Search Results (81)

Animal hoarding is a complex and multifactorial phenomenon that poses serious risks to animal welfare, public health, and environmental balance. Despite increasing attention, current interventions often remain fragmented and lack integration across medical, psychological, and social domains. Based on a critical review of existing tools and field experience in the Italian context, this study proposes a structured operational protocol to support multidisciplinary teams in the assessment and management of animal hoarding cases. The protocol integrates three complementary tools: a preliminary observational form, a clinical-relational interview, and a veterinary health form. Designed to be modular, replicable, and shareable among professionals from diverse backgrounds, the protocol aims to promote a One Welfare approach, recognizing the systemic interconnection between animal suffering, human psychological distress, and environmental degradation. While further experimental validation is required, this conceptual model provides a concrete operational basis for structured interventions and consistent data collection in support of research and public health. Full article

Environmental changes may affect animal hoarding behavior through changes to plant diversity. Food hoarding behavior in small mammals can affect the seed dispersal process and thus the regeneration of the plant population. However, little is known about how small mammals select seeds of different sizes under different forest types. Here, we tracked the fates of 3360 seeds in the field. We used a generalized linear mixed model to analyze the effects of small mammals on three fates (predation in situ, predation after dispersal, hoarding after dispersal) and two dispersal distances (predation distance after dispersal and hoarding distance after dispersal) of different seeds by size and forest type. The results showed that small mammals consume smaller seeds in situ and cache larger seeds after dispersal. The predation distance after dispersal and hoarding distance after dispersal of the large seeds were significantly higher than those of small seeds. Forest types with dense vegetation conditions exhibited lower hoarding rates after dispersal, while those with poor vegetation conditions had increased predation and hoarding distances after dispersal. Our results suggest that larger seeds are dispersed to further distances, potentially enhancing plant population regeneration. However, seeds are more often scatter-hoarded and dispersed over longer distances in forests with poor vegetation conditions, which may also benefit plant population regeneration. These results provide insights into how seed size and forest type influence seed predation and dispersal by small mammals. Full article

Digital hoarding (DH) is an emerging behavior with potential implications for psychological well-being and daily functioning. While traditionally associated with physical hoarding disorder, DH presents unique challenges in digital environments, particularly among university students increasingly immersed in technology. This study examines the relationship between DH and academic performance, proposing a theoretical model in which academic engagement and academic burnout act as mediating mechanisms. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources Theory, we provide evidence that DH contributes to a health impairment process that negatively affects student outcomes. Our findings reveal DH as a novel predictor of academic burnout, highlighting its detrimental impact on academic performance. These results carry significant theoretical and practical implications, offering new insights into the role of technology-related anxiety disorders in educational settings. From a practical perspective, our study underscores the need for higher education institutions to implement targeted interventions focused on emotional regulation and learning strategies to mitigate the negative effects of DH. Despite limitations related to sample specificity and cross-sectional data, this research opens avenues for future longitudinal studies and interventions aimed at addressing DH in both academic and professional contexts. By linking digital behaviors to mental health and performance, this work aligns with public health interests in understanding technology’s impact on youth well-being. Full article

Overconfidence is a well-established behavioral bias that involves the overestimation of one’s own capabilities. We introduce a model in which managers and agents exert effort in a joint production, after the manager decides on the allocation of the tasks. A rational manager tends to reduce their own effort by delegating the critical task to the agent more often than in an efficient task allocation. In contrast, an overconfident manager engages in responsibility hoarding, i.e., is likely to delegate a critical task less often to the agent than a rational manager. In fact, a manager with a sufficiently high ability and a moderate degree of overconfidence increases the total welfare by refusing to delegate critical tasks and by exerting more effort than a rational manager. Finally, we derive the conditions under which the responsibility hoarding can persist in an organization, showing that the bias survives as long as the overconfident manager can rationalize the observed output by underestimating the ability of the agent. Full article

