We examine the relationship between return and volatility of the stock markets and macroeconomic fundamentals for the G-7 countries by using monthly data ranging from July 1985 to June 2015. To meet this end, we apply the spillover index approach based on the generalized VAR framework developed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012, 2014). The empirical analysis shows strong interactions between the returns and volatilities of the G-7 stock markets and the considered set of corresponding macroeconomic factors including industrial production, money supply, interest rates, inflation, oil prices and exchange rates. The return and volatility spillover transmission/reception dynamics of the relationships between these stock markets and the macroeconomic fundamentals have changed after the global financial crisis of 2008. Our findings provide useful insights for investors and policy makers concerned with the unprecedented swings in the stock markets of G-7 countries.

Critical infrastructures (CI) are difficult to handle due to their complexity, size and the number of stakeholders involved. During emergency situations (e.g. fire or terrorist attack), a CI operator in the control room is faced with a flood of information coming from different sensors and legacy monitoring systems. Since in these situations, time is critical and the operators are under a great deal of pressure, a holistic management of all the technical systems and actors involved is needed, reinforced by the Recommendation and Decision Support System (RDSS) that helps emergency managers to take correct and timely decisions. One way to provide an adequate RDSS support to the operator is proposed in this paper which is based on an intelligent, event driven layer that sits on top of the legacy CI monitoring system. Powered by the complex event processing capabilities and facility data model implemented in the form of CI ontology, this layer processes events originating from different sources, conducts the situation and risk assessment, and reacts accordingly, either automatically or via recommendations proposed to emergency personnel. To validate the proposed approach, an event-driven RDSS was deployed on an airport use case (Nikola Tesla airport in Belgrade), as one of the most complex CIs.

Alarge number of incidents related to fake/inferior-quality drugs have occurred in China in recent years. In order to reduce drug crimes, the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) has exploited the new supervision approach, i.e., unannounced inspection (UI), since September 2014. However, the effectiveness of UI in driving drug producers to put more effort into meeting the requirements of Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) is yet to be ascertained. In this paper we apply game theory to study the effects of UI on the prevention of drug fraud, drug producers’ profits, and social welfare under scenarios of complete and incomplete information. We show that UI is not always an effective way of supervision. Specifically, if the upper bound on the punishment is not very large, UI can drive the firmto make the largest self-supervision effort only when the firm’s technical level is high and the supervision cost is low. Otherwise, UI cannot drive the firm to make the largest self-supervision effort. Under incomplete information, firms with a high technical level would adopt more self-supervision and make more profit than those with a low technical level. Moreover, we design a new mechanism under incomplete information that can incentive drug producers to make greater self-supervision effort to meet the requirements of GMP under certain conditions.

Mobile news apps have emerged as a significant means for learning about latest news and trends. However, in light of numerous news apps and information overload, motivating users to adopt one app is a major concern for both the industry and academia. Therefore, considering the attributes of mobile news and the debate on switching costs in the Internet context, based on the expectation-confirmation model (ECM), this study suggests that switching costs still exist and have a significant moderating effect on user satisfaction and continuous usage of mobile news apps. Furthermore, the different influences of information quality, system quality and service quality on continuance intention, user satisfaction and switching costs are discussed, showing that quality of information has a significant impact on users’ continuous usage of mobile news apps through increasing perceived usefulness, whereas personalized service quality have stronger effects through increasing user satisfaction and switching costs.

This paper analyzes manufacturers’ wholesale price decisions and the evolutionarily stable strategies of the retailers’ marketing behavior in duopoly supply chains, where each chain consists of one manufacturer and many retailers. Each retailer chooses one of two marketing strategies: social responsibility or non-social responsibility (i.e., a firm only cares about the benefits of its shareholders). We identify the conditions under which a strategy profile is evolutionarily stable. Furthermore, we investigate the manufacturers’ wholesale prices and find the following: (i) the retailer’s social responsibility decreases the unit wholesale price; (ii) when the degree of the retailer’s social responsibility is medium, the social responsibility of the retailer in a supply chain increases the profit of the retailer’s own manufacturer and decreases the profit of the rival’s manufacturer; otherwise, it decreases the profits of the two manufacturers; and (iii) when each retailer exhibits its social responsibility moderately, a triple-win situation can be achieved.