Florida Atlantic University

About: Florida Atlantic University is a education organization based out in Boca Raton, Florida, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 7788 authors who have published 19830 publications receiving 535694 citations. The organization is also known as: FAU & Florida Atlantic.

Board Composition, Managerial Ownership, and Firm Performance: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract: Our objective is to examine the sensitivity of simultaneous equations techniques in corporate governance research. We model Tobin's Q, board composition, and managerial ownership using a three-equation instrumental variables approach, with two specifications and four instruments. We find that the variables are jointly determined. However, results depend strongly on the specification of the model and the instruments. We conclude that results using simultaneous equations methods must be interpreted cautiously, OLS estimates should not be casually dismissed, and that sensitivity analysis is essential when estimating an empirical model whose structure is uncertain.

Distance Matters: Physical Space and Social Impact

Abstract: Studies of college students and citizens of south Florida, United States, students in Shanghai, China, and an international sample of social psychologists show that social influence, measured by the frequency of memorable interactions, is heavily determined by distance. In all three cases, although there was a great deal of interaction with distant persons, the relationship between distance and interaction frequency was well described by an inverse power function with a slope of approximately -1, consistent with the expectation that social impact is proportional to the inverse square of the distance separating two persons. This result confirms one principle from Latane's 1981 theory of social impact and helps explain the ability of opinion minorities to cluster and survive in the face of majority influence.

Social networks applied

Abstract: Social networks have interesting properties. They influence our lives enormously without us being aware of the implications they raise. The authors investigate the following areas concerning social networks: how to exploit our unprecedented wealth of data and how we can mine social networks for purposes such as marketing campaigns; social networks as a particular form of influence, i.e.., the way that people agree on terminology and this phenomenon's implications for the way we build ontologies and the Semantic Web; social networks as something we can discover from data; the use of social network information to offer a wealth of new applications such as better recommendations for restaurants, trustworthy email senders, or (maybe) blind dates; investigation of the richness and difficulty of harvesting FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) information; and by looking at how information processing is bound to social context, the resulting ways that network topology's definition determines its outcomes.