Everything I know about business I learned from monopoly

How do game designers approach their work? Perhaps in the same way that managers should. Here, the author, an expert in board-game design and the world's foremost authority on Monopoly, translates six tenets of game design into management principles. Three tenets focus on giving players the right level of structure. First, design simple and unambiguous rules: That also holds true in business; people engage most when responsibilities, objectives, and evaluation criteria are clear. Second, avoid frustrating the casual player. Just as not every game player aspires to be a grand master, not every employee wants to think like an executive. Third, establish a rhythm so that players know intuitively whether they are at the beginning, middle, or end of the game. Managers can also engineer such shifts of momentum and motivation for workers. Three more principles focus on providing entertainment. The most important is to tune into what's happening off the board. For many people, the real joy of a great game--or a great job--comes from the larger social experience surrounding it. Another key is to offer chances to come from behind. Even struggling employees want to believe, "The odds may be stacked against me, but just one great stroke and I'm right back in it." Finally, managers, like game designers, should provide outlets for latent talents. Games themselves can be useful in the workplace. For instance, an afternoon of game playing builds relationships and increases an organization's social capital. And simulation games can sharpen employees' business judgment. Managers may come to appreciate that games succeed depending on how well designed they are--and that many design challenges have their equivalents in the art of management.     

Strategic intensity: a conversation with world chess champion Garry Kasparov

It's hard to find a better exemplar for competition than chess. The image of two brilliant minds locked in a battle of skill and will-in which chance plays little or no apparent role-is compelling. Even people who have scant knowledge of the game instinctively recognize that chess is unusual in terms of its intellectual complexity and the strategic demands it places on players. Can strategists learn anything from chess players about what it takes to win? To find out, H BR senior editor Diane L. Coutu talked with Garry Kasparov, the world's number one player since 1984. Kasparov believes that success in both chess and business is very much a question of psychological advantage; the complexity of the game demands that players rely heavily on their instincts and on gamesmanship. In this wide-ranging interview, Kasparov explores the power of chess as a model for business competition; the balance that chess players strike between intuition and analysis; the significance of his loss to IBM's chess-playing computer, Deep Blue; and how his legendary rivalry with Anatoly Karpov, Kasparov's predecessor as World Chess Champion, affected his own success. Kasparov also shares his solution to what he calls the champion's dilemma, a question for all world masters, whether they are in business, sports, or chess: Where does a virtuoso go after he has accomplished everything he's ever wanted to, even beyond his wildest imagination? If you are lucky, says Kasparov, your enemies will push you to be passionate about staying at the top.     

Expert Systems for Evaluating Business Opportunities: Implementing the Management Advisor at Krypton Chemical

This paper investigates issues arising in procuring and implementing a commercial high-end expert system, Palladian's Management Advisor. This system is intended for improving corporate decisions about financial investments in new business opportunities, e.g. projects involving new plants, equipment, products, or marketing expenditures. We look at Krypton Chemical's experiences with the Management Advisor from both the customer's and the vendor's viewpoints. The discussion raises some difficult questions about what it takes to make high-end financial expert systems successful. The paper then concludes with recommendations intended to improve design, marketing, procurement and implementation practices with respect to such systems.     

A validated expert system for decision making in corporate recovery

This paper describes INSOLVE—an expert system for corporate recovery decisions. INSOLVE was built to understand the decision-making processes of corporate recovery experts who deal with companies in financial difficulties. INSOLVE has been developed using a multi-phase process similar to that widely adopted in software engineering. The expert system is described in terms of the assessment task and interpretation models of CommonKADS. The detailed results of the validation of INSOLVE with 17 experts show that it is an accurate model of human expertise in this domain. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

注册会计师审计质量控制的博弈分析

注册会计师审计质量优劣直接影响证券市场的有效程度,而审计质量实际状况一定程度上是注册会计师与上市公司管理当局及监管机构、上市公司管理当局与监管机构及股东之间互相博弈的结果。业界对审计质量博弈论研究主要集中于两个局中人的单阶段静态分析。本文构建了四个局中人的多阶段动态博弈模型,对注册会计师审计质量控制的行为选择及其影响因素进行了分析,其结论是:注册会计师审计策略与审计成本和审计风险高度相关,公司管理当局委托注册会计师的行为与审计报告意见紧密联系,独立董事行为影响注册会计师审计质量,管理当局的披露策略与期望收益和风险损失高度相关。     

