产业集群交易费用分析及其超边际模型研究

产业集群是当今世界经济中颇具特色的经济组织形式,其自身具有较强的竞争优势,而交易费用是使产业集群具有竞争优势的关键因素。运用超边际分析方法结合交易费用内部化理论,在对产业集群交易费用分析的基础上,构建产业集群交易费用超边际模型和逻辑模型,并通过模型超边际结构模式分析得出:产业集群有助于减少交易间服务费用和学习费用,使得交易费用降低,促进产业分工进一步深化,提高企业的竞争优势。     

多极世界中的美元政策:从“善意忽视”走向“积极管理”

美元作为世界主要储备货币和国际交换媒介,降低了美国消费者和企业的交易成本,减少了美元借款人的融资成本。当前国际货币体系走向多极化,国际经济、政治、社会和科学技术等发生重大变化,美元政策变革势在必行。短期内美元作为世界主要储备货币的地位难以动摇,但关于美元政策应该尽快从"善意忽视"转变为"积极管理"。     

Technical trading revisited: False discoveries,persistence tests,and transaction costs

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index from 1897 to 2011, and we use the false discovery rate (FDR) as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules, which allows diversifying against model uncertainty. Persistence tests show that, even with the more powerful FDR technique, an investor would never have been able to select ex ante the future best-performing rules. Moreover, even in-sample, the performance is completely offset by the introduction of low transaction costs. Overall, our results seriously call into question the economic value of technical trading rules that has been reported for early periods.     

The coming commoditization of processes

Despite the much-ballyhooed increase in outsourcing, most companies are in do-it-yourself mode for the bulk of their processes, in large part because there's no way to compare outside organizations' capabilities with those of internal functions. Given the lack of comparability, it's almost surprising that anyone outsources today. But it's not surprising that cost is by far companies' primary criterion for evaluating outsourcers or that many companies are dissatisfied with their outsourcing relationships. A new world is coming, says the author, and it will lead to dramatic changes in the shape and structure of corporations. A broad set of process standards will soon make it easy to determine whether a business capability can be improved by outsourcing it. Such standards will also help businesses compare service providers and evaluate the costs versus the benefits of outsourcing. Eventually these costs and benefits will be so visible to buyers that outsourced processes will become a commodity, and prices will drop significantly. The low costs and low risk of outsourcing will accelerate the flow of jobs offshore, force companies to reassess their strategies, and change the basis of competition. The speed with which some businesses have already adopted process standards suggests that many previously unscrutinized areas are ripe for change. In the field of technology, for instance, the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute has developed a global standard for software development processes, called the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). For companies that don't have process standards in place, it makes sense for them to create standards by working with customers, competitors, software providers, businesses that processes may be outsourced to, and objective researchers and standard-setters. Setting standards is likely to lead to the improvement of both internal and outsourced processes.     

How successful leaders think

In search of lessons to apply in our own careers, we often try to emulate what effective leaders do. Roger Martin says this focus is misplaced, because moves that work in one context may make little sense in another. A more productive, though more difficult, approach is to look at how such leaders think. After extensive interviews with more than 50 of them, the author discovered that most are integrative thinkers -that is, they can hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once and then come up with a new idea that contains elements of each but is superior to both. Martin argues that this process of consideration and synthesis (rather than superior strategy or faultless execution) is the hallmark of exceptional businesses and the people who run them. To support his point, he examines how integrative thinkers approach the four stages of decision making to craft superior solutions. First, when determining which features of a problem are salient, they go beyond those that are obviously relevant. Second, they consider multidirectional and nonlinear relationships, not just linear ones. Third, they see the whole problem and how the parts fit together. Fourth, they creatively resolve the tensions between opposing ideas and generate new alternatives. According to the author, integrative thinking is an ability everyone can hone. He points to several examples of business leaders who have done so, such as Bob Young, cofounder and former CEO of Red Hat, the dominant distributor of Linux opensource software. Young recognized from the beginning that he didn't have to choose between the two prevailing software business models. Inspired by both, he forged an innovative third way, creating a service offering for corporate customers that placed Red Hat on a path to tremendous success.     

