Role of resource gap and value appropriation: effect of reputation gap on price premium in online auctions

In this study, we draw on the resource‐based view of the firm and on value‐based models of strategy to examine when firms appropriate value from their superior resources. We argue for the need to take into account the role of the resource gap between competitors rather than the absolute resource stock of the focal firm when examining the resource‐performance relationship. In particular, we investigate whether the ability of a reputable seller to command a price premium is influenced by the reputation gap (i.e., the reputation differences between the focal seller and its closest competitor standardized by the reputation stock of both sellers). We test our hypotheses on 72 matched pairs of online transactions screened from more than 2,000 auctions of new mobile phones on the Polish Internet auction site Allegro. We find that the ability of a reputable seller to command a price premium (1) increases with the size of the reputation gap between the focal seller and its matched competitor, and (2) becomes increasingly smaller for each additional unit of the seller reputation gap. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal securitization with moral hazard

We consider the optimal design of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in a dynamic setting in which a mortgage underwriter with limited liability can engage in costly hidden effort to screen borrowers and can sell loans to investors. We show that (i) the timing of payments to the underwriter is the key incentive mechanism, (ii) the maturity of the optimal contract can be short, and that (iii) bundling mortgages is efficient as it allows investors to learn about underwriter effort more quickly, an information enhancement effect. Finally, we demonstrate that the optimal contract can be closely approximated by the “first loss piece.”     

Too big to fail: Some empirical evidence on the causes and consequences of public banking interventions in the UK

During the 2007–09 financial crisis, the banking sector received an extraordinary level of public support. In this empirical paper, we examine the determinants of a number of public sector interventions: government funding or central bank liquidity insurance schemes, public capital injections, and nationalizations. We use bank-level data spanning all British and foreign banks operating within the United Kingdom. We use multinomial logit regression techniques and find that a bank's size, relative to the size of the entire banking system, typically has a large positive and non-linear effect on the probability of public sector intervention for a bank. We also use instrumental variable techniques to show that British interventions helped; there is fragile evidence that the wholesale (non-core) funding of an affected institution increased significantly following capital injection or nationalization.     

How the UK economy weathered the financial storm

Prior to the global financial crisis of 2008, the UK had the largest banking sector asset to GDP ratio among large countries, and had experienced rapid real property price increases as well as a persistent current account deficit in the preceding decade. These factors, together with its role as an international financial centre, made the UK economy particularly vulnerable to the onset of the global financial crisis. Although the initial drop in real GDP was steep, we provide evidence that the economy has weathered the financial storm better than many feared, and has fared no worse than its peer group of major economies. In this paper we assess the reasons underlying this outcome, including the possibility of exaggerated vulnerabilities, global economic recovery, the flexible supply side of the UK economy, as well as fiscal, financial and monetary policy interventions. Our analysis suggests that all of these factors played a role in cushioning the impact on the UK real economy, leading to a more benign outcome than most observers expected.     

Mixed systems with minimal and maximal lifetime variances

We consider the mixed systems composed of a fixed number of components whose lifetimes are i.i.d. with a known distribution which has a positive and finite variance. We show that a certain of the k-out-of-n systems has the minimal lifetime variance, and the maximal one is attained by a mixture of series and parallel systems. The number of the k-out-of-n system, and the probability weights of the mixture depend on the first two moments of order statistics of the parent distribution of the component lifetimes. We also show methods of calculating extreme system lifetime variances under various restrictions on the system lifetime expectations, and vice versa.     

Physics competition to inspire learning and improve soft skills: a case of the Chain Experiment

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - The Chain Experiment competition has been held successfully for 6 years in Poland and is attracting growing interest. The...     

Patterns and determinants of the horizontal and vertical intra-industry trade of regions: panel analysis for Spain & Poland

ABSTRACT

Most of the empirical studies in the literature on intra-industry trade are conducted at the country level. Countries, however, differ in terms of granularity and internal heterogeneity. In the present study we empirically identify the determinants of the overall IIT as well as its horizontal and vertical components in the trade of Spanish and Polish NUTS-2 regions with all existing trade partners over the period 2005–2014. In order to obtain unbiased results, we utilize a semi-mixed effect model, estimated with the PPML method. We estimate the models jointly for all Spanish and Polish regions and then disjointly in a comparative manner – in order to identify incongruities of reaction to the various factors investigated. These include both traditional factors and a number of unorthodox factors such as regional path dependence, quality of regional institutions, the core or peripheral status of the reporting region.     

Reconstruction of previous failure times and records

For the sequences of independent identically distributed random variables with continuous distributions, we provide the optimal upper bounds for the increments of order and record statistics under condition that the values of future order statistics and records are known. The bounds are expressed in terms of quantiles and absolute moments centered about the quantiles of the parent distribution. We also describe the distributions which approach the bounds with arbitrary desired accuracy.The second author was supported by the Polish State Committee for Scientific Research (KBN) under Grant 5 P03A 012 20Received November 2003     

Unemployment and State Sector Insiders During the Economic Transition in Poland

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Management of large-scale interdisciplinary environmental programmes

Four aspects of uniformity (discipline, institution, type of research and sponsorship) are identified as decisive in the organization and management of large-scale research programmes: difficulties increase with increasing non-unifornmty in any of the aspects. Environmental research is an example of a research area in which one has to overcome all of these problems, and this paper describes the authors' experiences in managing just such a programme. Aspects covered include: the organizational framework chosen and its operation in practice, the selection of research goals, methods of data collection, and manpower and social problems in interdisciplinary research. The degree of generalizability of the observations in the paper is left open for discussion.