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- Testing the underlying structure of unfounded beliefs about COVID-19 around the worldPublication . Brzóska, Paweł; Żemojtel-Piotrowska, Magdalena; Piotrowski, Jarosław; Nowak, Bartłomiej; Jonason, Peter K.; Sedikides, Constantine; Adamovic, Mladen; Atitsogbe, Kokou A.; Ahmed, Oli; Azam, Uzma; Bălțătescu, Sergiu; Bochaver, Konstantin; Bolatov, Aidos; Bonato, Mario; Counted, Victor; Chaleeraktrakoon, Trawin; Ramos-Diaz, Jano; Dragova-Koleva, Sonya; Eldesoki, Walaa Labib M.; Esteves, Carla Sofia; Gouveia, Valdiney V.; Perez de Leon, Pablo; Iliško, Dzintra; Datu, Jesus Alfonso D.; Jia, Fanli; Jovanović, Veljko; Jukić, Tomislav; Khachatryan, Narine; Kovacs, Monika; Lifshin, Uri; Larzabal Fernandez, Aitor; Liik, Kadi; Malik, Sadia; Moon, Chanki; Muehlbacher, Stephan; Najafi, Reza; Oruç, Emre; Park, Joonha; Šolcová, Iva Poláčková; Ardi, Rahkman; Ridic, Ognjen; Ridic, Goran; Said, Yadgar Ismail; Starc, Andrej; Stefenel, Delia; Trà, Kiều Thị Thanh; Tiliouine, Habib; Tomšik, Robert; Torres-Marin, Jorge; Umeh, Charles S.; Wills-Herrera, Eduardo; Wlodarczyk, Anna; Vally, Zahir; Yahiiaiev, IlliaUnfounded—conspiracy and health—beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal structure (average CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.04), but a high correlation between the two factors (average latent factor correlation = 0.57). This model was replicable across 50 countries (total N = 13,579), as evidenced by metric invariance between countries (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMS = 0.07) as well as scalar invariance across genders (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03) and educational levels (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03). Also, lower levels of education, more fear of COVID-19, and more cynicism were weakly associated with stronger conspiracy and health beliefs. The study contributes to knowledge about the structure of unfounded beliefs, and reveals the potential relevance of affective (i.e., fear of COVID-19) and cognitive (i.e., cynicism) factors along with demographics, in endorsing such beliefs. In summary, we obtained cross-cultural evidence for the distinctiveness of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs about COVID-19 in terms of their structure and correlates.
- Evaluation of innovative insect-based products by Portuguese consumers using a repeated exposure approach under a controlled settingPublication . Barbosa, B.; Rocha, C.; Ribeiro, J. C.; Lima, R. C.; Costa, A. I. A.; Monteiro, M. J. P.; Maya, C.; Roos, N.; Cunha, L. M.In an era of considerable environmental pressures, edible insects have demonstrated their ability to integrate innovative and sustainable food production methods. Nonetheless, there are clear obstacles to their acceptance, particularly in Western countries. With a view to a longitudinal analysis of the consumption moment, the study's main goal was to assess how the repeated exposure approach can impact consumer's liking and sensory perception of different insect-based products. At the same time, these products were compared with commercially available plant-based analogue products, as these types of products can be targeted to the same market. For each group of products, the impact of repeated exposure on participants exposed to the products in a household context was compared with a group of participants who had no intervention at home. This comparative assessment was carried out in a sensory laboratory environment. Five different insect and plant-based products were assessed on a 9-point hedonic scale with open comments to complement the analysis by two panels of 58 participants. Significant differences were found between products throughout the exposure, with most products decreasing the liking scores between exposures. However, no significant differences concerning exposure were identified between the intervention and non-intervention groups. Regarding the evaluation of the samples according to the different exposure groups, it was observed that there was no noticeable impact of exposure on the evaluation of the insect-based products evaluated by the intervention group and the plant-based products tasted by the non-intervention group. This study reinforces the impact of repeated exposure on the overall liking levels of the samples, with valuable findings on sensory perception that can be translated into insect-based product development.
