通过预防召回获得边际竞争优势

对消费品公司来说，产品召回是一个严重的问题。在美国，每年因为安全原因有成千上万的产品被召回。如图1所示，在1999年和2001年间，14个主要类别的消费品的召回数量在稳定地增加。保守地估计，每个公司召回的平均成本多于800万美元，包括对消费者的赔偿。对消费品行业来说，这可以转化为多于60亿美元的成本，这个估计不包括市场信誉造成的销售损失和失去的市场份额。     

Ethical or practical: An empirical study of students' choices in simulated business scenarios

Graduate and undergraduate students were asked to evaluate the ethicality and practicality of the lead character in several case scenarios. Students' responses indicated they believed practicality was more important than ethicality. The majority of students were able to determine the correct ethicality of the cases presented to them. The authors conclude that more research is needed in the antecedents of a student's value system.Dr. White is U.C. Foundation Professor of Management at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he has been a faculty member since 1981. Dr White has published in the areas of general management, operations management, and personnel. Dr White holds the Ph. D. Degree in Management.Mr. Dooley is a candidate for the doctoral degree in management and holds an MBA degree.     

AN APPROACH TO LINKING AN ECOLOGICAL VEGETATION MODEL TO AN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMIC MODEL

Agricultural policy measures are directed increasingly towards encouraging production systems that are deemed to be favourable for ecologically valued plant communities and species. This paper presents an approach to linking an ecological model of vegetation with a regional economic model of agricultural production to provide a means of estimating the costs of achieving a given area of a desired vegetation type. This is demonstrated by an empirical study of heather and hay meadow conservation in the River Tyne catchment in northern England. The results show that policy measures need to take account both of spatial linkages within agriculture and temporal links between ecological processes and agricultural productivity.     

Profit or politics? Understanding renationalizations in Russia

This study examines firm-level determinants of the government incentives to acquire controlling stakes in private companies. Using a novel hand-collected dataset of 153 largest listed and unlisted Russian companies, I investigate the methods and the rationales of a 2004–2008 wave of selected nationalizations in a post-privatization market. I find robust evidence that formerly privatized and domestically-owned companies in strategically important sectors face the highest risks of corporate control transfers from private to state hands. I also find that the corporate tax evasion is another significant determinant of a firm nationalization. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, there is little evidence that renationalizations in Russia are driven by firm profitability factors: the government neither systematically “cherry-picks” best performers nor addresses market failures by rescuing national champions in financial distress. These results contribute to t'he politics and finance literature by providing new firm-level evidence on the importance of strategic nationalism in the government's decision to intervene into the corporate control structures.     

Subsampling the distribution of diverging statistics with applications to finance

In this paper we propose a subsampling estimator for the distribution of statistics diverging at either known or unknown rates when the underlying time series is strictly stationary and strong mixing. Based on our results we provide a detailed discussion of how to estimate extreme order statistics with dependent data and present two applications to assessing financial market risk. Our method performs well in estimating Value at Risk and provides a superior alternative to Hill's estimator in operationalizing Safety First portfolio selection.     

Circuit Breakers with Uncertainty about the Presence of Informed Agents: I Know What You Know … I Think

This study conducts experimental asset markets to examine the effects of circuit breaker rules on market behavior when agents are uncertain about the presence of private information. Our results unequivocally indicate that circuit breakers fail to temper unwarranted price movements in periods without private information. Agents appear to mistakenly infer that others possess private information, causing price to move away from fundamental value. Allocative efficiencies in our markets are high across all regimes. Circuit breakers perform no useful function in our experimental asset markets.