Variations in NHL Attendance

A BSTRACT . In recent years the National Hockey League (NHL) has put policies in place to boost attendance. Specifically, these changes have been to curb violence, increase scoring, and move to an unbalanced schedule featuring more games against regional rivals. This research looks at variations in game-to-game attendance in the NHL, focusing on these policy changes. It is found that violence, specifically fighting, tends to attract fans in large numbers across the United States and Canada. Surprisingly, increases in scoring, ceteris paribus , tend to depress attendance. The change in scheduling by the NHL, however, has been a success, with divisional rivals increasing attendance in U.S. cities and additional contests against other Canadian teams increasing attendance in Canada.     

new pricing in the pipeline

Ian Byatt, Director General of Water Supply, explains how the water and sewerage industry is regulated.     

Systematic biases and culture in project failures

Project success rates have improved, and much of the credit can be given to the knowledge, practices, and standards that have contributed to the professionalization of the field. Unfortunately, too many failures still occur. Because many of them can be traced to management and decision‐making practices, it might be useful at this stage to explore a set of systematic biases to determine if understanding them can help diagnose and perhaps even prevent failures from occurring. This article begins with a framework identifying the influences on project outcomes, defines the systematic biases that may derail projects, summarizes eight project failures, uses the framework to diagnose those failures, and concludes by suggesting how organizational and project culture may contribute to these very common and natural biases.     

Innovation and pricing in the Dutch drug industry

The Dutch pharmaceutical industry is characterized by a high degree of innovative rivalry resulting in frequent rises and falls in market shares by both firms and products. Conventional concentration ratios, Herfindahl indices and market share stability measures are not highly correlated. The market, however, does display price sensitivity. Elasticity of demand for new products is inversely related to their incremental quality and directly related to their age.     

Ramsey pricing in the presence of risk

This article examines Ramsey (second-best) pricing for a multi-product regulated monopolist when marginal costs fluctuate with a known probability function. When all marginal-cost risk is absorbed by consumers, the degrees of Pratt-Arrow absolute risk aversion and the marginal cost variances in the various markets have an affect on the appropriate Ramsey prices. An analogous result is obtained when investors absorb all of the cost risk. When the cost risk is optimally shared by consumers and investors, the deterministic Ramsey prices are obtained.     

Capital use intensity and productivity biases

Measures of productivity growth are often pro-cyclical. This paper focuses on measurement errors in capital inputs, associated with unobserved variations in capital utilization rates, as an explanation for the existence of pro-cyclical patterns in measures of productivity. Recently constructed national and state-specific indexes of inputs, outputs, and productivity in U.S. agriculture for 1949–2002 are used to estimate production functions that include proxy variables for changes in the utilization of durable inputs. The proxy variables include an index of farmers’ terms of trade and an index of local seasonal growing conditions. We find that utilization responses by farmers are significant and bias measures of productivity growth in a pro-cyclical pattern. We quantify the bias, adjust the measures of productivity for the estimated utilization responses, and compare the adjusted and conventional measures.     

Consumption asset pricing and the term structure

We investigate the relationship between consumption and the term structure using U.K. interest rate data. We demonstrate that the term structure contains information about future economic activity as implied by the benchmark time separable power utility consumption based capital asset pricing model (C-CAPM) since the yield spread has forecasting power for future consumption growth. Further, we analyze the ability of this benchmark and two alternative models which adopt utility functions characterized by non-separability, namely, the extension to the habit formation model of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) proposed by Wachter (2006) and the housing C-CAPM proposed by Piazzesi, Schneider and Tuzel (2007). Our findings are supportive of the habit formation specification of Wachter (2006), other models fail to yield economically plausible parameter values.     

如何定价楼盘

2008年的一项调查显示,购房者最关注的三大因素分别是价格、地段、开发及物业,其中关注价格因素的占83%.……     

A comparative analysis of security pricing using factor, macrovariable and arbitrage pricing models

This study compares and contrasts the single factor, three factor, macrovariable and APT models, using industry portfolios of all available firms on CRSP from 1980 to 1992. Comparatively, the APT is best, macrovariable second best and single factor model worse in pricing securities. Consistently, the market variable is cross sectionally priced in all models, and two of four APT factors capture the majority of variance in industry returns. In the latter case, factor three is ***DIRECT SUPPORT *** A00DH002 00002 consistently related to market returns, and factors two and three are also associated with risk premiums and exchange rates after 1987. Factor four is not related to any macrovariable, and term structure and production are never related to any risk factor.     

让用户参与定价

小鸭空调为了在北京促销其新产品, 曾在当地一家商场举行了一次"让用户 定价"活动。在活动现场,小鸭摆出几种 款式的新空调,在介绍了空调业的一般状 况和小鸭空调的特点后,让用户根据自己 的判断竞价,报价最高者可以以最后报价 买走该款空调。活动结束后,小鸭公司还 以用户竞出的价格作为这几种新机型的 市场零售价,全面供应北京市场。     

Road pricing and the 'new deal for transport'

There are several good reasons why motorists should be charged for using roads, and it is important to understand these and to distinguish between them.
Alternatives, however attractive, fail to stand up to close scrutiny. The change of government attitude showed in the recent White Paper is to be welcomed, but of the three specific proposals, two are questionable. Road pricing should not be used as a major welfare tool.     