- Improving formulation of innovative edible insect-based crispbread containing Tenebrio molitor or Acheta domesticus through sensory profiling and likingPublication . Rocha, C.; Ribeiro, J. C.; Barbosa, B.; Lima, R. C.; Osimani, A.; Aquilanti, L.; Cesaro, C.; Costa, A. I. A.; Roos, N.; Cunha, L. M.Abstract One of the critical factors in increasing consumer acceptance of edible insects is the development of appropriate products that lead to satisfactory sensory experiences. This way, the negative associations with entomophagy can be hampered, and developed products can be more successfully integrated into consumers' diets. This research aimed to integrate consumers into the food product development process, achieving crispbread formulations with increased acceptance and liking. Crispbread was developed with different formulations and sensory profiles, incorporating house cricket Acheta domesticus or yellow mealworm Tenebrio molitor. Two panels of 50 and 100 untrained consumers evaluated the crispbreads incorporating A. domesticus and T. molitor, respectively. The panels rated overall liking (9-point hedonic scale) and profiled the crispbreads using a Check-All-That-Apply ballot. Regardless of insect species and formulation, all the samples were accepted by consumers with hedonic scores above 5.5. Significant differences were observed between formulations for both insect species, with the chives-based crispbread having the highest liking scores and the incorporation of fennel seeds leading to the lowest liking scores. It was also possible to observe an effect of species, as crispbreads incorporating A. domesticus presented lower hedonic scores and higher association with negative attributes related to odour/flavour ('Earthy', 'Pet Food', 'Bitter) and texture ('Floury'). The results from this study highlight the importance of assessing consumers' opinions while developing insect-based food products, demonstrating that Portuguese consumers present higher liking scores of products incorporating T. molitor and chives.
- The volatility puzzle of the beta anomalyPublication . Barroso, Pedro; Detzel, Andrew; Maio, PauloThis paper shows that leading theories of the beta anomaly fail to explain the anomaly's conditional performance. Abnormal returns and Sharpe ratios of betting-against-beta (BAB) factors rise following months with below-median realized volatility, even controlling for mispricing, limits to arbitrage, lottery preferences, analyst disagreement, and sentiment. Moreover, the leverage constraints theory counterfactually predicts that market and BAB Sharpe ratios increase with volatility. We further show that institutional investors shift their demand from high- to low-beta stocks as volatility increases, and the resulting price impact is sufficient to explain the difference in abnormal BAB returns between high- and low-volatility states.
- Patterns of food preparation in children and adult diets and their associations with demographic and socio-economic characteristics, health and nutritional status, physical activity, and diet qualityPublication . Rei, Mariana Correia Castro; Correia, Daniela Macedo; Torres, Duarte Paulo Martins; Lopes, Carla Maria Moura; Costa, Ana Isabel Almeida; Rodrigues, Sara Simões PereiraThis cross-sectional study aimed to identify patterns of food preparation and examine their demographic and socio-economic drivers, along with impacts on health and nutritional status, physical activity, and diet quality. Dietary data from a national-representative sample (n = 5005, 3–84 years) of the Portuguese National Food, Nutrition, and Physical Activity Survey (IAN-AF 2015/16) were classified by preparation locations (at or away from home) and analysed via hierarchical clustering. Logistic regression models were used to examine associations between demographic and socio-economic factors and food preparation patterns and between these patterns and health and nutritional status, physical activity, and diet quality. The most common food preparation pattern (followed by 45.4% of participants) represented the highest intake of foods prepared by away-from-home establishments. Adolescents (vs. children, OR = 0.29, 95%CI = 0.17, 0.49) and older adults (vs. adults, OR = 0.37, 95%CI = 0.26, 0.53) had lower odds of following this pattern, whereas adult men (vs. women, OR = 4.20, 95% CI = 3.17, 5.57) had higher odds. Higher education, higher household income, and having children/adolescents in the household also increased the odds of eating foods prepared away from home, whereas living in rural areas or in food-insecure households decreased the odds. Noticeably, adults consuming more foods prepared away from home had lower odds of being overweight or obese (OR = 0.74, 95%CI = 0.56, 0.97), but higher odds of sedentarism (OR = 1.45, 95%CI = 1.08, 1.96) and poor diet (OR = 3.01, 95%CI = 2.08, 4.34) compared to those consuming more foods prepared at home by themselves. Dietary patterns marked by high away-from-home food preparation prevail. While these correlated with higher socio-economic status, sedentarism, and poorer diet — relatively to patterns with greater reliance on homecooked food — they were not linked to higher odds of obesity.
