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Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have emerged as a new mechanism for entrepreneurial finance, with parallels to initial public offerings, venture capital, and presale crowdfunding. In a sample of more than 1,500 ICOs that collectively raise $ 12.9 billion, we examine which issuer and ICO characteristics predict successful real outcomes (increasing issuer employment and avoiding enterprise failure). Success is associated with disclosure, credible commitment to the project, and quality signals. An instrumental variables analysis finds that ICO token exchange listing causes higher future employment, indicating that access to token liquidity has important real consequences for the enterprise.

Thermodynamics is devoted to the study of energy or materials, and few researchers have combined the laws of thermodynamics with stereoscopic vision. Thus, we propose Depth Multiple Hierarchical StereoNet (DMH-Net) by using thermodynamic color guidance, which present end-to-end deep architecture for real-time stereo matching, realize sub-pixel precision and produce high-quality refinement disparity on dataset benchmarks. At the same time, we use color thermodynamics to guide the image output of an accurate Hill disparity image. Our DMH-Net consists of four modules: the first module uses a deep spatial pooling method to extract multiple features that work on the initial left and right images. The second module use color guided to produce high-quality cost volume. We use the ahead of two modules to calculate depth disparity precision, which can segment coarse to fine to obtain background and edge of objects information. Thirdly module integrates the information about 3D cost volume and color channel to frame a 4D hierarchical cost volume. The fourth module is designed by depth hierarchical refinement to regress the final disparity. Finally, we achieve sub-pixel precision and real-time performance on benchmarks, which can produce high-quality thermodynamic disparity regression maps.

This study investigates the impact of celebrity endorsement and the moderating effect of negative publicity on consumer purchase intention or attitudes in an emerging market. Employing a quantitative research design, 500 respondents were surveyed using a structured questionnaire. The findings indicate that a celebrity endorser who has attributes such as attractiveness, trustworthiness, and familiarity has a positive influence on consumer's perception of quality, purchase intentions, and brand loyalty. However, celebrity endorser's negative publicity had no moderation effect on consumer purchase intention. This article provides key theoretical and practical implications for researchers and practitioners on the use of celebrity endorsers.

To overcome the manufacturing defects and improve the manufacturing quality of the end of the cross-braced of Bogie, through the analysis of a rough and a formed structure of the end of the cross-braced, the stress situation in the key tapping process of the inner hole is calculated, the tapping process and the corresponding parameters are determined, and the corresponding control strategies are put forward for other key processes in the manufacturing. Through a large number of production practice, the manufacturing process can significantly improve processing quality, improve production efficiency and reduce production costs of the end of the cross-braced of Bogie.

We examine a new dataset of public procurement laws, practice, and outcomes in 187 countries. We measure regulation as restrictions on the discretion of the procuring entities. We find that laws and practice are highly correlated with each other across countries, and better practice is correlated with better outcomes, but laws themselves are not correlated with outcomes. A closer look shows that stricter laws correlate with improved outcomes, but only in countries with low public sector capacity. We present a model of procurement in which both regulatory rules and public sector capacity determine procurement outcomes. In the model, regulation is effective in countries with low public sector capacity, but not in countries with high capacity because it inhibits the socially optimal exercise of discretion to exclude low quality bidders.

This study is a quantitative study that aims to determine and analyze whether 3 quality perspectives namely product quality, service quality and delivery quality affect consumer perceptions in rating online stores. The purpose of this study is to find out how consumers rate online stores from three points of view, namely the point of view of product quality, delivery quality, and from the point of view of service quality. This study is located in Surabaya and took a sample of 70 respondents with the provisions of doing online shopping as much as 5 times in the last 1 month. After fulfilling the validity and reliability test, then doing hypothesis testing using the F test and t-test. The results showed that 3 quality perspectives, namely product quality, service quality, and delivery quality either partially or simultaneously had a significant effect on consumer perceptions in determining online store ratings. In addition to building a store image, giving a high rating from consumers will also increase sales turnover which will have an impact on increasing online store profits.

Globalization has substantially influenced the world economy. However, managers have a limited understanding of how local–global identity influences consumers’ price perceptions and behavior. In this research, the authors propose that consumers’ local (vs. global) identity leads to a greater tendency to make price–perceived quality (PPQ) associations. Perceived quality variance among comparison brands is a key mechanism underlying these effects. Two field studies (Studies 1 and 7), seven experiments (Studies 2–6, 9, and 10), and a systematic review of secondary data (Study 8) provide converging and robust evidence for the effect of local–global identity on PPQ. Consistent with the perceived quality variance account, when quality differences among the brands are made salient, PPQ associations of consumers high in global (but not local) identity significantly increase, compared with baseline conditions. However, when perceived quality similarities are made salient, PPQ associations of consumers high in local (but not global) identity significantly decrease. Product type and distribution of customer ratings represent natural boundaries for the relationship between local–global identity and PPQ. The authors conclude with the implications for managers’ targeting endeavors. We also provide specific tools that marketers can use in ads and point-of-purchase materials to encourage or discourage consumers in making PPQ associations.

Due to the advances in the digitalization process of the manufacturing industry and the resulting available data, there is tremendous progress and large interest in integrating machine learning and optimization methods on the shop floor in order to improve production processes. Additionally, a shortage of resources leads to increasing acceptance of new approaches, such as machine learning to save energy, time, and resources, and avoid waste. After describing possible occurring data types in the manufacturing world, this study covers the majority of relevant literature from 2008 to 2018 dealing with machine learning and optimization approaches for product quality or process improvement in the manufacturing industry. The review shows that there is hardly any correlation between the used data, the amount of data, the machine learning algorithms, the used optimizers, and the respective problem from the production. The detailed correlations between these criteria and the recent progress made in this area as well as the issues that are still unsolved are discussed in this paper.

Multihoming, the decision to design a complement to operate on multiple platforms, is becoming increasingly common in many platform markets. Perceived wisdom suggests that multihoming is beneficial for complement providers as they expand their market reach, but it reduces differentiation among competing platforms as the same complements become available on different platforms. We argue that complement providers face trade-offs when designing their products for multiple platform architectures—they must decide how far to specialize the complement to each platform’s technological specifications. Because of these trade-offs, multihoming complements can have different quality performance across platforms. In a study of the U.S. video game industry, we find that multihoming games have lower-quality performance on a technologically more complex console than on a less complex one. Also, games designed for and released on a focal platform have lower-quality performance on platforms they are subsequently multihomed to. However, games that are released on the complex platform with a delay suffer a smaller drop in quality on complex platforms. This has important implications for platform competition, and for managers considering expanding their reach through multihoming. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0779 .

We define quality as characteristics that investors should be willing to pay a higher price for. Theoretically, we provide a tractable valuation model that shows how stock prices should increase in their quality characteristics: profitability, growth, and safety. Empirically, we find that high-quality stocks do have higher prices on average but not by a large margin. Perhaps because of this puzzlingly modest impact of quality on price, high-quality stocks have high risk-adjusted returns. Indeed, a quality-minus-junk (QMJ) factor that goes long high-quality stocks and shorts low-quality stocks earns significant risk-adjusted returns in the United States and across 24 countries. The price of quality varies over time, reaching a low during the internet bubble, and a low price of quality predicts a high future return of QMJ. Analysts’ price targets and earnings forecasts imply systematic quality-related errors in return and earnings expectations.