Three rodent species with similar characteristics coexist in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula (Wood mouse Apodemus sylvaticus, Algerian mouse Mus spretus and Common vole Microtus arvalis). This study examines if habitat segregation exists between the species, as a means of preventing the intense competition that may exclude any of these species. One of the three species recently arrived in the area. The other two have been consuming resources for a long time. Our aim is to check whether adaptations have been acquired during this time. To do this, we placed the three rodent species in semi-wild enclosures consisting of three different habitats and fed them acorns from the two most abundant oak species of the area for one week. We estimated the number of acorns and the mass per acorn that each species consumed in each habitat. It was found that each species prefers different habitats. The two species that were first installed in the area participated in acorn dissemination through transport and storage. They also conserved the embryos of the acorns consumed. The newly arrived species did not transport acorns and destroys them during consumption, behaving as a true predator species. The three species segregate their habitats to avoid competition. The two species that have been in the area for a longer time exhibit a relationship with the oaks that is akin to mutualism. Full article

The objective of the study is to demonstrate how cognitive chief executive officers (CEOs) influence corporate social and environmental performance under the moderating impact of innovation, supervisors and cash holdings. Significantly, we have formulated cognitive CEOs using data envelope analysis while considering the specific attributes of the incumbent CEO (by considering the age, tenure, goodwill, education and tacit knowledge of CEOs). The research approach aims to elucidate that cognitive CEOs strongly invigorate social and environmental performance. However, the moderating role of corporate innovation weakens this connection, whereas the moderating role of supervisors invigorates this relationship. In contrast, cash hoarding deters social and environmental performance through its moderating effectiveness. Conclusively, theoretical contribution illuminates the stakeholder theory frame of reference while emphasizing the identification of corporate social and environmental performance. Specifically, the role of cognitive CEOs has been signified as a promoter of such strategies, which indicate their orientation toward social responsibility. Empirical underpinnings illustrate the impact of corporate innovation, supervisors and cash holdings, which asymmetrically influence social and environmental performance. The recommendations of the research results refer to the characterization of the optimal attributes of cognitive CEOs that are essential to enhance social and environmental performance. Full article

The core characteristic of the bullwhip effect is that upstream companies overproduce or hoard inventory due to information distortion, leading to resource waste and increased carbon emissions, which severely affects the economic, environmental, and social efficiency of sustainable supply chains. This paper investigates the impact of retailers’ cognitive bias, namely, overconfidence, on the bullwhip effect in the sustainable supply chain. It characterizes retailers’ overconfidence from two aspects: overprecision and overestimation. This study finds that retailers’ overestimation biases distort demand forecasts, causing product orders and inventory decisions to significantly deviate from the rational optimal level, exacerbating the bullwhip effect in sustainable supply chains. In contrast, retailers’ overprecision bias reduces the forecast error, which has a mitigating effect on the bullwhip effect on inventory; however, this effect weakens as the level of overestimation increases. Furthermore, order lead time and the autocorrelation coefficient of demand moderate the bullwhip effect. Finally, through numerical simulation analysis, the interactive effects of overconfidence bias and operational parameters are effectively captured, providing strong validation for the theoretical results and research propositions. The conclusions of this study offer valuable managerial insights for mitigating the bullwhip effect of sustainable supply chain caused by irrational factors. It also provides policy recommendations for promoting the theoretical research and practice of sustainable supply chains. Full article

An assembly of fourth-century BCE Samarian silver coins and late-fifth-century BCE Samarian cut silver sheets, Sidonian and Philistian coins from a hacksilber hoard allegedly found in the region of Samaria belonging to the David and Jemima Jeselsohn collection, were characterized by metallurgical analyses. The aims of the research were to identify the items’ composition and manufacturing processes. We affirmed that the Samarian coins were made of silver–copper alloy produced by a controlled process. The microstructural and elemental analyses revealed that the sheets were produced from various materials, including pure silver, silver–copper, and silver–copper–gold alloys, whereas the Sidonian and Philistian coins were made of silver–copper alloy. Continuity in style and production techniques was observed. This information provides a better understanding of the material culture and technological skills in the Persian-period province of Samaria. Full article

