Customer retention measurement in the UAE banking sector

This aper investigates how image, perceived service quality and satisfaction determine retention in a retail bank setting. Data were collected from retail banking customers in the United Arab Emirates. The results show that image is both directly and indirectly related to retention via satisfaction, while perceived service quality is indirectly related to retention via satisfaction. The paper concludes that satisfaction is not the sole determinant of retention in retail banking. The managerial and research implications of the study are also discussed.     

Anonymous price taking equilibrium in Tiebout economies with a continuum of agents: Existence and characterization

We introduce a model of a local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite but unbounded populations, where the set of possible projects for each jurisdiction/club is unrestricted in size. Under boundedness of per capita payoffs, which simply ensures that equal treatment payoffs are bounded above, we apply results of Kaneko and Wooders (1986) to obtain nonemptiness of the core of the economy. We then demonstrate, under the stronger condition of strict small group effectiveness, that the equal treatment core coincides with the set of price-taking equilibrium outcomes with anonymous prices—that is, prices for public goods depend only on observable characteristics of agents. Existence of equilibrium follows from nonemptiness of the core and equivalence of the core to the set of equilibrium outcomes. Our approach provides a new technique for showing existence of equilibrium in economies with a continuum of agents.     

No Arbitrage in Discrete Time Under Portfolio Constraints

In frictionless securities markets, the characterization of the no-arbitrage condition by the existence of equivalent martingale measures in discrete time is known as the fundamental theorem of asset pricing. In the presence of convex constraints on the trading strategies, we extend this theorem under a closedness condition and a nondegeneracy assumption. We then provide connections with the superreplication problem solved in Föllmer and Kramkov (1997).     

No arbitrage conditions and liquidity

We extend the fundamental theorem of asset pricing to the case of markets with liquidity risk. Our results generalize, when the probability space is finite, those obtained by Kabanov et al. [Kabanov, Y., Stricker, C., 2001. The Harrison-Pliska arbitrage pricing theorem under transaction costs. Journal of Mathematical Economics 35, 185–196; Kabanov, Y., Rásonyi, M., Stricker, C., 2002. No-arbitrage criteria for financial markets with efficient friction. Finance and Stochastics 6, 371–382; Kabanov, Y., Rásonyi, M., Stricker, C., 2003. On the closedness of sums of convex cones in L⁰$L^0$ and the robust no-arbitrage property. Finance and Stochastics] and by Schachermayer [Schachermayer, W., 2004. The fundamental theorem of asset pricing under poportional transaction costs in finite discrete time. Mathematical Finance 14 (1), 19–48] for markets with proportional transaction costs. More precisely, we restate the notions of consistent and strictly consistent price systems and prove their equivalence to corresponding no arbitrage conditions. We express these results in an analytical form in terms of the subdifferential of the so-called liquidation function. We conclude the paper with a hedging theorem.     

INTERSECTORAL ALLIANCE AND SOCIAL INNOVATION: WHEN CORPORATIONS MEET CIVIL SOCIETY

ABSTRACT: This article analyses an alliance between a public utility company and a consortium of Associations upholding consumer rights. The project consists of developing means in order to help customers with very low income in a collection situation by suggesting payment arrangements that would take account of their financial situation. Inter‐organizational collaboration is a way to increase the capacities of organizations and to apply leverage to existing resources so as to solve social problems more effectively by pooling together resources, skills and knowledge. We examine the making of this social innovation through the arrangements taking in three institutional dimensions: cognitive, normative and regulative. The case study shows that the legitimacy of the agreement was based on recombining the values of fairness and solidarity. The innovation process was rooted in the exchange of knowledge and access to resources based on the expertise of actors. The agreement moved beyond the experimental framework when it was diffused as a newly learned procedure which became an organizational routine.     

LIQUIDATION OF AN INDIVISIBLE ASSET WITH INDEPENDENT INVESTMENT

We provide an extension of the explicit solution of a mixed optimal stopping–optimal stochastic control problem introduced by Henderson and Hobson. The problem examines whether the optimal investment problem on a local martingale financial market is affected by the optimal liquidation of an independent indivisible asset. The indivisible asset process is defined by a homogeneous scalar stochastic differential equation, and the investor's preferences are defined by a general expected utility function. The value function is obtained in explicit form, and we prove the existence of an optimal stopping–investment strategy characterized as the limit of an explicit maximizing strategy. Our approach is based on the standard dynamic programming approach.     

OPTIMAL INVESTMENT UNDER RELATIVE PERFORMANCE CONCERNS

We consider the problem of optimal investment when agents take into account their relative performance by comparison to their peers. Given N interacting agents, we consider the following optimization problem for agent i, : where is the utility function of agent i, his portfolio, his wealth, the average wealth of his peers, and is the parameter of relative interest for agent i. Together with some mild technical conditions, we assume that the portfolio of each agent i is restricted in some subset . We show existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium in the following situations:

• ‐ unconstrained agents,
• ‐ constrained agents with exponential utilities and Black–Scholes financial market.

We also investigate the limit when the number of agents N goes to infinity. Finally, when the constraints sets are vector spaces, we study the impact of the s on the risk of the market.     

Consumer trust toward retail websites: Comparison between pure click and click-and-brick retailers

This paper examines the effects of security/privacy and social presence of retailers on consumer's e-trust in two different contexts: pure click and click and brick retailers. It explores how e-trust affects consumer attitudes toward websites and WOM. A conceptual model is tested using Structural Equation Modeling, on a random sample of 989 French customers. Results suggest that perceived website social presence and perceived security/privacy exert strong and positive impacts on website credibility and benevolence, which in turn directly influence website attitudes and indirectly influence word-of-mouth. One major difference between pure click and click-and-brick retailers is that the role of social presence in developing online benevolence is more important in the case of pure click retailers. The study concludes with managerial implications that may be useful in retail marketing.     

Optimal investment with taxes: an existence result

We study the deterministic control problem of maximizing utility from consumption of an agent who seeks to optimally allocate his wealth between consumption and investment in a financial asset subject to taxes on benefits with first-in–first-out priority rule on sales. Short sales are prohibited and consumption is restricted to be non-negative. Such a problem has been introduced in a previous paper by the same authors where the first-order conditions have been derived. In this paper, we establish an existence result for this non-classical optimal control problem.     

Option pricing by large risk aversion utility¶under transaction costs

We consider a multi-asset continuous-time model of a financial market with transaction costs and prove that, for a strongly risk-averse investor, the reservation price of a contingent claim approaches the super-replication price increased by the liquidation value of the initial endowment.