Enhancing Recommender System with Collaborative Filtering and User Experiences Filtering

Recommender systems have become an essential part in many applications and websites to address the information overload problem. For example, people read opinions about recommended products before buying them. This action is time-consuming due to the number of opinions available. It is necessary to provide recommender systems with methods that add information about the experiences of other users, along with the presentation of the recommended products. These methods should help users by filtering reviews and presenting the necessary answers to their questions about recommended products. The contribution of this work is the description of a recommender system that recommends products using a collaborative filtering method, and which adds only relevant feedback from other users about recommended products. A prototype of a hotel recommender system was implemented and validated with real users.

Intrinsic Motivation, Psychological Needs, and Competition

Competition is an apt place to experience intrinsic motivation, as competitive settings are often rich with optimal challenges and immediate, effectance-relevant feedback. Yet competition can also undermine intrinsic motivation and sustained engagement by introducing controlling pressures and negative feedback. To explain the contrasting effects of competitive settings on intrinsic motivation, this chapter presents a self-determination theory analysis. According to the theory, when elements of competitive settings are experienced as controlling or pressuring, they undermine competitors’ autonomy, decreasing intrinsic motivation. However, when these elements are perceived as both non-controlling and competence-informing, they can satisfy both autonomy and competence needs, enhancing intrinsic motivation. Unpacking these motivational crosscurrents, the authors identify the motivational implications of different elements of competition, including competitive set, pressure to win, feedback and competitive outcomes, challenge, leaders’ motivating styles, team interpersonal climate, and intrapersonal events such as ego-involvement. The authors also examine both positive and negative effects of competition on the need for relatedness. The chapter concludes by discussing how conditions that foster the need-satisfying aspects of competition not only enhance intrinsic motivation but also help prevent the emergence of competition’s darker sides, such as cheating, doping, objectifying opponents, aggression, and poor sportspersonship.

Team-baseret Læring i Anvendt Klinisk Farmakologi

I takt med et øget optag af studerende på de danske universiteter er der i stigende grad behov for at udvide paletten af undervisningsmetoder for at sikre, at undervisningen er studenter-aktiverende og med relevant feedback. For at imødegå udfordringen valgte underviserne på et ny kursus i Anvendt Klinisk Farmakologi for medicinstuderende at udbyde Team-Based Learning (TBL). Undervisningsmetoden var ved kursets start ukendt for alle undervisere. Herudover havde de fleste sparsom erfaring med at undervise faciliterende og i fællesskab (lærerteams). Derfor valgte vi at undersøge det nye tiltag ved at sammenholde TBL-undervisningen med den vanlige case-baserede undervisning. Artiklen henvender sig til undervisere, der overvejer at introducere en aktiverende undervisningsmetode, der kræver deltagelse af et lærerteam og alle med interesse for den modstand, der potentielt kan opstå ved aktiverende undervisning både blandt undervisere og studerende.

Risky Business: Assessing the Generalizability of the PCAOB's Risk-Based Inspection Reports for Annually Inspected Audit Firms

SUMMARY Existing research has found that the PCAOB inspection results of small (triennially inspected) audit firms provide incremental information about audit quality, but research has not documented a similar finding for large (annually inspected) firms. I examine the generalizability of annually inspected firms' inspection findings to audit quality by investigating the association between account-specific findings and account-specific audit quality while controlling for the PCAOB's risk-based program. First, I create a selection model to approximate the risk-based inspection process. I then use its outputs to control for selection risk while examining the association between revenue-specific deficiencies and the audit quality of revenues. I find that after controlling for selection risk, revenue-specific deficiencies are generalizable to the audit quality of revenues for clients that are more likely to be inspected. These results provide some evidence that the PCAOB's inspection program is meeting its objective of providing relevant feedback to stakeholders about audit quality. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources described in this text.