DePaul University

About: DePaul University is a education organization based out in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 5658 authors who have published 11562 publications receiving 295257 citations.

Materialism, Attitudes, and Social Media Usage and Their Impact on Purchase Intention of Luxury Fashion Goods Among American and Arab Young Generations

Abstract: Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Foursquare provide consumers with tremendous opportunities to create and disseminate brand-related content and product usage information around the world. This study investigates whether materialism, an important construct of consumer behavior, is a consequence of social media usage, which also influences users’ attitudes toward social media advertising (SMADV) among American and Arab young social media users. In addition, this study examines the relationship between materialism and purchase intention of luxury fashion goods across American and Arab users. Overall, the results suggest that Arab social media users exhibited higher levels of materialism and social media usage as well as more favorable attitudes toward SMADV than did American users. In both samples, social media usage positively predicts materialism and users’ SMADV attitudes. Both samples showed positive relationships between materialism and purchase intention toward luxury fashi...

Work design in situ: Understanding the role of occupational and organizational context.

Abstract: Despite nearly 100 years of scientific study, comparatively little attention has been given to articulating how the broader occupational and organizational context might impact work design. We seek to address this gap by discussing how aspects of the occupational and organizational context can constrain or enable the emergence of different work design features as well as influence the relationships between work design features and various outcomes. We highlight how different forms of context might impact work design and suggest that this is an important and potentially fruitful area for future work design research and theory. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Earnings Management? Erroneous Inferences Based on Earnings Frequency Distributions

Abstract: A vast literature following Hayn [1995] and Burgstahler and Dichev [1997] attributed the so-called “discontinuities” in earnings distributions around zero to earnings management. Despite recent evidence that these discontinuities are likely caused by other factors, researchers and teachers continue to point to the shapes of these distributions as evidence of earnings management. We provide three sets of further evidence that these discontinuities are likely caused by factors other than earnings management: (1) we provide, as an example, a detailed analysis of the severe effects of sample selection in a recent study; this study erroneously concludes that the shape of an earnings distribution is evidence of earnings management, (2) we provide a simple explanation for the shape of the earnings distribution that is most often cited as evidence of earnings management; the relation between earnings and prices differs with the magnitude and the sign of earnings, and (3) we provide further examples that support the main point of our paper; evidence beyond the mere shape of a distribution must be brought to bear before researchers can draw conclusions regarding the presence/absence of earnings management.

The Unfairness of Popularity Bias in Recommendation

Abstract: Recommender systems are known to suffer from the popularity bias problem: popular (i.e. frequently rated) items get a lot of exposure while less popular ones are under-represented in the recommendations. Research in this area has been mainly focusing on finding ways to tackle this issue by increasing the number of recommended long-tail items or otherwise the overall catalog coverage. In this paper, however, we look at this problem from the users' perspective: we want to see how popularity bias causes the recommendations to deviate from what the user expects to get from the recommender system. We define three different groups of users according to their interest in popular items (Niche, Diverse and Blockbuster-focused) and show the impact of popularity bias on the users in each group. Our experimental results on a movie dataset show that in many recommendation algorithms the recommendations the users get are extremely concentrated on popular items even if a user is interested in long-tail and non-popular items showing an extreme bias disparity.