Objectives
Poor sleep quality is a common issue among older adults; it can lead to a poor quality of life and impairments in cognitive function and physical health. This study aimed to conduct a ...systematic review and meta‐analysis of the effect of listening to music on sleep quality in older adults.
Design
Systematic review and meta‐analyses.
Setting
Five databases, including Embase, Ovid Medline, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and the Index to Taiwan Periodical Literature System, were searched to identify studies assessing the efficacy of music therapy in older adults aged 60 years and older published through February 20, 2021.
Participants
Adults aged 60 years and older.
Measurements
We searched English‐ and Chinese‐language studies of randomized control trials. All studies were reviewed by two independent investigators. The primary sleep outcome was the Pittsburgh sleep quality index. The Cochrane Collaboration tool was used to assess the risk of bias, and Review Manager 5.3 software was used to conduct the meta‐analysis.
Results
Five randomized control trials were included in the meta‐analysis. Older adults who listened to music experienced significantly better sleep quality than those who did not listen to music mean difference (MD): −1.96, 95% CI −2.23 to −1.73, P = 0.003. The subgroup analysis revealed that older adults who listened to sedative music obtained a more effective improvement in sleep quality than those who listened to rhythm‐centered music (MD: −2.35, 95% CI –3.59 to −1.10, P = 0.0002). Furthermore, listening to music for longer than 4 weeks (MD: −2.61, 95% CI −4.72 to −0.50, P = 0.02) was to be effective at improving sleep quality.
Conclusions
Music therapy is safe and easy to administer and can effectively improve sleep quality among older adults, particularly those listening to more sedative music for at least a four‐week duration.
The past decade has seen significant pressure to return manufacturing to developed countries. Such movements call for import tariffs to be raised and consumers' valuation of products made from ...locally sourced components increased. These factors are believed to stimulate firms operating in a single market to source components locally. However, it is not clear that they are equally effective for multinational firms that produce and sell products in multiple markets. To enrich the understanding of this issue, we build a game‐theoretical model to analyze the sourcing decisions of a global manufacturer that maintains production sites and sells products in both domestic and foreign markets in a competitive environment. The firm can choose either to source components from suppliers located in the same markets as the manufacturing sites to gain tariff savings and a price premium from consumers' higher valuation, or to source all components from a single foreign supplier to obtain a lower sourcing cost. We find that the structure of the global supply chain plays a critical role in the firm's sourcing strategy. Consumers' higher valuation of locally manufactured goods always promotes local sourcing. Raising tariffs, however, might backfire and discourage local sourcing because of the firm's global supply chain structure and the foreign supplier's strategic response to higher tariffs. Finally, local sourcing may reduce the consumer surplus even though consumers place a higher value on locally manufactured goods. This paper sheds light on recent movements to return manufacturing to developed countries and demonstrates the importance of taking the manufacturer's global supply chain structure and vertical interaction with suppliers into account.
Rapid advances of information technology in recent years have enabled both the manufacturers and the retailers to operate their own Internet channels. In this study, we investigate the interaction ...between the capabilities of introducing the Internet channels, the pricing strategies, and the channel structure. We classify consumers into two segments: grocery shoppers attach a higher utility from purchasing through the physical channel, whereas a priori Internet shoppers prefer purchasing online. We find that when the Internet shoppers are either highly profitable or fairly unimportant, the manufacturer prefers to facilitate the channel separation either through his own Internet channel or the retailer's. In the intermediate region, however, the manufacturer encroaches the grocery shoppers and steals the demand from the retailer's physical channel. With horizontal competition between retailers, a priori symmetric retailers may adopt different channel strategies as a stable market equilibrium. The manufacturer may willingly give up his Internet channel and leverage on the retailer competition. When the manufacturer sells through an online e‐tailer, Internet shoppers may be induced to purchase through the physical channel. This reverse encroachment strategy emerges because selling through the e‐tailer leads to a more severe double marginalization problem.