Putting your company's whole brain to work

Innovate or fall behind: the competitive imperative for virtually all businesses today is that simple. Responding to that command is difficult, however, because innovation takes place when different ideas, perceptions, and ways of processing and judging information collide. And it often requires collaboration among players who see the world differently. As a result, the conflict that should take place constructively among ideas all too often ends up taking place unproductively among people. Disputes become personal, and the creative process breaks down. The manager successful at fostering innovation figures out how to get different approaches to grate against one another in a productive process the authors call creative abrasion. The authors have worked with a number of organizations over the years and have observed many managers who know how to make creative abrasion work for them. Those managers understand that different people have different thinking styles: analytical or intuitive, conceptual or experiential, social or independent, logical or values driven. They deliberately design a full spectrum of approaches and perspectives into their organizations and understand that cognitively diverse people must respect other thinking styles. They set ground rules for working together to discipline the creative process. Above all, managers who want to encourage innovation need to examine what they do to promote or inhibit creative abrasion.     

New development: The application of incomplete contract theory to documenting Social Impact Bonds

ABSTRACT

Nobel laureate Oliver Hart’s work in developing a theory of incomplete contracting is relevant to explaining the evolution of the pay for success contracts that undergird Social Impact Bonds (SIBs). By its very nature, a pay for success contract that supports a SIB is likely to be functionally incomplete in that it is unable to describe and differentiate in the initial contract all relevant future states of the world in which the contract is to operate. Navigating this incomplete world can be particularly challenging when it comes to government contracting for quality outcomes in social services. Accordingly, Hart’s incomplete contracting framework can help us to think more clearly about how to document a pay for success contract that best supports a SIB transaction.     

Building a leadership brand

How do some firms produce a pipeline of consistently excellent managers? Instead of concentrating merely on strengthening the skills of individuals, these companies focus on building a broad organizational leadership capability. It's what Ulrich and Smallwood--cofounders of the RBL Group, a leadership development consultancy--call a leadership brand. Organizations with leadership brands take an "outside-in" approach to executive development. They begin with a clear statement of what they want to be known for by customers and then link it with a required set of management skills. The Lexus division of Toyota, for instance, translates its tagline--"The pursuit of perfection"--into an expectation that its leaders excel at managing quality processes. The slogan of Bon Secours Health System is "Good help to those in need." It demands that its managers balance business skills with compassion and caring. The outside-in approach helps firms build a reputation for high-quality leaders whom customers trust to deliver on the company's promises. In examining 150 companies with strong leadership capabilities, the authors found that the organizations follow five strategies. First, make sure managers master the basics of leadership--for example, setting strategy and grooming talent. Second, ensure that leaders internalize customers' high expectations. Third, incorporate customer feedback into evaluations of executives. Fourth, invest in programs that help managers hone the right skills, by tapping customers to participate in such programs. Finally, track the success of efforts to build leadership bench strength over the long-term. The result is outstanding management that persists even when individual executives leave. In fact, companies with the strongest leadership brands often become "leader feeders"--firms that regularly graduate leaders who go on to head other companies.     

Making sense of nonbusiness accounting.

The nonbusiness world of municipalities, colleges and universities, hospitals, and other nonprofit organizations follows its own rules when it comes to financial statements, and these are often confusing to anyone who is accustomed to business accounting. According to this author, it was the concept of fund accounting that divided the two worlds of business and nonbusiness accounting and led to a situation where it is almost impossible to judge the financial performance of nonbusiness entities. He shows how financial statements of the business and nonbusiness worlds can use the same standards, with a few modifications for the unique features of nonbusiness organizations.     

Drivers of technical trend-following rules' profitability in world stock markets

Testing short-horizon technical trend-following rules, including the first comprehensive evidence on the relatively-neglected MACD rule, on a large panel of world stock market indexes, we investigate the determinants of technical trading rule profitability. The main driver of trend-following rules' profitability is return persistence, which, in turn, is negatively related to market development. Return volatility adds to technical rule profitability. A new result is that the presence of an index futures market lowers profits to short-horizon trend-following rules after controlling for other indicators of market development. This may reflect the role of transaction costs as a friction retarding incorporation of information.     

