Search Results (10)

The goal of the study is to inquire into how longer tenure on the board may undermine directors’ independence and distort the efficiency of executive compensation mechanisms. Our empirical findings based on an international panel database and static panel regression modeling demonstrate that director tenure is positively associated with executive compensation with the effect being amplified by the degree of managerial capture of the board. Longer director tenure is also shown to reduce the sensitivity of executive compensation to negative earnings surprises while simultaneously contributing to the lower overall probability of management departures even in the event of a negative earnings surprise. Board independence is evidenced to play no significant role in intermediating the studied relationships. Overall, while postulating the existence of an independence–tenure tradeoff, the paper posits a need for revision of the currently applicable formal criteria of board independence in order for them to accommodate the possible impact of director tenure on the quality of corporate oversight. The present study extends upon the existing literature by expanding the geographical scale of the sample and focusing on indirect symptoms of reduced supervisory effectiveness of the boards. Full article

ESG washing, as an organizational decoupling behavior, refers to enterprises strategically disclosing environmental information to obscure their actual ESG performance, which not only elevates audit risks but also increases uncertainty in audit pricing. Based on a sample of Chinese listed companies from 2014 to 2023, this study introduces excess executive compensation and executive myopia as mediators to investigate the mechanisms through which ESG washing influences abnormal audit fees via chain mediating effects. Additionally, market structure is considered a moderating variable to examine its moderating role within the model. The empirical results demonstrate that ESG washing in listed companies significantly increases abnormal audit fees. Both excess executive compensation and executive myopia exert positive individual mediating effects as well as a chain mediating effect. Furthermore, the moderating effect of market structure attenuates the mediating role of excess executive compensation but amplifies that of executive myopia. This research proposes an integrated framework combining organizational decoupling theory and transaction cost theory, thereby clarifying the underlying pathways through which ESG washing influences abnormal audit fees. The study offers policy implications for government authorities to strengthen ESG regulations, enhance supervisory mechanisms, and promote a more sustainable business environment. In addition, it provides guidance for enterprises in mitigating ESG washing, optimizing audit-related costs, and enhancing their capacity to address ESG challenges, improve corporate governance, and strengthen competitiveness. Full article

In recent years, a key problem in wireless sensor networks has been how to effectively deploy the minimum number of wireless charging pads while establishing at least one feasible charging path from the base station. This ensures that the unmanned aerial vehicle can reach and recharge all sensor nodes from the BS. Previous works have often employed greedy algorithms to solve the optimal deployment problem, treating coverage and connectivity as interdependent properties. This has led to excessive constraints on the placement of wireless charging pads, as each newly added charging pad has to satisfy both properties at the same time. Additionally, previous works have overlooked the critical issue of avoiding the occurrence of isolated sensor nodes in uncovered fragmented regions, in deployment. Failing to address this issue requires additional deployment costs to compensate for uncovered nodes. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we propose a sink-outward strategy wireless charging pad deployment algorithm, which deploys charging pads layer by layer from the innermost region outward, prioritizing coverage before connectivity. The proposed sink-outward max covering (SMC) consists of two key steps: initial pad deployment and optimization. The simulation results show that the proposed method SMC combined with the optimization step, called reducing pads by reallocating pads partially (RPRAP), achieves a reduction in pad count of 10.6–19.8% compared with the methods used in previous works, and the execution time demonstrated in previous works is several to tens of times longer than that of SMC combined with RPRAP. Moreover, the proposed redundant pad removal step, RPRAP, not only removes more redundant pads than the methods used in previous works but also drastically reduces processing time in large-scale wireless sensor networks with many redundant pads. Full article

There are ongoing debates globally regarding excessive executive compensation, the perceived weak link between pay and performance, and the widening inequality gap. The South African corporate governance code King IV’s Principle 14 addresses the need for fair, responsible, and transparent remuneration. At the same time, the newly enacted Companies Amendment Act No. 16 of 2024 in South Africa emphasizes transparency in compensation, shareholder voting, and responding to shareholder feedback. This study conducts a systematic literature review of 30 articles on the transparency of executive remuneration disclosures and their determinants by analyzing Scopus-indexed articles published between 2010 and 2023, selected through specific keyword searches. The findings suggest an increasing focus on research regarding the disclosure of executive compensation, predominantly conducted in the Global North and primarily framed through agency theory. Studies exploring the factors influencing executive remuneration and the relationship between pay and performance are prevalent, with mixed results generally indicating a positive connection. Firm size emerges as a key factor in transparency, and many studies employ binary scoring to evaluate whether executive compensation disclosure is present. This paper provides valuable insights for investors, analysts, and policymakers and adds to the current understanding of executive remuneration transparency. Full article

Ubiquitous and seamless indoor-outdoor (I/O) localization is the primary objective for gaining more user satisfaction and sustaining the prosperity of the location-based services (LBS) market. Regular users, on the other hand, may be unaware of the impact of activating multiple localization sources on localization performance and energy consumption, or may lack experience deciding when to enable or disable localization sources in different environments. Consequently, an automatic handover mechanism that can handle these decisions on a user’s behalf can appreciably improve user satisfaction. This study introduces an enhanced I/O environmental awareness service that provides an automated handover mechanism for seamless navigation based on multi-sensory navigation integration schemes. Moreover, the proposed service utilizes low-power consumption sensor (LPCS) indicators to execute continuous detection tasks and invoke GNSS in confusion scenarios, and transition intervals to make the most firm decision on the credibility of the LPCS-triggered transition and compensate for indicator thresholds. In this manner, GNSS are used for short intervals that help reduce detection latency and power consumption. Consequently, the proposed service guarantees accurate and reliable I/O detection while preserving low power consumption. Leveraging the proposed service as an automated handover helped realize seamless indoor-outdoor localization with less switching latency, using an integrated solution based on extended Kalman filter. Furthermore, the proposed energy-efficient service was utilized to confine crowdsourced data collection to the required areas (indoors and semi-indoors) and prevent excess data collection outdoors, thereby reducing power drainage. Accordingly, the negative impact of data collection on the user’s device can be mitigated, participation can be encouraged, and crowdsourcing systems can be widely adopted. Full article