- (Not) by chance? An application of Assembly Theory to infer non-randomness in organizational designPublication . Ilseven, Ekin; Puranam, PhanishAssembly theory (AT) (Sharma et al., Nature 622:321-328, 2023) is a novel and ambitious perspective on the emergence of larger structures from smaller structures in the physical realm. It offers formal tools to infer the development trajectories of observed structures under some theory-driven assumptions. By mapping it onto the micro-structural perspective of organizations, we show how AT can also help us model organizational development and estimate the extent to which an observed organizational structure is (un)likely to have arisen by chance. We apply these to illustrate how we can infer the extent of non-randomness in the development history of an organization based on its current structure. We note theoretical and empirical implications for the study of organization design.
- Joint bottom-up method for probabilistic forecasting of hierarchical time seriesPublication . Bertani, Nicolò; Jensen, Shane T.; Satopää, Ville A.Many domains involve a hierarchy of time series, where the granular bottom-level series sum to upper-level series based on geography, product category, temporal granularity, or other features. Decision making in these domains requires forecasts that are accurate, probabilistic, and coherent in the sense of respecting the summing structure. In this paper, we first show that accurate and coherent probabilistic forecasts for all series in the hierarchy can be obtained by focusing on a joint model of the bottom-level series. Based on this result, we devise a Bayesian method that models the bottom-level series jointly, takes into account their contemporaneous and lagged dependence, and outputs a coherent probabilistic forecast of all series in the hierarchy. For empirical validation, we compare our method against many state-of-the-art techniques on data on Australian domestic tourism and product sales at Walmart. On each data set, our method outperforms its competition in terms of prediction accuracy. To conclude, we demonstrate how our method can support decisions in inventory management of multiple Walmart products.
- Adaptação improvisada em equipa: um modelo de adaptação em tempo realPublication . Abrantes, António Cunha Meneses; Passos, Ana Margarida; Cunha, Miguel Pina e; Costa, Patrícia LopesQuando as equipas precisam de se adaptar num contexto de escassez extrema de tempo, elas podem paralisar, podem manter o plano anterior, ou podem improvisar um novo plano. Este último fenómeno consiste na adaptação improvisada em equipa. Sendo um conceito recente, pouco se sabe sobre como as equipas se podem adaptar eficazmente em situações de carência temporal, e como podem produzir conhecimento a partir destes processos. Neste artigo conceptual, desenvolvemos um modelo teórico, baseado num fluxo temporal, o qual contribui para um melhor entendimento da adaptação improvisada. Propomos um conjunto de fatores de influência temporais, moderadores da resposta a estímulos contingenciais, e um conjunto de processos de equipa, fundamentais para a eficácia da adaptação improvisada. Propomos, ainda, que a reflexividade em equipa medeia a relação da adaptação improvisada com a aprendizagem. Ao explorar o fluxo temporal da adaptação improvisada em equipa, estendemos as literaturas de improvisação e de adaptação, aumentando a granularidade dos construtos, alargando a sua rede nomológica.
- Remote work-related barriers: exploring how grit relates to self-reported productivity during COVID-19 lockdownPublication . Farias, Ana Rita; Rebordão, Beatriz; Simão, CláudiaRemote work has become increasingly common due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this has presented workers with new difficulties and barriers that may have an effect on their performance and productivity. In this paper, we explored the barriers to remote work and how a certain personality trait—grit: passion and perseverance in achieving long-term goals—could influence how workers copied with this reality. A total of 203 participants (69.5% female) with mean age of 41.90 (SD= 12.60) years completed an online survey, during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Portugal, investigating grit, perceived stress/anxiety, perception of remote work as a barrier, and self-reported productivity during this period. The findings suggest that grit negatively predicts the number of barriers identified during the transition to remote work and consequently positively predicts worker self-reported productivity. Thus, self-reported productivity is positively related to grit, and this relationship is mediated by the number of identified barriers. Future research should extend this study using longitudinal data, exploring the impact of core variables on career progression and the role of grit in worker resilience across various sectors and work environments, including the influence of events like the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Bank competition and information productionPublication . De Marco, Filippo; Petriconi, SilvioWe show that bank competition diminishes banks' incentives to produce information about prospective borrowers. We exploit the deregulation of US interstate branching as a shock to competition and use borrowers' stock returns after loan announcements to measure bank information production. Positive loan announcement returns are reduced in states that deregulate interstate branching, especially for opaque and bank-dependent firms and smaller banks that rely on soft information. Existing (i.e., inside) banks reduce information production more than new (i.e., outside) banks after deregulation, suggesting that they do so to deter borrower poaching. Furthermore, the probability of a covenant violation increases following deregulation.