银行问市场经纪业务发展现状与建议

我国银行间市场自2006年正式引入货币经纪制度以来,经纪业务发展势头良好,市场参与者应用经纪业务的深度和广度不断提高。该文通过分析国内外经纪业务发展现状与动态,揭示了进一步推动经纪业务发展的重要作用和意义,并针对我国银行间市场经纪业务存在的不足,提出了相关政策建议。     

利益博弈:功能视角的农村金融组织体系重构的逻辑依据

运用博弈分析方法,以农村金融机构和农户为参与人构建博彝模型,基于农村贷款的实施过程来分析双方的行为和可能产生的结果,为"功能视角"的农村金融组织体系重构提供逻辑依据.     

The probability evaluation game: an instrument to highlight the skill of reflexive listening

This paper describes the development of the Probability Evaluation Game (PEG): an innovative teaching instrument that emphasises the sophistication of listening and highlights listening as a key skill for accounting practitioners. Whilst in a roundtable format, playing PEG involves participants individually evaluating a series of probability terms and then calling out their evaluations amongst fellow players who have done the same. When listening to peers’ responses, any difference in evaluation of the same term confronts players with the knowledge that without skilled, reflexive listening conversations are dangerous playgrounds of miscommunication. The PEG presents a valuable learning opportunity where the potential impact of this issue for accounting and business world can be discussed. This paper details how PEG was developed, its format and how it has been used with students and accounting practitioners. Furthermore emergent, and often intriguing, learning points are discussed and related to accounting and the workplace more generally.     

Combining Expert Systems and Hypertext: Opportunities and Obstacles

Hypertext discussions are occurring more frequently at expert systems conferences. Hypertext is not an expert system language or expert system shell, but instead it is simultaneously a method of storing and retrieving data. The growing interest in hypertext in the expert system domain is because the combination of hypertext capabilities and expert systems creates a compelling synergistic relationship (Oren, 1987). During a panel discussion at the Second International Symposium on Expert Systems in Business, Finance and Accounting, Bill Swartout compared traditional expert systems to hypertext by saying that the knowledge base (e.g. the production rules) of an expert system can be thought of as formal knowledge and hypertext can be thought of as informal knowledge. This article will demonstrate how this informal knowledge can add power to traditional expert systems by increasing the flexibility of the explanation facilities and thereby the appeal of the system to a broader range of users. The article also will discuss how expert systems can improve the functionality of hypertext systems by adding intelligence to traditional hypertext systems. This article is divided into three sections. The first describes basic hypertext concepts. The second section shows how hypertext can enhance expert systems and, conversely, how expert systems can enhance hypertext systems. The final section discusses some potential problems and concerns that must be considered when designing a hypertext system.     

The 'Independence' of Expert Opinions in Corporate Takeovers: Agreeing With Directors' Recommendations

Abstract:   The impact of non‐audit services on auditor independence has been the recent focus of regulators worldwide. Using expert reports provided in Australian takeovers, this study investigates a context where the audit independence issue is reversed. As approximately a quarter of expert reports are prepared by the target firm's auditor, concerns have been expressed over the independence of the opinion provided. This paper finds that, relative to other experts, there is no difference in the rate at which experts with other business dealings with the target, including the target's auditor, provide an opinion that agrees with that of directors. However, the capital market reaction around the release of the report indicates that reports produced by auditors are viewed as non‐independent.     

Fusion of expertise among accounting faculty: towards an expertise model for academia in accounting

This paper aims to portray an accounting faculty expert. It is argued that neither the academic nor the professional orientation alone appears adequate in developing accounting faculty expertise. The accounting faculty expert is supposed to develop into a so-called ‘flexpert’ (Van der Heijden, 2003) who is able to deploy practical accounting exposure in teaching and research. This ‘fusion’ (mix of expertise) resulting from gaining expertise in quite different occupational areas, is attainable at academic career start levels in accounting, where during one's career orientation a professor is both an academic and a professional by training. Fusion is also attainable in complementary competence building wherein the faculty member invests in training and development in the non-core competence domain. The so-called ‘fusion framework’ that is depicted in this contribution could be usefully applied in recruitment efforts of business schools in search of a promising accounting professor.     