Transaction cost, corporate governance and division of labor—A general equilibrium analysis of professional managers and its implication to China's practice

This paper develops a Walrasian general equilibrium model based on transaction cost and specialization to investigate the emergence and evolution of the role of management services in a competitive market with the general concern of corporate governance. It explains the reason why along the commercialization and modernization of human society, there is substantial increment of professional managers available for business world, and also becoming more affordable for more business companies. With the improvement of transaction efficiency, the market demand of professional managers are more preferred and profitable, which will also bring about new business structures and new economic institutional systems to improve the well-being to the overall members of society. Thereby, hiring professional managers in a competitive market can promote aggregate productivity by enlarging the scope for trading off network effects of the division of labor on aggregate productivity against transaction costs. To business practitioners, this model suggests hiring professional managers a key element of business viability during that a major transition took place in human society. China's recent practices in ownership transformation and corporate governance have also been examined, which further proves our argument that performance and effectiveness of interaction and interrelation between ownership and corporate governance are endogenously determined by different market conditions. It is impossible to achieve success ownership transformation and establish effective corporate governance without upgraded changes and consecutive adjustment and improvement of market conditions to facilitate the solid function of market mechanism.     

小额保险保费收取：灵活性与交易成本的权衡

保费收取问题是小额保险运营商面临的主要挑战之一。收费频次和时机的选择对于提高小额保险的覆盖面具有十分重要的意义,且目标人群的现金流及被保险事物的风险分布是决定保费收取策略制定的两个主要因素。保险商在采取灵活的保费收取策略来提高保险覆盖面的同时,也应注意到由此带来的交易成本的增加。从其它国家的经验来看．一个有效的方法是通过与贴近低收入人群的组织和机构进行合作,以团体为基础进行保费收取。     

Learning to lead at Toyota

Many companies have tried to copy Toyota's famous production system--but without success. Why? Part of the reason, says the author, is that imitators fail to recognize the underlying principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS), focusing instead on specific tools and practices. This article tells the other part of the story. Building on a previous HBR article, "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System," Spear explains how Toyota inculcates managers with TPS principles. He describes the training of a star recruit--a talented young American destined for a high-level position at one of Toyota's U.S. plants. Rich in detail, the story offers four basic lessons for any company wishing to train its managers to apply Toyota's system: There's no substitute for direct observation. Toyota employees are encouraged to observe failures as they occur--for example, by sitting next to a machine on the assembly line and waiting and watching for any problems. Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments. Employees embed explicit and testable assumptions in the analysis of their work. That allows them to examine the gaps between predicted and actual results. Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible. The company teaches employees at all levels to achieve continuous improvement through quick, simple experiments rather than through lengthy, complex ones. Managers should coach, not fix. Toyota managers act as enablers, directing employees but not telling them where to find opportunities for improvements. Rather than undergo a brief period of cursory walk-throughs, orientations, and introductions as incoming fast-track executives at most companies might, the executive in this story learned TPS the long, hard way--by practicing it, which is how Toyota trains any new employee, regardless of rank or function.     

Energy and habitat: Designing a sustainable urban ecosystem

As the world's cities grow so new ways of satisfying their demands for food and fuel resources will have to be found, especially in the third world where total fuel demands are expected to expand several fold in one generation. An ecological model for a future complex urban community is presented to illustrate the place of energy in a growing system and how habitat—the physical component—possesses life cycles interdependent with living species. Recycling, biomass fuels, telecommunications, marine living and the propagation of viable organizations are all elements that will enable the globe to sustain future expanding metropolises.     

The intra-day performance of market timing strategies and trading systems based on Japanese candlesticks

Abstract

We develop market timing strategies and trading systems to test the intra-day predictive power of Japanese candlesticks at the 5-minute interval on the 30 constituents of the DJIA index. Around a third of the candlestick rules outperform the buy-and-hold strategy at the conservative Bonferroni level. After adjusting for trading costs, however, just a few rules remain profitable. When we correct for data snooping by applying the SSPA test on double-or-out market timing strategies, no single candlestick rule beats the buy-and-hold strategy after transaction costs. We also design fully automated trading systems by combining the best-performing candlestick rules. No evidence of out-performance is found after transaction costs. Although Japanese candlesticks can somewhat predict intra-day returns on large US caps, we show that such predictive power is too limited for active portfolio management to outperform the buy-and-hold strategy when luck, risk, and trading costs are correctly measured.     

