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The owner of a small financial services firm is evaluating the performance of four funds to determine whether to offer them to his clients. The funds span a variety of objectives and include a recently initiated fund. The case explores issues related to the evaluation of mutual fund performance, including the selection of benchmarks and the effect of fees. The case provides a natural and compelling context in which to discuss market efficiency.

Towers Watson (TW) has always conducted its own research into alternative approaches to market cap investing. A senior investment consultant with TW, impressed by a recent presentation by the CIO of Research Affiliates (RA) about an innovative investing concept called the “Fundamental Index methodology,” thinks it might be an important innovation in applying nonmarket cap approaches. But he has some concerns about the approach and whether or not it would be appropriate for TW's clients who depend on the firm to keep them on the cutting edge of institutional investing.

This case is taught in Darden's Investments elective but could be used in introductory Finance classes to explore the concept of diversification of investments or in a portfolio management course as a means to explore optimal portfolio allocation. It is accompanied by several teaching tools including a teaching note for instructors, student and instructor spreadsheets, student and instructor videos, and a PowerPoint deck for class debrief. The case would work well in a module sequenced between CornerStone Partners (UVA-F-1677) used before and Pravda Asset Management (UVA-F-1602) used after.

The global head of investment research at the World Gold Council (WGC) has finished his presentation “The Strategic Case for Gold as an Asset Class” at the 2012 Bloomberg Precious Metals Conference in New York. As a result of the market collapse in 2008 and the ongoing euro-area crisis, investors worldwide have safety and security on their minds, and many in the room were wondering whether gold would provide capital preservation and improve the overall risk-return tradeoff of their portfolios. At the same time, the sustained run-up in the price of gold since 2001 that was mentioned in the presentation was a cause for concern. Was gold the safe haven that it had proved to be in 2008 and 2009, or was it an asset class at the peak of a bubble? The investment case for gold deserved closer examination.

This case examines the importance of liquidity to financial markets, using the dramatic volatility of mutual fund flows in 2008 as an example. While the case is targeted to MBA students in an investments or portfolio management course, it is also appropriate for an advanced undergraduate course. It is written from the perspective of a fund manager who has experienced significant redemptions in 2008 and is considering whether or not to use ReFlow Management LLC's “liquidity provision” service. The case requires students to examine the nature and magnitude of mutual fund trading costs; how fund flows may induce additional trading, and how ReFlow's innovative service attempts to resolve these issues. Through this analysis, students will better understand what is meant by the term “liquidity” and how liquidity, or a lack thereof, can negatively impact portfolio performance.

Online medical teams (MTs), involving collaboration between remote healthcare workers, can provide comprehensive and rapid healthcare to patients. The growth in MTs is continuing, with popularity growing among doctors and patients, but some MTs disband, which could break the continuity of healthcare services provided. We aim to address this pressing issue by exploring the effects of team diversity and leadership types on team status (i.e. team disbandment (TD)). This paper systematically investigates the influences of team diversity, including separation, variety and disparity diversity and the effects of leadership types, including strong, equal and weak types.

A data set consisting 1,071 online MTs was collected from the Good Doctor website, a leading Chinese online health community (OHC), on January 10, 2018. The data captured included 206 teams which disbanded after 3 months collaboration. Logistic regression and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) were used to examine their effects.

The results show that variety diversity, related to departments, positively affects TD, but disparity diversity, referring to clinician titles, negatively affects TD. Separation diversity, in terms of team member attitudes, exerts a negligible influence on disbandment. Although strong and equal leadership types negatively influence TD, they are seen to strengthen the positive effect of variety diversity, suggesting stable structure combinations of strong or equal-type leadership and low department diversity, as well as the match of weak-type leadership and high department diversity.

This paper extends the current understanding of virtual teams and OHCs by examining the role of leadership types and team diversity, and their influencing role on team status. The pairwise combinations are obtained to effectively reduce the disbandment probability of medical teams operating in OHCs, which could help platform managers, team founders and those connected with MTs deal with the team-disbandment crisis, providing both theoretical and practical implications to healthcare providers and researchers alike.

This study aims to explain why organisations remain vulnerable to financial failure despite increasing financial regulation to improve governance. Using a case study of gambling and regulation in professional football in England, it introduces the concept of “regulatory legitimacy” to show how this enables football clubs to gamble.

The study quantifies the extent to which football clubs in the Championship of the English Football League (EFL) adopt a conventionally economically irrational decision to run a loss-making budget in the hope of achieving sporting success. The study postulates criteria for evidence of this form of gambling by overspending on playing talent with data from the clubs’ published financial statements. A pay-off matrix is developed to compare the intended and actual outcomes.

The research finds that this strategy was both prevalent and the most successful to achieve promotion.

This study makes three contributions. The first is the quantification of the prevalence of this form of gambling. The second is the finding that, despite regulations to limit spending on wages, gambling is rational in the non-economic sense because it is almost a necessary strategy to achieve promotion if the club had not been relegated from the Premier League in the previous season. The third contribution is the development of the concept of “regulatory legitimacy” as a way to understand the process through which regulations are implemented yet are ineffective at curbing financial gambling.

Although online reviews have become a key source of information for consumer purchasing decisions, little is known about how the concreteness of language used in these reviews influences perceptions of deception. This study aims to address this important gap by drawing on psycholinguistic research and Language Expectancy Theory to examine how and when the concreteness of online reviews (abstract vs concrete) impacts consumers’ perceived deception.