Forecasting the stock market prices is complicated and challenging since the price movement is affected by many factors such as releasing market news about earnings and profits, international and ...domestic economic situation, political events, monetary policy, major abrupt affairs, etc. In this work, a novel framework: deep predictor for price movement (DPP) using candlestick charts in the stock historical data is proposed. This framework comprises three steps: 1. decomposing a given candlestick chart into sub-charts; 2. using CNN-autoencoder to acquire the best representation of sub-charts; 3. applying RNN to predict the price movements from a collection of sub-chart representations. An extensive study is operated to assess the performance of the DPP based models using the trading data of Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index and a stock market index, Nikkei 225, for the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Three baseline models based on IEM, Prophet, and LSTM approaches are compared with the DPP based models.
In developing countries, farmers lack information for making informed production, manufacturing/selling decisions to improve their earnings. To alleviate poverty, various non‐governmental ...organizations (NGOs) and for‐profit companies have developed different ways to distribute information about market price, crop advisory and farming technique to farmers. We investigate a fundamental question: will information create economic value for farmers? We construct a stylized model in which farmers face an uncertain market price (demand) and must make production decisions before the market price is realized. Each farmer has an imprecise private signal and an imprecise public signal to estimate the actual market price. By examining the equilibrium outcomes associated with a Cournot competition game, we show that private signals do create value by improving farmers' welfare. However, this value deteriorates as the public signal becomes available (or more precise). In contrast, in the presence of private signals, the public signal does not always create value for the farmers. Nevertheless, both private and public signals will reduce price variation. We also consider two separate extensions that involve non‐identical private signal precisions and farmers' risk‐aversion, and we find that the same results continue to hold. More importantly, we find that the public signal can reduce welfare inequality when farmers have non‐identical private signal precisions. Also, risk‐aversion can dampen the value created by private or public information.
While the previous literature on green technology adoption has not fully considered information sharing, we consider the impact of demand information sharing on the adoption of green technologies by ...risk‐averse farmers in a vertical agricultural supply chain. We find that government subsidies and information sharing do not always promote farmers' adoption of green technologies. The accuracy of the information plays a vital role in promoting farmers' adoption of green technologies; however, the increased green technology adoption induced by more accurate information may be detrimental to farmer welfare in the presence of production diseconomies. Information sharing can reduce the amount of government subsidies for promoting green technology adoption, thereby suggesting the substitutable role of information and monetary instruments. Nonetheless, information‐sharing may lead to lower water savings and thus should be adopted with caution. Risk aversion has a nontrivial impact on agricultural technology adoption: farmers are more likely to adopt traditional agricultural technologies when their risk aversion is either very low or very high. Finally, we validate our decision model with U.S. Department of Agriculture cotton production data and propose management insights to help farmers make appropriate adoption decisions under information asymmetry and risk‐averse attitudes.
We examine the impact of consumer search from the perspective of revenue‐maximizing optimal auction design. In this two‐sided market, advertisers are endowed with privately known qualities, and ...consumers incur heterogeneous search costs when clicking on advertisements displayed by the search engine. Our general approach eliminates ad hoc restrictions and therefore allows us to uncover the salient economic trade‐offs. We adopt the optimal mechanism design approach to examine this two‐sided private information problem. The optimal mechanism design approach gives rise to the truly revenue‐maximizing scheme, and yields managerial implications that are substantially different from the literature. We show that from the revenue maximization perspective, the search engine necessarily displays the advertisers in the descending order of their qualities. The search engine shall insert unnecessary hassles to induce the revenue‐maximizing search behaviors. Thus, each consumer stops searching pre‐maturely compared to the socially optimal search behavior. In addition, the search engine shall implement probabilistic forced termination upon consumers’ clicking on advertisements, and this probability is higher for advertisers with poorer qualities. When each advertiser has a two‐dimensional type on consumer learning and matching, even if consumers’ search costs become negligible, the allocative inefficiency does not vanish. Moreover, no strategic obfuscation is imposed. When allowing for non‐independent qualities, we show that product variety does not constitute a rationale for advertisers’ favoritism.
