Business ethics: the materiel/manufacturing perspective

The discussion of purchasing practices and product integrity, which have ethical implications for materiel/manufacturing management, serves to illustrate how routine decisions can have larger implications for the firm as a whole. Management needs to take a proactive role in confronting ethical issues by (1) demonstrating a corporate commitment to sound ethics in business practices, (2) providing written policies where appropriate to provide a basis for sound ethical conducts, (3) educating various functional areas to understand their responsibility in seeming unrelated ethical problems, (4) delegating authority in ethical issues where such issues are considered in decision making, and (5) fostering interfunctional communication as a means in establishing corporatewide responsibility. The basic philosophical principles of JIT serve as a blueprint for recognizing and managing ethical responsibility. The unexpected by-products of a JIT implementation may be vendor/customer good will and an excellent reputation for the firm.     

Museum marketing: Identification of high,moderate, and low attendee segments

This study was undertaken to discern differences between high, moderate, and low museum attendees. One-way analysis of variance and stepwise discriminant analysis were used for market segmentation purposes to differentiate the characteristics of the three groups. The discriminant analysis yielded a model which was found to predict better and was significantly different from the proportional chance prediction, and it is thus felt that a viable method for segmenting museum-goers has resulted.     

Signalling under intertemporal resolution of uncertainty: Distinguishing debt-with-warrants from similar offerings

This article extends existing static analyses of debt-with-warrants' ability to signal by considering the intertemporal resolution of uncertainty. Provided that managers seek to minimize residual risk while correctly signalling prospects, callable bonds-with-warrants can prove strictly superior to analogous offerings of pure debt or of debt-with-equity. Because our intertemporal structure allows bonds to be called while warrants remain outstanding, these complicated offerings can also be successfully discriminated from convertible bonds. Managers can further accentuate dissipation of residual risk by simultaneously issuing debt-with-warrants and buying down existing equity (through share repurchase or cash dividends).The authors express our appreciation to Charlie Jacklin for discussions concerning this material. Our thanks also go to an anonymous referee atRQFA who helped us to refine our final product.Much of the work for this paper was conducted while Professor Robbins was a Visiting Research Scholar at Stanford GSB.     

The impact of grand strategy and planning formality on financial performance

An empirical study involving 97 manufacturing firms that averaged $20 million in annual sales yielded a strong positive correlation between the degree of planning formality and firm performance. Additionally, interactive analysis disclosed that this relationship pervaded various grand strategies; the implication being that formalized strategic planning was consistently a positive factor associated with high levels of organizational performance.     

Application of Risk Theory to Interpretation of Stochastic Cash-Flow-Testing Results

Abstract

In this paper we consider the Sparre Andersen insurance risk model. Three cases are discussed: the ordinary renewal risk process, stationary renewal risk process, and s-delayed renewal risk process. In the first part of the paper we study the joint distribution of surplus immediately before and at ruin under the renewal insurance risk model. By constructing an exponential martingale, we obtain Lundberg-type upper bounds for the joint distribution. Consequently we obtain bounds for the distribution of the deficit at ruin and ruin probability. In the second part of the paper, we consider the special case of phase-type claims and rederive the closed-form expression for the distribution of the severity of ruin, obtained by Drekic et al. (2003, 2004). Finally, we present some numerical results to illustrate the tightness of the bounds obtained in this paper.     

The rule 10b5-1 loophole: an empirical study

This paper seeks to empirically examine the market effects of a loophole in insider trading law that allows insiders to cancel supposedly irrevocable pre-planned trades under SEC Rule 10b5-1 based on inside information. Based on an econometric analysis of a dataset of 81 NASDAQ-listed companies from 2004 to 2006, the paper concludes that: (1) the trading public attaches primary significance to the announcement of a 10b5-1 plan rather than the specified start date of that plan; (2) insiders make above-market profits using 10b5-1 plans but do not appear to arbitrarily or continually create such plans; (3) 10b5-1 plans have a significant negative effect on the liquidity of a firm’s shares, and therefore the firm’s cost of capital; and (4) insiders do not appear to increase the volatility of their own firms’ shares in order to profit by trading on the basis of material nonpublic information under the protection of the 10b5-1 safe harbor.