Improving the business impact of foresight

Achieving an impact on business decision-makers with foresight does not appear to be an easy task. Therefore, the Macro Trends team at Deutsche Bank Research has formulated some criteria to guide foresight projects. They should aim to produce plausibility, provide convenience and inspiration as well as an appropriate time perspective with regard to the content of foresight results. In addition, a structured way of producing and delivering foresight, a seamless inclusion in organisational procedures, a high level of interaction with decision-makers, ideational entrepreneurship, innovation regarding communication with business people, and persistence and synchronisation with the business organisation are the key criteria for achieving a higher impact from foresight projects. To live up to these criteria, the Macro Trends team has developed a 'trend map' which provides a conceptual aggregation of trends - to provide orientation for decision-makers and stakeholders.     

Option Pricing in ARCH-type Models

ARCH models have become popular for modeling financial time series. They seem, at first, however, to be incompatible with the option pricing approach of Black, Scholes, Merton et al., because they are discrete-time models and possess too much variability. We show that completeness of the market holds for a broad class of ARCH-type models defined in a suitable continuous-time fashion. As an example we focus on the GARCH(1,1)-M model and obtain, through our method, the same pricing formula as Duan, who applied equilibrium-type arguments.     

Evolution of global airline strategic alliance and consolidation in the twenty-first century

Global airline strategic alliances have emerged since the late 1980s, and their number has slowly risen through the years. Will the number of such alliances continue to proliferate? Or will airlines consolidate with one another to form mega-carriers? In this paper, the likelihood of various airline consolidation and alliance development possibilities was examined based on a number of high-level trends and forces. The most probable near-term industry alliance and consolidation structure is described, accompanied with a probable path of evolution. These predictions have important implications for managers of strategic alliances, carriers who are currently in an alliance as well as carriers who are planning to join one.     

Adjustment of Western Business Expatriates in Hong Kong Versus the Chinese Mainland

Business expatriates assigned to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, mostly from Western Europe and North America, responded to a survey assessing the extent of sociocultural and psychological adjustment. As expected, results showed that the expatriates were better socioculturally adjusted to Hong Kong than the Chinese mainland, whereas no difference was found for psychological adjustment between the two samples. Examining the adjustment of different nationalities it was found that French business expatriates were less well socioculturally adjusted both in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland than their British and U.S. counterparts. Practical implications of these findings for business expatriates as well as for their firms are discussed and future avenues for extending research of this nature is explored.     

The influence of corporate acquisitions on the behaviour of key inventors

The behaviour of key inventors after the acquisition of their company is examined. Key inventors are identified on the basis of their patenting output. They account for a large number of their company's high-quality patents. The analysis of 43 acquisitions shows that key inventors leave to a substantial extent their company or they significantly reduce their patenting performance after the acquisition. Factors influencing the behaviour of key inventors after acquisitions are identified. Implications for the effective management of acquisitions as well as suggestions for further research are outlined.     

How to define and study farmers' management capacity: theory and use in agricultural economics

Textbooks and articles on farm management stress the importance of the management capacity of the farmer with respect to his farm results. However, explicit definitions together with an elaboration of this concept are hard to find. In this article, aspects of management capacity are grouped into: (1) personal aspects, consisting of fanner's drives and motivations, fanner's abilities and capabilities and his biographical facts such as age and education; and (2) aspects of the decision-making process, consisting of practices and procedures with respect to planning, implementation and control of decisions at the farm. Empirical studies on the role of management capacity in relation to farm results are reviewed. Frontier production functions are widely used in recent literature to estimate technical and economic efficiency of farms. However, in explaining differences in efficiency most studies do not go further than adding a biographical variabk (e.g., level of education). This study concludes that a next step would be to include aspects of the decision-making process. Longitudinal on-farm observations, which give possibilities for studying the dynamic aspects of the decision-making, are suggested to further analyze the concept of management capacity.     

Estimating International Interindustry Linkages: Non-survey Simulations of the Asian-Pacific Economy

This paper evaluates a recently published semi-survey international input–output table for nine East-Asian countries and the USA with four non-survey estimation alternatives. A new generalized RAS procedure is used with stepwise increasing information from both import and export statistics as optimisation constraints on the four non-survey tables. The results show that the estimated table improves when increasing information from both sources is used, despite the well known inconsistencies between import and export data in trade statistics. It is concluded that the new procedure can be useful as a critical analysis of newly published (semi-)survey international tables and/or as an early updating tool during the construction process.