This study investigates the impact of general consumers’ compulsive hoarding behavior (CHB) on future behavioral responses and examines the moderating roles of reward type, hoarding pattern, and self-monitoring. To achieve this, we conducted an experimental survey based on a scenario. The findings reveal that consumers with high CHB exhibited lower altruistic disposal and higher purchase hiding compared to those with low CHB. Among high-CHB consumers, receiving social rewards for disposing of possessions led to increased altruistic disposal and reduced purchase hiding. In contrast, low-CHB consumers showed no significant differences based on reward type. The results also indicate that higher selective hoarding behavior among high-CHB consumers is associated with lower altruistic disposal and higher purchase hiding. Additionally, high-CHB consumers with greater self-monitoring tendencies demonstrated increased altruistic disposal and purchase hiding, whereas self-monitoring had no significant effect on low-CHB consumers. By focusing on general consumers rather than individuals with severe hoarding disorders, this study provides new insights into understanding CHB in everyday contexts. By exploring the causal relationships between CHB and related variables, the findings contribute to strategies aimed at mitigating compulsive hoarding behaviors and promoting responsible consumption patterns. Full article

Seed hardness has been acknowledged as one of the most significant physical traits influencing seed consumption and caching by animals. From an evolutionary perspective, a hard seed shell should potentially be regarded as a dispersal and predator escape strategy rather than a maladaptive trait of plants. However, to our knowledge, this prediction has not been adequately tested in the context of seed dispersal. Here, we offered seeds with hard shells to the main seed consumers widely distributed in two distinct forest ecosystems to test our hypothesis that a hard seed shell might act as an ecological filter to deter predators but attract obligatory seed dispersers. Our studies demonstrated that seeds with the hardest shells consistently and directly deterred small-bodied seed consumers that have been proven to be either larder-hoarders or scatter-hoarders in the two forests. Nevertheless, rodents with the largest body size and seed handling capacity seemed to be effective seed dispersers targeting hard seed shells. The deterrence to seed predators and the attraction to an effective seed disperser reflects the evolutionary significance of seed hardness in the seed dispersal syndrome. Our studies in different forest ecosystems strongly suggest that a hard seed shell is not an evolutionary dead end in plant–animal interactions. On the contrary, the outcome of a hard seed shell in the seed dispersal syndrome is of evolutionary importance for plant–animal mutualistic interactions in various forest ecosystems. Full article

In Marie-Elena John’s 2006 novel Unburnable, Lillian Baptiste returns to Dominica from the United States intending to confront the secrets and traumas of her maternal family line. The novel structures Lillian’s developing apprehension of who her mother and grandmother were and what they endured in late-colonial Dominica around a series of revelations regarding each woman’s imbrication within the realm of the magico-spiritual, which includes magic, Obeah and their cognates; Catholicism; spells and curses; ghosts and other spirit manifestations; and extra-sensory perception. The reader comes to understand Lillian as (and sometimes before) Lillian comes to understand herself: the last in a line of magico-spiritually powerful women whose encounters with colonial catastrophe and its heteropatriarchal, racist–classist machinations are both figured through and navigated by way of that power. Where socioeconomic and political power may conventionally be regarded as the proper subject of realist fiction and social-science inquiry, and magico-spiritual power as within the ambit of magical-realist fiction and folklore studies, Unburnable proposes worldly and magico-spiritual power as inhabiting the same material, political and psycho-social plane of Caribbean reality: as mutually entangled, co-constituting, reciprocally illuminating and, above all, dually heritable forces. In this way, the novel issues an invitation to rethink questions of power in the shadow of the Caribbean plantation and consider anew the ways in which it is, on the one hand, hoarded, bequeathed and weaponized against the vulnerable and, on the other, fluid, arcane in its sources and workings, and susceptible to insurgent counter-deployments. Full article

We study the effects of climate change exposure on firms’ cash holdings using a recently developed measure which decomposes the overall exposure into opportunities and uncertainties. We find that firms with a greater overall exposure to climate change hold more cash, and this effect is mainly driven by climate change-related opportunities. This is consistent with the hypothesis that firms hoard cash to prepare for future opportunities. Methodologically, we use the contemporaneous weather conditions as well as those from the recent past as instrumental variables. These results provide new evidence on the relationship between climate change and cash holding. Full article