Two scenario-based experiments were conducted to examine how the concreteness of online reviews (abstract vs concrete) influences consumers’ perceptions of deception, considering the mediating role of psychological distance to online reviews and the moderating effects of Machiavellianism (Mach) and reviewer identity disclosure.

Online reviews that include concrete language lead to lower perceived deception by reducing consumers’ psychological distance from the review. For consumers with higher levels of Mach, online reviews written in abstract (vs concrete) language result in higher perceived deception via psychological distance, while for consumers with lower Mach, online reviews written in concrete (vs abstract) language result in higher perceived deception via psychological distance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to highlight the relevance of linguistic style (i.e. concrete review vs abstract review) on consumers’ perceived deception toward online reviews in the context of e-commerce.

The framework enables managers of online retailing platforms to identify the most effective strategies to decrease consumers’ perceived deception via the appropriate utilize of linguistic styles of online reviews.

This study contributes to both theory and practice by deepening knowledge of how and when the concreteness of online reviews (abstract vs concrete) affects consumers’ perceived deception and by helping managers of online retailing platforms make the most effective\ strategies for reducing consumers’ perceived deception toward online reviews during online shopping.

The assembly quality of complex products is pivotal to their lifecycle performance. Assembly precision analysis (APA) is an effective method used to check the feasibility and quality of assembly. However, there is still a need for a systematic approach to be developed for APA of kinematic mechanisms. To achieve more accurate analysis of kinematic assembly, this paper aims to propose a precision analysis method based on equivalence of the deviation source.

A unified deviation vector representation model is adopted by considering dimension deviation, geometric deviation, joint clearance and assembly deformation. Then, vector loops and vector equations are constructed, according to joint type and deviation propagation path. A combined method, using deviation accumulation and sensitivity modeling, is applied to solve the kinematic APA of complex products.

When using the presented method, geometric form deviation, joint clearance and assembly deformation are considered selectively during tolerance modeling. In particular, the proposed virtual link model and its orientation angle are developed to determine joint deviation. Finally, vector loops and vector equations are modeled to express deviation accumulation.

The proposed method provides a new means for the APA of complex products, considering joint clearance and assembly deformation while improving the accuracy of APA, as much as possible.

In China, healthcare services have historically been expensive and difficult to access, with resources being unfairly distributed, often being centralized in large hospitals in major cities. In rural regions, hospitals often suffer from limited supplies, including human capital and equipment. E-health technologies have received significant attention from governments and citizens, with online healthcare communities (OHCs) providing easier communication between patients and doctors. Although doctors play a pivotal role in the success of OHCs, they are often unsure how to attract patients, with limited research focusing on this. The purpose of this paper is to explore how doctors can take initiatives in OHCs, from the joint perspectives of individual effort (i.e. intrapersonal factor) and identity in medical teams (MTs) (i.e. interpersonal factor), based on attribution theory.

Hierarchical linear regression was conducted on data from 3,170 doctors participating in 865 online MTs, to examine the effects of individual effort and identity in MTs on individual performance. Individual effort included central effort (log-in frequency to OHC) and peripheral effort (articles published on doctors' homepages). Identity in MTs was represented as the identity of team leader and multiple team membership (MTM).

This study found that the main variables – central and peripheral effort, and leader and MTM identity – all had significant and positive impacts on the service quantity (SQ) of both written and telephone consultations. Although positive effects could be experienced in most conditions that were congruent with the logic of identity theory, the interaction terms demonstrated complex influences. Specifically, leader identity did not moderate the effect of article effort in written consultation, while MTM identity could not moderate the relationship between frequency effort and SQ in telephone-consultation services. Further, the leader identity negatively moderated the relationship between article effort and SQ in telephone consultations. Thus, for doctors with the leader identity, the impact of article effort on SQ was weaker. In summary, both aspects were proved to play important roles in individual SQ.

This study provides empirical findings through focusing on the SQ of both written and telephone consultations in OHCs, thereby enabling healthcare providers to take initiatives and ultimately improve the efficiency and provision of delivered healthcare services. It is worth mentioning that doctors possessing the identity of team leader should be cautious that the more articles published by them may not lead to envisaged telephone-consultation performance, according to the negative moderating effect of leader identity on the relationship between article effort and SQ during telephone consultations.

This study contributes to the OHC literature by investigating how doctors' efforts and identity in OHCs affect individual performance, based on attribution theory and identity theory. Further, we provide healthcare practitioners with an improved understanding of these dimensions to improve autonomy regarding service provision in OHCs.

Although governments have used social media platforms to interact with the public in an attempt to minimize anxiety and provide a forum for public discussion during the pandemic, governments require sufficient crisis communication skills to engage citizens in taking appropriate action effectively. This study aims to examine how the National Health Commission of China (NHCC) has used TikTok, the leading short video–based platform, to facilitate public engagement during COVID-19.

Building upon dual process theories, this study integrates the activation of information exposure, prosocial interaction theory and social sharing of emotion theory to explore how public engagement is related to message sensation value (MSV), media character, content theme and emotional valence. A total of 354 TikTok videos posted by NHCC were collected during the pandemic to explore the determinants of public engagement in crises.

The findings demonstrate that MSV negatively predicts public engagement with government TikTok, but that instructional information increases engagement. The presence of celebrities and health-care professionals negatively affects public engagement with government TikTok accounts. In addition, emotional valence serves a moderating role between MSV, media characters and public engagement.

Government agencies must be fully aware of the different combinations of MSV and emotion use in the video title when releasing crisis-related videos. Government agencies can also leverage media characters – health professionals in particular – to enhance public engagement. Government agencies are encouraged to solicit public demand for the specific content of instructing information through data mining techniques.