This study investigates the implication of government information provision on a farming cooperative's quality certification strategy in an agricultural supply chain. A farming cooperative has some ...private quality information of its product and can convey it via quality certification in the planting stage. A product distributor makes the order decision based on the farming cooperative's quality certification and can observe the exact product quality information only after the product is reaped. During this process, a local government provides free but imperfect demand forecasting to help the farming cooperative make more efficient pricing and quality certification decisions. We show that the impact of quality certification on the farming cooperative's profit hinges on three factors: the quality standard, the cost of certification, and the precision rate of government information, and the profit exhibits non‐monotonic relationship with any of these factors. The farming cooperative could become worse off with the government's free information provision, and a higher information precision rate could result in a down‐side jump for the farming cooperative's profit. In comparison to government information channel, the farming cooperative may choose to costly acquire the demand information by itself and controls the information precision rate. Our main results hold when the distributor can determine the retail price and discuss the possible signaling role of wholesale price under our game framework.
Abstract
Background
Owing to the heterogeneity of microbiota among individuals and populations, only
Fusobacterium nucleatum
and
Bacteroides fragilis
have been reported to be enriched in colorectal ...cancer (CRC) in multiple studies. Thus, the discovery of additional bacteria contributing to CRC development in various populations can be expected. We aimed to identify bacteria associated with the progression of colorectal adenoma to carcinoma and determine the contribution of these bacteria to malignant transformation in patients of Han Chinese origin.
Methods
Microbiota composition was determined through 16S rRNA V3–V4 amplicon sequencing of autologous adenocarcinomas, adenomatous polyps, and non-neoplastic colon tissue samples (referred to as “tri-part samples”) in patients with CRC. Enriched taxa in adenocarcinoma tissues were identified through pairwise comparison. The abundance of candidate bacteria was quantified through genomic quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) in tissue samples from 116 patients. Associations of candidate bacteria with clinicopathological features and genomic and genetic alterations were evaluated through odds ratio tests. Additionally, the effects of candidate bacteria on CRC cell proliferation, migration, and invasion were evaluated through the co-culture of CRC cells with bacterial cells or with conditioned media from bacteria.
Results
Prevotella intermedia
was overrepresented in adenocarcinomas compared with paired adenomatous polyps. Furthermore, co-abundance of
P. intermedia
and
F. nucleatum
was observed in tumor tissues. More notably, the coexistence of these two bacteria in adenocarcinomas was associated with lymph node involvement and distant metastasis. These two bacteria also exerted additive effects on the enhancement of the migration and invasion abilities of CRC cells. Finally, conditioned media from
P. intermedia
promoted the migration and invasion of CRC cells.
Conclusion
This report is the first to demonstrate that
P. intermedia
is enriched in colorectal adenocarcinoma tissues and enhances the migration and invasion abilities of CRC cells. Moreover,
P. intermedia
and
F. nucleatum
exert additive effects on the malignant transformation of colorectal adenomas into carcinomas. These findings can be used to identify patients at a high risk of malignant transformation of colorectal adenomas or metastasis of CRC, and they can accordingly be provided optimal clinical management.
We study the optimal selling scheme when a seller sells a product/service with a positive consumption externality, and customers are uncertain about the product's/service's value. Because early ...adopters learn this value, we consider the customers' intrinsic signaling incentives and positive feedback effects. Allowing the seller to choose the sequence of customers' decisions (as an endogenous hierarchy) implies that signaling takes place in multiple rounds. To tackle this hierarchical signaling problem, we develop a novel dynamic‐programming approach that yields analytical expressions of the equilibrium outcomes. The profit‐maximizing structure turns out to be a chain in which the seller sells to the customers one by one. The sequential selling scheme is not only profitable for the seller but also beneficial to the society. The profit‐maximizing pricing exhibits a cream‐skimming property–decreasing prices along the sequence. The lack of seller's commitment is detrimental to the social welfare; nonetheless, the sequential selling still boosts up the seller's profit. When customers are allowed to freely disclose their quantity decisions to others, they willingly comply with the seller's plan of information transmissions. Despite the inherent value uncertainty, the optimal usage of information transmissions requires deliberate restricted access to information among customers. Our result also suggests some congruence between the profit and welfare maximization.
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