3-D negotiation. Playing the whole game

What stands between you and the yes you want? According to negotiation experts David Lax and James Sebenius, executives face obstacles in three common and complementary dimensions. The first dimension is tactics, or interactions at the bargaining table. The second is deal design, or the ability to draw up a deal at the table that creates lasting value. And the third is setup, which includes the structure of the negotiation itself. Each dimension is crucial in the bargaining process, but most executives fixate on only the first two: 1-D negotiators focus on improving their interpersonal skills at the negotiating table--courting their clients, using culturally sensitive language, and so on. 2-D negotiators focus on diagnosing underlying sources of value in a deal and then recrafting the terms to satisfy all parties. In this article, the authors explore the often-neglected third dimension. Instead of just playing the game at the bargaining table, 3-D negotiators reshape the scope and sequence of the game itself to achieve the desired outcome. They scan widely to identify elements outside of the deal on the table that might create a more favorable structure for it. They map backward from their ideal resolution to the current setup of the deal and carefully choose which players to approach and when. And they manage and frame the flow of information among the parties involved to improve their odds of getting to yes. Lax and Sebenius describe the tactics 3-D negotiators use--such as bringing new, previously unconsidered players into a negotiation--and cite examples from business and foreign affairs. Negotiators need to act in all three dimensions, the authors argue, to create and claim value for the long term.     

APX: An Integrated Knowledge-Based System to Support Audit Planning

Auditors who must express an opinion on the financial statements of publicly held enterprises must perform a series of risk assessments as the basis for selecting appropriate audit procedures to be performed. Although many auditing expert systems have been developed for individual components of the audit risk assessment process such as inherent and control risk assessment, none integrate these assessments to arrive at the ultimate objective of assessing the allowable level of detection risk which drives audit procedure selection. This paper discusses critical design concerns for audit planning expert systems in light of the integrated nature of the steps involved in the audit planning process. The design and development of an integrated audit planning expert system called APX (Audit Planning eXpert) is also discussed. A distinguishing feature of APX is that it not only performs the individual types of risk assessments but it also integrates the resulting assessments to arrive at allowable detection risk. The knowledge acquisition and system development process are described to illustrate some of the mechanics of developing such a system.     

Towards evolutionary game models of financial markets

Evolutionary game models analyse strategic interaction over time; equilibrium emerges (or fails to emerge) as players/traders adjust their actions in response to the payoffs they earn. This paper sketches some early and some recent evolutionary game models that contain ideas useful in modelling financial markets. It spotlights recent work on adaptive landscapes. In an extended example, the distribution of player/trader behaviour obeys a variant of Burgers' partial differential equation, and solutions involve travelling shock waves. It is conjectured that financial market crashes might insightfully be modelled in a similar fashion.     

Threat to regulate and coordination failures: Experimental evidence

Coordination games can represent a wide range of issues in real estate. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment designed to investigate the impact of regulatory threats in a coordination game. The experiment consisted of two sessions. The first session included a simple coordination game. We found significant coordination failures among the players in this session. We then conducted a second session in which we introduced a new player who had the choice to either intervene and regulate the payoffs of the other players or not to intervene and let the other players' actions determine the outcome. Our objective was to test whether the introduction of such a regulatory authority would induce more cooperative play by the players and move the market to the Pareto superior outcome. We found this not to be the case. There was no statistically significant difference between the choices of subjects in the two sessions.     

Underlying principles of the electronization of business: a research agenda

This paper discusses the underlying principles of the electronization of business and its impact on accounting information systems (AIS). The concept of electronization of business processes and the consequent deconstruction of the value chain in the new economy is introduced. A bitable society requires an entirely new set of processes and players, where traditional companies will either perish or incorporate substantive changes in the way they conduct business. The general effects of electronization of business lead to the introduction of 8 emerging business issues and 13 research opportunities. The paper concludes that the phenomenon of electronization is a heterogeneous one, with firms and industries developing features at different paces. This heterogeneity presents yet another challenge to developing new and relevant accounting standards that drive the processes found in state-of-the-art systems.     

