A behavioral cobweb-like commodity market model with heterogeneous speculators

According to empirical studies, speculators place significant orders in commodity markets and may cause bubbles and crashes. This paper develops a cobweb-like commodity market model that takes into account the behavior of technical and fundamental speculators. We show that interactions between consumers, producers and heterogeneous speculators may produce price dynamics which mimics the cyclical price motion of actual commodity markets, i.e., irregular switches between bullish and bearish price developments. Moreover, we find that the impact of speculators on price dynamics is non-trivial: depending on the market structure, speculative transactions may either be beneficial or harmful for market stability.     

Ethical Attitudes of Accounting Practitioners: Are Rank and Ethical Attitudes Related?

We address a previous finding in the business ethics literature in which accounting professionals in higher rank levels, i.e., “manager” or “partner” of auditing firms, appear to have lower moral reasoning ability than their junior counterparts. Prior investigations have relied upon a similar methodology for estimating ethical beliefs, namely testing “moral reasoning ability” using either the Moral Judgment Interview or Defining Issues Test. In the present study, we use a multiple vignettes approach to test for the existence of the inverse rank-ethical beliefs effect. With only 2 of the 30 vignettes resulting in both managers and partners being more accepting of the ethically charged behaviors, the results presented here using this alternative methodology are generally not supportive of the inverse rank-ethical beliefs phenomenon. We also use a multivariate analysis in order to control for demographic characteristics. Our results suggest that the most robust predictor of ethical attitudes among accounting practitioners is age, not rank within a firm.     

Old technology meets new technology: complementarities,similarities, and alliance formation

Alliance formation is commonplace in many high‐technology industries experiencing radical technological change, where established firms use alliances with new entrants to adapt to technological change, while new entrants benefit from the ability of established players to commercialize the new technology. Despite the prevalence of these alliances, we know little about how these firms choose to ally with specific firms given the range of possible partners they may choose from. This study explores factors that lead to alliance formation between pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. We focus on the alliance tie as the unit of analysis and argue that dyadic complementarities and similarities directly influence alliance formation. We then introduce a contingency model in which the positive effect of complementarities and similarities on alliance formation is moderated by the age of the new technology firm. We draw theoretical attention to the intersection between levels of analysis, in particular, the intersection between dyadic and firm‐level constructs. We find that a pharmaceutical and a biotechnology firm are more likely to enter an alliance based on complementarities when the biotechnology firm is younger. Another noteworthy finding is that proxies for broad capabilities appear to be at least as effective, if not more so, in predicting alliance formation compared to fine‐grained science and technology‐related indicators, like patent cross‐citations or patent common citations. We conclude by suggesting that future studies on alliance formation need to take into account interactions across levels; for example, how dyadic capabilities interact with firm‐level factors, and the advantages and disadvantages of more or less fine‐grained measures of organizational capabilities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An alternative approach for portfolio performance evaluation: enabling fund evaluation relative to peer group via Malkiel’s monkey

We propose an implementable portfolio performance evaluation procedure that compares a portfolio with respect to the portfolios constructed by an infinite number of Malkiel’s blindfolded monkeys, or equivalently the whole enumeration of all possible portfolios. We argue that this approach exhibits two main advantages. First, it does not require any benchmark portfolios because a portfolio is being compared to an infinite number of portfolios. Second, it is market condition invariant. Since the market conditions are already reflected in the portfolio performances of an infinite blindfolded monkeys, our measure of portfolio performances is invariant to volatile market conditions.     

Consumer power and choice deferral: The role of anticipated regret

This paper examines the influence of social power on consumers' propensity to defer choice. Based on the notion that elevated power reduces regret anticipation—the fear of making a wrong choice—it is proposed that power influences the extent of choice deferral by reducing consumers' susceptibility to anticipated regret. Because of the regret-based mechanism, power can increase or decrease consumers' propensity to defer choice, depending upon the situational factors that are associated with anticipated regret, such as salience of regret, outcome reversibility (e.g., return policy), and locus-of-regret (postponing vs. choosing now). Using different manipulations of power, seven studies provide consistent support for the proposed effects and show that situational factors and marketing strategies can induce, turn off, or even reverse the effect of power on deferral. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.     

Analysing tax evasion dynamics via the Ising model

We develop a model of tax evasion based on the Ising model. We augment the model using an appropriate enforcement mechanism that may allow policy makers to curb tax evasion. With a certain probability tax evaders are subject to an audit. If they get caught they behave honestly for a certain number of periods. Simulating the model for a range of parameter combinations, we show that tax evasion may be controlled effectively by using punishment as an enforcement mechanism.     

The mystery of the money supply definition

Conclusion As we have shown, the validity of various definitions of money cannot be ascertained by means of a statistical correlation with national income. A valid definition can be established by following the essentialist approach—that is, by focusing on the distinguishing characteristics of an entity. Contrary to mainstream thinking, we have shown that the money supply definition remains intact, notwithstanding the deregulation of financial markets and the introduction of electronic means of payments.     

Limit theorems for multivariate discrete distributions

According to the usual law of small numbers a multivariate Poisson distribution is derived by defining an appropriate model for multivariate Binomial distributions and examining their behaviour for large numbers of trials and small probabilities of marginal and simultaneous successes. The weak limit law is a generalization of Poisson's distribution to larger finite dimensions with arbitrary dependence structure. Compounding this multivariate Poisson distribution by a Gamma distribution results in a multivariate Pascal distribution which is again asymptotically multivariate Poisson. These Pascal distributions contain a class of multivariate geometric distributions. Finally the bivariate Binomial distribution is shown to be the limit law of appropriate bivariate hypergeometric distributions. Proving the limit theorems mentioned here as well as understanding the corresponding limit distributions becomes feasible by using probability generating functions.