Measure preserving derivatives and the pricing kernel puzzle

Recent empirical studies have found evidence of nonmonotonicity in the pricing kernels for a variety of market indices. This phenomenon is known as the pricing kernel puzzle. The payoff distribution pricing model of Dybvig predicts that the payoff distribution of a direct investment of $1 in a market index may be replicated by investing less than $1 in some derivative written on that market index whenever the associated pricing kernel is nondecreasing. Using the Hardy–Littlewood rearrangement inequality, we obtain an explicit solution for the cheapest replicating derivative, which we refer to as the optimal measure preserving derivative. The optimal measure preserving derivative is the permutation appearing in Ryff’s decomposition of the pricing kernel with respect to the market payoff measure. We compute optimal measure preserving derivatives corresponding to the estimated physical and risk neutral distributions in the paper by Jackwerth (2000) that first brought attention to the pricing kernel puzzle.     

An anomaly in the pricing of bank non-interest mortgage charges

This paper uses a monopolistically competitive model to study the determinants of bank mortgage charges. The study shows that concentration and the loan-price ratio do not have significant effects on the bank mortgage charges. Significantly, the charges are found to be positively related to the number of banks and bank offices in a given market and inversely related to the market size or population. (JEL L130, G210)     

Macroeconomic policy and the pricing behavior of imperfectly competitive firms

This paper develops theoretical models of the effect of expansionary macroeconomic policy on the pricing behavior of pure monopolist and oligopolist firms. A number of factors are identified which affect the magnitude of the price change chosen by an imperfectly competitive firm in response to macro policy action. The behavior of oligopolistic firms in response to macro policy changes is found to be influenced by the fact that expansionary macro policy initially impacts on industry demand rather than firm demand, and that the oligopolist's consequent pricing behavior will affect the share of the industry demand increase which it is able to appropriate.     

Swap pricing and hedging of general DCFs

This paper shows that under payoff and/or interest rate uncertainty the splitting up of discounted cash flows (DCFs) into period addenda not only permits to quantify the contribution of each period to the total (random) DCF, but also allows us to price it and hedge the its risk. The contribution effect was already well known, while the pricing and hedging issue is new in this context. We first notice that—through the decomposition—each cash flow process can be interpreted as a swap one. We then resort to the risk-neutral pricing and hedging technique as applied to (exotic) swaps.     

Arbitrage pricing theory and risk-neutral measures

Abstract We consider a market with countably many risky assets and finite factor structure, as in the “arbitrage pricing theory” of Ross (1976). We prove necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of parameters for the existence of an equivalent risk-neutral measure, i.e., a measure under which each asset return has zero expected value. We relate these conditions to a certain absence of arbitrage property of the model. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 91B24, 91B28 Journal of Economic Literature Classification: G10, G12     

Road pricing in a free society

Improved road pricing would be an indispensable element in a road system run on commercial principles, with charges for road use not co-mingled with taxes, and with no discrimination against private road providers. But pricing imposed by a monopoly supplier, to 'restrain' motorised mobility, is unacceptable in a free society.     

Realized volatility forecasting and option pricing

A growing literature advocates the use of microstructure noise-contaminated high-frequency data for the purpose of volatility estimation. This paper evaluates and compares the quality of several recently-proposed estimators in the context of a relevant economic metric, i.e., profits from option pricing and trading. Using forecasts obtained by virtue of alternative volatility estimates, agents price short-term options on the S&P 500 index before trading with each other at average prices. The agents’ average profits and the Sharpe ratios of the profits constitute the criteria used to evaluate alternative volatility estimates and the corresponding forecasts. For our data, we find that estimators with superior finite sample Mean-squared-error properties generate higher average profits and higher Sharpe ratios, in general. We confirm that, even from a forecasting standpoint, there is scope for optimizing the finite sample properties of alternative volatility estimators as advocated by Bandi and Russell [Bandi, F.M., Russell, J.R., 2005. Market microstructure noise, integrated variance estimators, and the accuracy of asymptotic approximations. Working Paper; Bandi, F.M., Russell, J.R., 2008b. Microstructure noise, realized variance, and optimal sampling. Review of Economic Studies 75, 339–369] in recent work.     

Demand and supply estimation biases due to omission of durability

We build a dynamic equilibrium model of a durable goods oligopoly with a competitive secondary market to evaluate the bias in estimating the structural parameters of demand and supply when durability is omitted. We simulate data from our dynamic model and use them to estimate the model’s static counterpart. We find that the static estimate of the elasticity of demand is an overestimate of the true elasticity and that the static estimate of the markup is an underestimate. Our results provide a benchmark on the magnitude and sign of the bias when static models are used for economic inference.