A mixed-criticality system refers to an integrated embedded system in which tasks with different criticality levels run on a shared computing platform. In the design and development of mixed-criticality systems, how to schedule tasks to ensure that high-criticality tasks are executed in time and low-criticality tasks are served as much as possible is a major problem to be studied. Existing studies tend to consider pessimistic processing strategies to ensure the schedulability of functional tasks with high-criticality requirements. However, excessive pessimistic processing can lead to waste of system resources, thereby reducing the performance of functional tasks with low-criticality requirements. In this paper, we propose an adaptive-service-level adjustment strategy for low-criticality tasks, which solves the problem of waste of resources caused by invalid compensation in the low-criticality task compensation method of flexible mixed-criticality systems. In view of the problem that the existing methods mostly use static budget allocation and static independent mode switching without considering the actual operation of the task, this paper also proposes a flexible and dynamic mixed-criticality system scheduling scheme and designs a system execution framework, scheduling algorithm, and dynamic allocation strategy of maximum execution budget, in order to reduce unnecessary redundant resource expenditures and system switching costs and to improve the performance of low-criticality tasks. Experiments show that the proposed methods are effective compared to the state-of-the-art. Full article

In this paper, a method for sizing the reactive power compensation in a non-interconnected island power system is presented and applied to determine the necessary inductive reactive power compensation for the autonomous power system of Rhodes Island, Greece. The Rhodes power system is often confronted with an excess of reactive power, as a result—inter alia—of underground high-voltage (HV) cable lines and distributed generation penetration. Reactive power compensation is typically a local issue in power systems, usually aiming at maintaining an acceptable voltage profile on specific transmission segments, e.g., long underground or submarine cables. In autonomous systems, however, where network lengths are relatively short, reactive power compensation is meant to address the overall reactive power equilibrium of the system. The proposed method follows a three-step approach. First, power flow analysis is conducted to determine the size of the maximum compensation that may be necessary, i.e., the compensation size that practically allows unit commitment to be conducted without being constrained by reactive power considerations. Then, a unit commitment and economic dispatch model is executed over the course of a year to determine the optimal compensation size, using the output of the power flow analysis to formulate reactive power balance constraints. Finally, the results of the economic optimization are assessed in terms of dynamic security to verify the feasibility of the optimal solution. Full article

The assembly process is sometimes blocked due to excessive dimension deviations during large-scale assembly. It is inefficient to improve the assembly quality by trial assembly, inspection, and accuracy compensation in the case of excessive deviations. Therefore, assemblability prediction by analyzing the measurement data, assembly accuracy requirements, and the pose of parts is an effective way to discover the assembly deviations in advance for measurement-assisted assembly. In this paper, a coordination space model is constructed based on a small displacement torsor and assembly accuracy requirements. An assemblability analysis method is proposed to check whether the assembly can be executed directly. Aiming at the incoordination problem, an assemblability optimization method based on the union coordination space is proposed. Finally, taking the space manipulator assembly as an example, the result shows that the proposed method can improve assemblability with a better assembly quality and less workload compared to the least-squares method. Full article

This paper empirically studies the connection between earnings management and corporate social performance, conditional on the existence of CSR-contingent executive compensation contracts, an emerging practice to link executive compensation to corporate social performance. We find that executives are more likely to manipulate earnings to achieve their personal compensation goals when CSR rating is low, as well as their CSR-contingent compensation. Because of public pressure on their excessive total compensation, corporate executives see no need to manipulate earnings to increase compensation when their CSR-contingent compensation is already high. Our results suggest that earnings management and CSR-contingent compensation are substitute tools to serve the interests of executives, which is an agency problem that was never previously studied. Additionally, we explore how managerial characteristics affect earnings management, driven by the incentive effects of CSR-linked compensation. Full article

Since the global financial crisis, management incentive compensation, which is sensitive to financial firms’ short-term performance, has been noted to threaten financial systems’ sustainability by incentivizing managers to pursue excessive risks. Subsequently, international standards have been established regarding compensation for financial institutions’ senior executives and employees. However, this compensation may impact not only banks’ risk-taking behaviors, but also their earnings management, as the latter affects financial performance while compensation is decided as a reflection of such performance. Therefore, this study analyses executive compensation’s impact on banks’ earnings management using compensation data on South Korean banks. The analysis revealed higher earnings management using a loan loss provision with more variable compensation. On the one hand, if the proportion of equity-linked compensation to incentive compensation increased, then earnings management increased. On the other hand, more deferred compensation led to increased earnings smoothing. This study evaluates regulatory impacts across multiple dimensions by analyzing the effects of incentive compensation standards—intended to increase financial systems’ sustainability—on individual financial institutions and further contributes to studies on managerial decision making. Full article