tests.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240811.].

This paper examines the issue of employee discrimination after a political crisis: the annexation of Crimea. The annexation, which resulted in a political crisis in Russian-Ukrainian relations, is a setting which allows us to test if a bilateral political issue caused employee discrimination. We use a quasi-experimental approach to examine how the political crisis influenced participation in major sports leagues in Russia and Ukraine. The results show that the employment conditions significantly worsened since the Crimea crisis started.

We analyse the determinants of football fans’ happiness in the Russian Premier League using facial emotion recognition. We propose a new way of measuring subjective well-being and provide its empirical validation using sports data. Our sample consists of about 10,000 photos from football matches uploaded on the most popular social network in Russia during the seasons 2014/15–2017/18. The dataset of photos is analysed with the Emotion Recognition software, which takes a facial expression in an image as an input and returns the confidence across a set of emotions for each face in the image. Next we use multinomial logistic regression to identify the determinants of happiness. The results show that uncertainty and expectations are important drivers of football fans’ happiness. A win decreases the probability of being unhappy, and the effect becomes stronger for late rounds of a national championship. The change in happiness because of a home team win is stronger for males.

PurposeThis study suggests an alternative to confirmatory content analysis (CA) and empirically demonstrates that explorative CA enables new insights into the mechanism of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure. In so doing, this research contributes to both methodological and empirical advancements in IC disclosure research.Design/methodology/approachEmploying the assumptions of positive accounting theory and taking book value of intangible assets as a reference, our research design utilizes well-established text-mining (TM) tools based on a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression. We assume that the degree of cohesion between officially disclosed and evaluated intangible assets on balance sheets and those contextually delivered in narrative form may affect how IC is ultimately disclosed in annual reports.FindingsOur main finding is in line with the results and criticism of previous studies. We show that companies do not extensively disclose IC in their annual reports. However, some narrative forms for IC disclosure are identified and confirmed by several robustness checks.Research limitations/implicationsFirst, the findings provide internal validity only for large US enterprises. These firms have similar, well-structured reporting requirements. This analysis might be enriched by an examination and a comparison of different institutional contexts, such as emerging countries. Second, following previous studies, annual reports serve as the source of data. Consequently, the findings are relevant only for mandatory and voluntary disclosure of IC, mitigating the relevance of this study for contexts of involuntary disclosure.Originality/valueThis study makes two contributions. First, we add to the empirical literature by offering one more piece of evidence on whether and, if so, the extent to which companies disclose IC in their annual reports. Second, we provide further examination of confirmatory CA by proposing a number of statistically validated codes and tokens that are indicators of IC communication by companies.

Background/ObjectivesThe study considers the problem of the inclusion of people with obesity in the context of the growing role of computer-based work. Negative stereotypes about people with obesity still hold even when they are irrelevant in tasks that require little physical activity.Subjects/MethodsUsing data from the realm of competitive video gaming (eSports) and image recognition-based metric of body mass index metric derived from artificial intelligence, we examine the individual performance depending on weight. The sample includes 821 players and 127,533 player performance observations.ResultsFor shorter tasks, individuals with normal weight performed better than individuals with obesity. For longer tasks, however, people with Class III (severe) obesity outperformed all others, and their advantage increased with task duration.ConclusionsOur findings shed light on an understanding of how actually body features are related to objective individual performance in a competitive context.

Purpose Company intellectual capital (IC) is nowadays considered as a key resource that can transform a company’s value. For this reason, the efficiency of IC is crucial for all stakeholders. Evaluating efficiency is difficult, because IC is partly unobservable and its efficiency varies across time. The aim of this study is to suggest a methodology for estimating the dynamic efficiency of a company’s intellectual resources. Design/methodology/approach The panel data model suggested by Kneip et al. (2012) is used to estimate dynamic efficiency. The main feature of this model is that the unobservable component has a multi-dimensional factor structure. Taking advantage of the ability of this model to control for unobserved complex heterogeneity, the authors use the results in further stochastic frontier analysis. A data set containing information about Russian companies for the period from 2001 to 2010 is used. Findings In this paper, the dynamic efficiency of Russian companies is estimated. It is shown that, using the traditional efficiency estimate, companies can be overestimated. Research limitations/implications The main limitation of the suggested methodology is that it is necessary to have a long panel data structure. Practical implications Taking advantage of time-varying efficiency, one can estimate the efficiency growth rate as a measure of performance, standard deviation as a measure of risk and autocorrelation as a measure of stability. Originality/value This is the first study to present clear evidence of the time-varying nature of IC efficiency. On the methodological side, the paper presents a fairly simple method capable of estimating various indicators of a company’s efficiency.

This study provides readers with new information about key drivers of performance in the emerging area of eSports. Competitive computer gaming (eSports) is becoming increasingly popular, and the number of gamers and amount of prize money is growing. We therefore explore some key country-level characteristics that may contribute to players’ success, measured as money won. We use gamers’ prize earnings aggregated by country and a hurdle model to understand the determinants of performance. The results show that a 1% increase in GDP per capita leads to a 2.2% increase in prize money per capita. Country population is not statistically significant in the outcome model. This finding may indicate that eSports talents are not uniformly distributed across the world population. Surprisingly, post-Soviet and planned or post-planned economies are more likely to participate in eSports.

The European Commission of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) has identified glial mechanisms of seizures and epileptogenesis as top research priorities. The aim of our study was to conduct a comparative analysis of the expression levels of cytoskeletal proteins (glial fibrillar acidic protein (GFAP) and vimentin), protective protein S100, and proapoptotic caspase-3 protein in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) associated with focal cortical dysplasia (FCD). We aimed to investigate how the expression levels of these proteins depend on age (both in children and adults), gender, and disease duration, using immunohistochemistry. Nonparametric statistical methods were employed for data analysis. In the epileptic focus area of the cortex and white matter in patients with FCD-associated temporal lobe DRE, a higher level of expression of these proteins was observed. Age and gender differences were found for vimentin and S100. In the early stages of disease development, there was a compensatory sequential increase in the expression of cytoskeletal and protective proteins. In patients with DRE, depending on the disease duration, patterns of development of neurodegeneration were noted, which is accompanied by apoptosis of gliocytes. These results provide insights into epilepsy mechanisms and may contribute to improving diagnostic and treatment approaches.