This paper examines the impact that state ownership has on the financial reporting practices of publicly traded firms. Using a unique sample of listed Chinese firms ultimately controlled by local and/or provincial government entities, we test the proposition that the incentives of the underlying government and the structure of the state’s ownership shape financial reporting practices. We find t...

Language ability is an inevitable aspect of delegation in agents to provide for collaborative natural language interaction (CNLI) during task delegation. To cater to users of different languages, the CNLI is required to be multilingual. When multilingual CNLI has to be provided in a manner characteristic of agents, it leads to realizing two types of autonomies viz. behavior autonomy to provide ...

While multiagent systems have been extolled as dynamically configurable and capable of emergent behavior, these qualities can be a drawback. When the system changes so that it no longer achieves its goals, emergent behavior is undesirable. Giving agents the autonomy to adapt and then expecting them to adapt only in acceptable ways requires rigorous design analyses. In this paper, we propose met...

This document is an output from a research programme funded by UKaid from the Department for International Development. However, the views expressed are not necessarily those of DFID. Executive Summary Cities have long been connected with processes of bureaucratisation and state building, as they have been to conflict and war. In bringing these two associations together Charles Tilly (1992) pro...

Two studies examined whether volitional resources can shield implicit self-evaluation against the autonomy-undermining influence of external demands. Volitional resources were operationalized as individual differences in action orientation (Kuhl & Beckmann, 1994). Implicit self-evaluation was assessed via an adaptation of the affective priming task (Fazio, 2001). In Study 1, a threatening visua...

he development of the Russian federal system has been marked by conflict, co-optation, and consensus. Emerging from the generally unitary Russian republic within a formally federal but largely unitary Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia began its development as a federal system with little experience and few institutional structures salvageable from the earlier system. The patchwork Soviet-era con...

Artificial nutrition represents the whole set of medical therapies which totally or partially replace oral feeding when this is no longer possible. Artificial nutrition needs to be initiated and withdrawn depending on the balance between the advantages and disadvantages induced to the patient. The medical world frequently encounters dilemmas about initiating and withdrawing this treatment. Nume...

Hybrid vehicles and energy management is now a fertile area of research and development. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the tools development for energy management and collaborative decision-making in hybrid electrical vehicles. We propose a multi-agent system for intelligent energy management. To test the designed and developed system, we have used a vehicle powered by a hydrogen fu...