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With the popularity of e-commerce, shilling attack is becoming more rampant in online shopping websites. Shilling attackers publish mendacious ratings as well as reviews for promoting or suppressing target products. The purpose of this paper is to investigate group shilling, a new typed shilling attack, behavior in a real e-commerce platform (e.g. Amazon.cn).

Several behavioral features are proposed for modeling the shilling group, and thus an unsupervised ranking method based on principal component analysis (PCA) is presented for identifying shilling groups from real users on Amazon.cn.

As indicated by the behavior analysis, the proposed method has successfully identified a number of shilling groups on Amazon. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the proposed features and accuracy of the proposed unsupervised method are carefully validated.

This paper presents a set of solutions for discovering shilling groups when the ground truth labels are hard to be obtained in real environment, including candidate groups generation, behavioral features definition and unsupervised detection.

In the North Hiding of Yorkshire a number of samples of lardine were examined during the second quarter. Four of these samples contained water to the extent of 24, 25, and 26 per cent. respectively. One case was taken into court, but the magistrates dismissed the information. They were of opinion that there being no statutory standard for lardine they could not fix the percentage of water that was permissible. An appeal was made to the High Court, and eventually the case was referred back to the magistrates to determine whether or not there was adulteration.

Whoosh, is that all there is? On the eve of becoming a partner at a well-known consulting firm (“the stuff MBA dreams are made of”), a senior executive starts to question what he is doing with his life. Walt Shill had graduated eight years earlier from the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia and had worked his way up at McKinsey Consulting to become the first American partner in the Japanese office. Shill and his family move back to the United States, where he starts to question his goals. For the first time, it seems that Shill has no target to aim for. Having had reached his goals, Shill sets out on an adventure to seek his own meaning of life. He gets into good-enough shape to take a cross-country bicycle ride, which he completes. This undisguised case tells Shill's story and what he learned along the way. It ends with Shill's promise to himself to be less judgmental and to start walking through life with eyes wide open. A teaching note is available to registered faculty.

Traditional auction theory assumes that bidders possess values defined solely on the auctioned object. There may, however, be cases in which bidders possess preferences over the revenue achieved by the auctioneer. We present here a comprehensive framework of price-preference valuations, unifying several phenomena ranging from preference for charitable giving to shill bidding. We compare expected efficiency and revenue of first- and second-price auctions for some specific cases of key interest. We also incorporate heterogeneous bidder preferences and examine the effects of mis-specified beliefs and show that both are crucial for understanding these situations.

Drawing on Dewey’s accounts of learning the Alexander Technique (AT), this chapter explores why he found the process so powerful. As AT teachers, we explain how the technique enables practitioners to become aware of fixed, unconscious habits and to bring them under conscious control. With a new student, work begins with physical habits. However, because physical, cognitive, emotional and social functionings are interdependent, AT lessons typically enable flexibility in each of these spheres. Dewey’s writings show his strong theoretical commitment to the idea of learning as practical and experiential. His AT lessons were truly revelatory in providing him with both direct, embodied experience of the power of habit to drive human behaviour and a practical means of becoming aware of, and resisting, his own habits of thought and action.

Perceptions are shaped by habit in such a way that the senses can be unreliable in working out how to respond in a given situation. Dewey’s practice of the AT revealed to him the dissonance between his habitual self in activity and his conscious view of himself. Dewey was challenged by his AT lessons, which required an open, enquiring attitude and sense of humility. In the AT, Dewey found a means of pursuing an active, critical, self-directed process of discovery and adaptation akin to childhood learning. AT begins with the self, our ‘tool of tools’. Through fundamentally modifying the self, the AT supports the openness and flexible response to the physical and social world that characterize productive experiential learning.

Before leaving the subject of the relations of the Public Analyst to the Medical Officer of Health it is desirable to refer to a matter which sometimes gives rise to difficulties and to disagreements between the two officers. Apparently by a legal oversight the duty of looking after the water supply of a district is allotted to the Medical Officer—but there is nothing to show in what way and to what extent he is to be personally occupied in carrying out this task. It also happens that water is specifically excluded from the scope of the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts, and, in view of these circumstances, some Medical Officers have adopted the idea that their duties are not to be limited to administrative work in this connection, but that it is also incumbent on them to make the necessary analyses; while in other, and perhaps more frequent instances the local autherities, particularly in country districts, deliberately place that burden on the shoulders of the Medical Officer when arranging the conditions of his appointment.

Numerous studies suggest that announcements of capital offerings cause abnormal price reaction in stock markets. However, despite extensive research, relevant studies on the property sector are still relatively scarce, especially in the case of Hong Kong. The determinants of the post‐offering price effects, which vary across industries and regions, are yet to be identified. This paper aims to examine the abnormal stock return phenomenon of Hong Kong property developers and construction companies surrounding the announcement and offer dates of capital issuances.

It employs the event‐study methodology and regression analysis to verify such effects.

The major findings are: on equity offering announcements, there is a significant negative price reaction; the pre‐offering debt/equity ratio of a firm is significantly associated with the level of abnormal price reactions; and on debt offerings there is, to the contrary, a modest increase in stock prices.

This study has identified a set of determinants of the post‐offering stock price effects.

It can be concluded that there is evidence of abnormal price effects over the announcement and offer dates of capital issuances with unique characteristics of the property and construction sectors in Hong Kong.

The case centers on Shilling & Smith's acquisition of Xteria Inc. and the resulting need to quickly scale the company's IT infrastructure to accommodate the acquisition. The case is based on a real leasing problem faced by a major retail firm in the Chicago area when it purchased a small credit card processing firm and scaled the operations to handle the retail firm's credit card transactions. The CIO of Shilling & Smith needs to determine which lease option is the best means of providing the technical infrastructure needed to support the firm after the acquisition of Xteria. Several issues will drive this decision, including the value and useful life of the equipment, as well as the strategic context of the firm. This case examines how to evaluate different lease options when acquiring data center information technology infrastructure. Specifically, the case addresses software vs. hardware leasing, different lease terms, and choosing between different lease structures depending on the strategy and needs of a company. This case enables students to understand the different types of technology leases and in which situations these leases would be employed.

The Shilling & Smith case examines how to evaluate different lease options when acquiring data center information technology infrastructure. Specifically, students learn software vs. hardware leasing, different lease terms, and how to choose between different lease structures depending on the strategy and needs of the company. A secondary objective of the case is to teach students the important components and relative costs of information technology infrastructure.

Whether you market autos, computers or lawn mowers, superior parts management is likely to represent a significant opportunity to not only improve customer satisfaction, but also boost profitability and create an advantage over competitors.