The new economy is stronger than you think

Many policy makers at the Fed contend that the new economy is a fragile bubble--and that with the "irrational exuberance" of the capital markets, the sky is going to fall on the U.S. economy. That couldn't be further from the truth, according to William Sahlman. As long as the government doesn't interfere, he argues, the economy is sturdy, resilient, and raring to grow. The new economy is strong for several reasons. First, it is based on a business model that works. Any business system that relentlessly drives out inefficiency, forces intelligent business-process reengineering, and gives customers more of what they want will be sustainable. Second, it is built on America's admiration for entrepreneurs and its tolerance for failure, not to mention its easy access to capital. Third, the new economy is attracting the best and brightest minds in the country. And finally, says Sahlman, the new economy is strong because it is spreading. It may be primarily an American phenomenon now, but in a few short years it will start to show its effects everywhere, making the whole world a more productive place. Still, Sahlman believes, the road ahead is not without potholes and sharp curves. But that is what the new economy is all about, he maintains--companies attacking the status quo and entrenched players, companies experimenting to find new technologies that improve or replace earlier ones. Such activity presents no cause for alarm. The economic, social, and cultural factors undergirding the new economy are rock solid. It's simply a matter of letting them stand.     

Portfolio optimization under model uncertainty and BSDE games

We consider robust optimal portfolio problems for markets modeled by (possibly non-Markovian) Itô–Lévy processes. Mathematically, the situation can be described as a stochastic differential game, where one of the players (the agent) is trying to find the portfolio that maximizes the utility of her terminal wealth, while the other player (“the market”) is controlling some of the unknown parameters of the market (e.g., the underlying probability measure, representing a model uncertainty problem) and is trying to minimize this maximal utility of the agent. This leads to a worst case scenario control problem for the agent. In the Markovian case, such problems can be studied using the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman–Isaacs (HJBI) equation, but these methods do not work in the non-Markovian case. We approach the problem by transforming it into a stochastic differential game for backward stochastic differential equations (a BSDE game). Using comparison theorems for BSDEs with jumps we arrive at criteria for the solution of such games in the form of a kind of non-Markovian analogue of the HJBI equation. The results are illustrated by examples.     

Risk Awareness of Interpersonal Trust and Entrepreneurship in China: Evidence from Survey Data

This paper aims to build a theoretical framework for the influence of risk awareness of interpersonal trust (RAIT) on entrepreneurship, and explores the influence of RAIT on entrepreneurship with the micro survey data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2010–2013. The study found that, individuals with higher level of RAIT, their probability of starting new business will increase significantly, and with every increase of RAIT level, the probability of business venturing increase almost 4.0%. No mediation effects of information screening and cooperative mechanism are found in the relationship between RAIT and entrepreneurship. Moreover, during the venturing process, risks accompanying interpersonal trust cannot be reduced by social input; the reduction occurs only in eastern China where the economic system and the industrial development standards are more comprehensive and mature. This paper contributes to the literatures in the following two areas: it provides new evidence on how to deal with risks in the entrepreneurship process that accompanying interpersonal trust; meanwhile, it provides an explanatory mechanism on how the risk awareness affects business venturing.     

Expert Systems in Accountancy: A Review of Some Recent Applications

This paper assesses the current and likely impact of expert systems on the accounting community.

The paper begins by briefly reviewing about twenty financially-oriented systems, including those which model expertise in the sub-domains of auditing, taxation advice, financial planning and business risk assessment. The predominantly narrow view taken by some authors in the literature is noted. An attempt is made to broaden this view by ascertaining why particular classes of application might have been chosen in preference to others, and to comment on the significance of this choice. The number and scope of applications are analysed, and some observations are made on their current state of development. Some conclusions are drawn on the suitability of expert systems for traditional accountancy tasks, and an assessment of their current level of success is made. Their likely future impact is considered and the conclusion is drawn that there are still many stumbling blocks in the way of successful implementations of large scale systems but that a useful niche may exist for smaller systems.