Although digital hoarding behavior does not directly affect physical space, with the popularization of cloud storage services, its impact on energy consumption has become increasingly significant, posing a challenge to environmental sustainability. This study focuses on the factors influencing consumer digital hoarding behavior on e-commerce platforms, aiming to provide management decision-making references for e-commerce enterprises to deal with consumer digital hoarding phenomena and improve transaction effectiveness. Based on the Motivation–Opportunity–Ability (MOA) Theory and through the Adversarial Interpretive Structure Modeling Method (AISM), this study systematically identifies and analyzes the influencing factors. The findings reveal that emotional attachment, burnout, and fear of missing out are the main motivational factors directly affecting consumer digital hoarding behavior, with strong interconnections between these factors. Perceived usefulness and platform interaction design are significant opportunity factors, indirectly affecting digital hoarding behavior by improving user experience and satisfaction. E-commerce platform convenience, anticipated ownership, perceived economic value, emotional regulation ability, auxiliary shopping decision-making, perceived behavioral control, and information organization ability are the foundational and intermediate factors. The research results emphasize the importance of understanding consumer digital hoarding behavior in the context of sustainable development. This is not only conducive to optimizing the shopping cart function and data management strategy of e-commerce platforms and improving transaction conversion rates but also provides a reference for policymakers to formulate data management and privacy protection policies. Full article

Non-native species have caused various problems for both animal and human communities globally, but their monitoring during the early stages of establishment is often difficult. A population of the Oriental Magpie (Pica serica) has established on Hokkaido Island, northern Japan, since the 1990s, offering a rare opportunity for field biologists to monitor the entire history of a colonizing avian population. To clarify the current number and distribution of the population and their major determinants, we conducted bimonthly surveys from May 2012 to March 2013, over a total of 417 h, in Tomakomai City, the central area of the current distribution. We found 181 to 248 magpies in every survey, and 46 active nests in May. Most of the magpies appeared in residential areas, avoiding commercial and industrial areas, and did not show seasonal changes in their distribution pattern. The magpies mainly foraged in short grasslands in public spaces, such as parks, in May and July, but most of the birds preferred house gardens for foraging from November to March. Dogs or cats were often kept outside in the gardens where the magpies foraged, and observations of magpies stealing and hoarding pet food were common. It is likely that the magpies rely on anthropogenic food resources such as pet food, especially in winter. Continuous monitoring of this population will enable further knowledge of the factors that limit the number and range of not only non-native species but also avian populations in general to be obtained. Full article

Brandt’s voles (Lasiopodomys brandtii), one of the main non-hibernating rodent species in the typical grassland of Inner Mongolia, live in groups and have the behavioral habit of hoarding food in underground warehouses in autumn to prepare for the winter food shortage ahead. The division of labor and cooperation are typical behavior patterns of gregarious mammals, but it is unclear whether Brandt’s voles exercise a division of labor in food hoarding before overwintering. To explore the division of food hoarding in Brandt’s voles during the autumn period, three treatments, namely added food, added food + competition, and control, were set up with three replicates. An infrared camera was positioned to observe and record the behavior of Brandt’s voles under different treatments. Next, behavioral experiments regarding food-hoarding division were performed on individuals. The results showed that (1) Brandt’s voles had two types of hoarding behavior, namely high food hoarding and low food hoarding, but not all individuals displayed hoarding behavior. (2) In all treatments, feeding behavior, which was the most important type of behavior, accounted for the highest proportion of all behaviors. (3) There was no significant difference in body weight and sex between high- and low-food-hoarding individuals of Brandt’s voles, and there was no significant difference between high- and low-food-hoarding individuals in other divisions of labor either. (4) There was no significant difference in inquiry ability between high- and low-food-hoarding groups, but there was a significant difference in spatial memory. High-food-hoarding individuals had greater spatial memory. In summary, Brandt’s voles had two types of hoarding behavior: high food hoarding and low food hoarding. Furthermore, high-food-hoarding individuals had greater spatial memory. Full article