Staying Home or Moving Away? Restructuring Efforts within Multinational Enterprises

This paper analyses the impact of geographic dispersion on employment changes within multinationals. Building on earlier work of Landier et al. (2009, Review of Financial Studies 22, 3: 1119), we investigate whether corporate decision‐making within a multinational is affected by the distance between an affiliate and its headquarter. Our findings suggest a detrimental impact of distance on employees, by either an increased likelihood of observing a downsizing event, or by witnessing a larger decrease in the number of employees at distant locations during downsizing events. In addition, our results seem to relate the higher likelihood of observing a downsizing event to the role of social factors on decision making. The more visible a manager is in his community, the less likely he is to downsize proximate divisions.     

Why passengers’ geo-demographic characteristics matter to airport marketing

Passengers’ preference and origin location data (home postcodes) can be extremely useful for marketing purposes, with the potential for more effective customer segmentation and targeting, yet traditional airport market research has often neglected these aspects. This paper utilises passenger survey data from the Gold Coast Airport in the state of Queensland, Australia, to perform a geo-demographic classification analysis in conjunction with census data. With geo-coded passenger preference data, the trip characteristics and airport decision preferences were cross-compared with demographic data with socio-economic variables. The results revealed distinctive contrasts in passenger origin location for short-haul domestic trips and long-haul international trips, in which passengers from afar are willing to travel longer distances to reach a second-tier airport to make use of cheaper airfares. One of the implications of this study is that low-cost carriers’ businesses (the airlines or the airports) should better target their customers by offering geographically targeted marketing.     

Negotiators’ Attitudes toward Signing Business Contracts: Evidence from Greece and Israel

This study extends beyond negotiation process and styles, and focuses on negotiators’ tendency to sign formal contracts. Drawing on a risk mitigation perspective, it examines the influence of businesspeople's levels of horizontal and vertical individualism‐collectivism, ethical idealism, and trust propensity on their attitudes toward signing formal negotiated business contracts in Greece and in Israel. A survey questionnaire was translated from English to Greek and to Hebrew, and 649 responses were collected from employees who worked in industries such as banking, insurance, construction, manufacturing, retailing, and tourism in the Greek and Israeli private and public sectors. Our findings suggest that higher levels of horizontal individualism, horizontal collectivism, and ethical idealism increase employees’ tendency to sign formal contracts, whereas lower levels of general trust are associated with a higher propensity to sign formal contracts. Interestingly, employees’ propensity to sign formal contracts was significantly lower in Israel than in Greece. We argue that the propensity to sign formal contracts, and thus to mitigate potential agreement risks, is dependent on the individuals’ cultural and personal attributes. The study provides practitioners with a set of cultural and individual attributes that can serve as predictors of negotiators’ predisposition toward signing business contracts. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Ex ante or ex post competition policy? A progress report

When intervening in markets, say to block a merger, competition authorities are constrained by the limited information they have about the social desirability of the available alternatives. Compared to ex ante control, ex post control is based on the more accurate information that becomes available in the intervening period, but entails temporary losses to social welfare and reversal costs incurred to unscramble the eggs. Through a toy model, we identify situations in which the competition authority finds it optimal to commit to forego the option of ex post review in order to avoid chilling ex ante socially beneficial mergers. On the other hand, the case for ex post review is strengthened if post-merger market conducts can signal the merged firm's private information about the consequences of the merger.     

The role of public intervention in R & D

The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) we emphasize the rule of uncertainty in achieving an efficient allocation of resources to R & D activities; (2) we identify and discuss optional mechanisms that are directed at minimizing the role of uncertainty in determining R & D decisions; and (3) we analyze the role of public intervention in R & D via a formal structure. More specifically, we explain why and under what conditions a risk-averse decision-maker will invest less than a government in research and inventive activities. Sufficient conditions that lead to private underinvestment in these activities are established. Furthermore, if the option of buying information exists, then we identify a set of private governmental contracts that may lead to the acceptance of a research project that a priori is unfeasible.     

An Event Option Pricing Model with Scheduled and Unscheduled Announcement Effects

There is considerable evidence supporting the time-varying distribution of asset returns. There is also ample evidence that scheduled announcement events such as money supply announcements (in the case of foreign exchange), earnings announcements (in the case of stocks), and crop reports (in the case of commodities), as well as random unscheduled events, can affect the level and volatility of asset returns. This study provides an Event Model for European call options which explicitly addresses effects of these two classes of events. This specification requires estimation of more parameters, but it could provide a more accurate basis for pricing options than previous Poisson jump-diffusion models. Parametric analysis shows that the standard models under price the options relative to the Event Model. The Event Model may be particularly useful in pricing short-term deep out-of-the-money options when scheduled events are present in the market.     

Understanding discontinuance: Towards a more realistic model of technological innovation and industrial adoption in Britain

The paper outlines the ideas and theory behind a recently begun research project. The project consists of an investigation of the complexities, and particularly the problems, inherent in introducing technological innovation into production systems in industry. The practical and theoretical need for work of this kind is examined and the character and focus of the proposed investigation sketched. The concept of “discontinuance” is analysed and seen to apply both to the cessation of innovation production by a supplier and the termination of innovation usage by an adoptor. Rogers and Shoemaker's (1971) division of adoptor discontinuance into “replacement” and “disenchantment” discontinuance is considered and reformulated using the terms “replacement adoption”, “negative changeover effects” and “regressive discontinuance”. Finally, a number of models both of innovation development and innovation adoption are considered, synthesized and revised. An initial framework for the comprehension of innovation development and adoption is sketched and some of the potentially important issues therein are highlighted.     

A note on Model Reference Adaptive System (MRAS) estimate with infinite variance

This paper discusses the estimation of a parameter in an autoregressive model with infinite variance. A recursive estimation procedure based on minimizing the prediction errors is provided. It is also shown that the model reference adaptive system estimate for an AR (1) model given in Aase (1983) is a special case.     

On the socially optimal size of a life-saving facility

The paper examines the simultaneous problem of finding an optimal size of an intensive care unit and an optimal amount of social investment in preventive medicine. The “demand” for ICU services is assumed stochastic. The approach used is to minimize social costs involved in operating the facility and social loss stemming from deaths of untreated patients.

After deriving the optimality conditions the results are applied to recent British data