Adolescent injuries in relation to economic status: An international perspective

The primary objective of the study was to examine the relationship between patterns in car-to-car crashes involving young drivers and car and driver characteristics and the research design was a national register-based prospective cohort study. Individual records in a cohort born 1970 – 1972 are linked to road-traffic-crash data (1988 – 2000). Subjects' first police-registered two-car crash leading to severe or fatal injury (n = 4875) are identified. Typical crash patterns are highlighted and associations between pattern and both car and individual socio-demographic characteristics are tested. Four crash patterns are highlighted. Male drivers and those with lower educational attainment are over-represented in all patterns. Pattern-based risk levels vary considerably according to car safety level and driver's age at time of injury and socio-economic status. Crash patterns might be considered in young adult driver education systems, bearing in mind the consistent higher risks of male drivers and of drivers with lower educational attainment.     

Investment and Capital Structure of Partially Private Regulated Firms

We develop a model that examines the capital structure and investment decisions of regulated firms in a setting that incorporates two key institutional features of the public utilities sector in many countries: firms are partially owned by the state and regulators are not necessarily independent. Among other things, we show that regulated firms issue more debt, invest more, and enjoy higher regulated prices when they face more independent regulators, are more privatized, and when regulators are more pro‐firm. Moreover, regulatory independence, higher degree of privatization, and pro‐firm regulatory climate are associated with higher social welfare.     

Backup strategy for robots’ failures in an automotive assembly system

Automotive assembly lines are often characterized by robots’ failures that may result in stoppages of the lines and manual backup of tasks. The phenomena tend to impair throughput rate and products’ quality. This paper presents a backup strategy in which working robots perform tasks of failed robots. The proposed Mixed-Integer Linear-Programming based approach minimizes the throughput loss by utilizing the robots’ redundancy in the system. Two algorithms are developed to comply with stochastic conditions of a real-world environment. The performance of these algorithms is compared with several heuristics, and the downstream-backup based algorithm is found superior to all other methods.     

Highway robbery: complementary monopoly and the hold-up problem

We analyze the hold-up problem in the context of the Cournot–Ellet theory of complementary monopoly. The strategic interaction among travelers and two distinct owners of successive segments of a segment road is used as a metaphor for complementary goods that are traded sequentially. It is shown that when trade occurs double marginalization is eliminated. Furthermore, allowing for strategic placement of the tollbooths (simultaneous trade) avoids the hold-up problem but not double marginalization. Thus, this analysis suggests the endogenous creation of institutions among complementary monopolistic suppliers that assure their customers of not being held up whenever it is strategically possible.     

Tradability,closeness to market prices,and expected profit: their measurement for a binomial model of options pricing in a heterogeneous market

A reliable method of options pricing in real time would help various players, including hedgers and speculators, to make informed decisions. In this study, we develop an extensive simulation with multiple business environments, which includes the use of real data from the S&P 500 Index between the years 2010–2017 for the 30 days prior to expiration of the options. Forecasted tradability is computed based on the SH model: a theoretical model of real-time options pricing that takes into account players’ heterogeneity with regard to their willingness to accept offers proposed by the opposing player. The quality of the model is examined for the scenario in which the model players are speculators who act against the real market prices. We show that the equilibrium prices predicted by the SH model are close to the market prices (a deviation of up to approx. 3%) in an In-The-Money environment. Additionally, the tougher the players (i.e., the greater their level of unwillingness to accept a bid from the opposing player), the higher the average tradability. We also find that the level of willingness of the players has a greater effect on tradability than does option moneyness or the market trend.

     

A Double Moral Hazard Model of Organization Design

We develop a theory of organization design in which the firm's structure is chosen by trading off ex post efficiency in the implementation of projects against ex ante efficiency in the selection of projects. Using our framework, we derive a novel set of empirical predictions regarding differences between firms with a functional structure and firms with a divisional structure. We examine how the overall profitability of the two structures is affected by various factors like size, complexity, and asymmetry in the importance of tasks and also explore the desirability of adopting a narrow business strategy.     

The Dynamic Evolution of Preferences

This paper develops a general methodology for characterizing the dynamic evolution of preferences in a wide class of strategic interactions. We give simple conditions characterizing the limiting distribution of preferences in general games, and apply our results to study the evolutionary emergence of overconfidence and interdependent preferences. We also show that this methodology can be adapted to cases where preferences are only imperfectly observed. Earlier drafts of this paper were circulated under the title: “The Evolution of Perception Biases” and some of these results appeared in the earlier working paper Heifetz, Shannon and Spiegel (2003). We thank three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Shannon thanks the NSF for research support under grant SES-0351346.     

Sustainability in Practice

Should business lead on environmental sustainability? The article argues that while there are some environmental initiatives that support the mission of the business, such as energy savings that also reduce costs, business should not go too far. On the one hand, its ability to do so is limited since most of the carbon footprint is outside its four walls, and even where it can make substantial changes, it should not do it until consumers will be willing to pay for it and incur minor inconveniences.     

Optimal state‐contingent regulation under limited liability

We consider an optimal regulation model in which the regulated firm's production cost is subject to random, publicly observable shocks. The distribution of these shocks is correlated with the firm's cost type, which is private information. The regulator designs an incentive‐compatible regulatory scheme, which adjusts itself automatically ex post given the realization of the cost shock. We derive the optimal scheme, assuming that there is an upper bound on the financial losses that the firm can sustain in any given state. We first consider a two‐type, two‐state case, and then extend the results to the case of a continuum of firm types and an arbitrary finite number of states. We show that the first‐best allocation can be implemented if the state of nature conveys enough information about the firm's type and/or the maximal loss that the firm can sustain is sufficiently large. Otherwise, the solution is characterized by classical second‐best features.     

Ex post adaptations and hybrid contracts in software development services

We follow the recent literature on ex post adaptations in procurement and argue that highly volatile specifications result in multiple variations of fixed price (FP) and time and materials (T&M) contracts. Specifically, placing a cap on specification change in FP contracts prevents specification volatility, similar to the way that placing a cap on the price in T&M contracts prevents price escalation. We argue that these hybrid mechanisms are particularly important in software development contracting, a new critical business capability involving frequent and costly ex post adaptations to specification change. The level of completeness in these contractual archetypes is hypothesized to be determined by contracting costs and benefits, where costs are related to project uncertainty and benefits are related to the likelihood of vendor opportunism. We test this hypothesis with a unique data set of 270 software development contracts entered into by a leading international bank. The analysis confirms the existence of multiple hybrid contracts that mitigate both price escalation and specification volatility. It also shows that contracting costs and benefits explain more variance in contract choice when these hybrids are included, uncovering the detailed mechanisms used to curb opportunism when the vendor is less familiar to the client.