The Politics of Transaction Costs

This article aims to develop a model for analysing the operation and outcomes of the contracting process as it applies to public services, and to explore the politics of transaction costs involved in this process using a case study of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) in the UK. For this purpose the article deals with the policy outputs from two time periods, 1991 and 1994, which are regarded as the most dynamic years in terms of CCT policy implementation. The article also demonstrates how transaction costs may be manipulated in the contracting process by the interested parties. Finally, it suggests that the politics of transaction costs should be studied systematically in the future.     

Regional strategies for global leadership

The leaders of such global powerhouses as GE, Wal-Mart, and Toyota seem to have grasped two crucial truths: First, far from becoming submerged by the rising tide of globalization, geographic and other regional distinctions may in fact be increasing in importance. Second, regionally focused strategies, used in conjunction with local and global initiatives, can significantly boost a company's performance. The business and economic data reveal a highly regionalized world. For example, trade within regions, rather than across them, drove the surge of international commerce in the second half of the twentieth century. Regionalization is also apparent in foreign direct investment, companies' international sales, and competition among the world's largest multinationals. Harvard Business School Professor Pankaj Ghemawat says that the most successful companies employ five types of regional strategies in addition to--or even instead of--global ones: home base, portfolio, hub, platform, and mandate. Some companies adopt the strategies in sequence, but the most nimble switch from one to another and combine approaches as their markets and businesses evolve. At Toyota, for example, exports from the home base continue to be substantial even as the company builds up an international manufacturing presence. And as Toyota achieves economies of scale and scope with a strong network of hubs, the company also pursues economies of specialization through interregional mandates. Embracing regional strategies requires flexibility and creativity. A company must decide what constitutes a region, choose the most appropriate strategies, and mesh those strategies with the organization's existing structures. In a world that is neither truly global nor truly local, finding ways of coordinating within and across regions can deliver a powerful competitive advantage.     

Profit Possibilities in Currency Markets: Arbitrage, Hedging, and Speculation

This paper reviews and extends the existing literature on covered arbitrage, delineates the conditions for profitable arbitrage with the hedging instruments of forward and options contracts in the foreign exchange markets, and defines the maximum possible profits out of a given market environment. Next, the simple rules on speculation are articulated with and without transaction costs, and then we show how speculation can be covered with options and forwards. Finally, speculation is integrated with arbitrage and hedging, and further compounding of profit possibilities is illustrated.     

The dangers of feeling like a fake

In many walks of life-and business is no exception-there are high achievers who believe that they are complete fakes. To the outside observer, these individuals appear to be remarkably accomplished; often they are extremely successful leaders with staggering lists of achievements. These neurotic impostors--as psychologists call them--are not guilty of false humility. The sense of being a fraud is the flip side of giftedness and causes a great many talented, hardworking, and capable leaders to believe that they don't deserve their success. "Bluffing" their way through life (as they see it), they are haunted by the constant fear of exposure. With every success, they think, "I was lucky this time, fooling everyone, but will my luck hold? When will people discover that I'm not up to the job?" In his career as a management professor, consultant, leadership coach, and psychoanalyst, Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries has found neurotic impostors at all levels of organizations. In this article, he explores the subject of neurotic imposture and outlines its classic symptoms: fear of failure, fear of success, perfectionism, procrastination, and workaholism. He then describes how perfectionist overachievers can damage their careers, their colleagues' morale, and the bottom line by allowing anxiety to trigger self-handicapping behavior and cripple the very organizations they're trying so hard to please. Finally, Kets de Vries offers advice on how to limit the incidence of neurotic imposture and mitigate its damage through discreet vigilance, appropriate intervention, and constructive support.     

Transaction costs and crowding

We use industry data to determine whether crowding of the investment space is caused by portfolio construction processes typical to the investment community. In particular, this paper examines the extent that transaction cost models cause crowding of the investment space, even when the investment models are completely unrelated to one another. We find that as transaction costs become more significant in the portfolio creation process as portfolios increase in size from $500 million to $5 billion, crowding actually declines for long-only portfolios and mainly declines, but sometimes increases for market neutral portfolios. This research sheds more light on how crowding develops through actions by players within the financial system.