The informativeness of on-line advertising

Sending general advertisements with inflationary claims may attract additional visitors with whom an advertiser is poorly matched. This is costly when ads are priced per-click because many visitors (clickers) will not purchase. This renders per-click advertising particularly conducive to the transmission of information via ads. The admissibility of information transmission depends not only on advertiser behaviour, but also upon consumers' interpretation of and trust in ads. In less conducive environments, consumers quickly learn to place little stock in the claims they see advertised. This mechanism undermines the ability of advertisers and consumers to communicate under per-impression or per-sale fee structures. Consumers benefit from increased informativeness, but distortions introduced by the market power given to advertisers imply that society may be better-off with no information transmission taking place.     

A model of biased intermediation

We study situations in which consumers rely on a biased intermediary's advice when choosing among sellers. We introduce the notion that sellers' and consumers' payoffs can be congruent or conflicting, and show that this has important implications for the effects of bias. Under congruence, the firm benefiting from bias has an incentive to offer a better deal than its rival and consumers can be better‐off than under no bias. Under conflict, the favored firm offers lower utility, and bias harms consumers. We study various policies for dealing with bias and show that their efficacy also depends on whether the payoffs exhibit congruence or conflict.     

Are the best of the best better than the rest? The effect of multiple rankings on company value

In this paper, we explore the cumulative and interactive effects from being listed on one or more of four popular annual surveys (Fortune’s “Most Admired Companies” and “100 Best Companies to Work For,” Business Ethics “Best Corporate Citizens,” and Working Mother’s “100 Best Companies for Working Mothers.”) We find portfolios constructed of firms selected across these surveys add value to a portfolio, initially and over longer-holding periods, but the overall results are driven by the performance of those firms selected from the Most Admired Companies and Best Corporate Citizens rankings. We also discover that being listed in two or three different surveys on a yearly basis produces incremental value.     

COORDINATING PRODUCTION AND DISPOSAL OF COMMODITY STOCKPILES WITH APPLICATION TO AUSTRALIA'S WOOL INDUSTRY

Following the dismantling of a price-support program, a central bureaucracy is left with a commodity stockpile to dispose. It happened with wheat and feed grains in the U.S. in 1986 and wool in Australia in 1991. It soon may happen in Europe with grains, manufactured dairy products and other commodities which have supported prices. Obvious policies include privatising the stockpile, disposing of the stockpile by a central bureaucracy and quarantining the stockpile from the market. Each policy imposes constraints on disposal based, perhaps, on judgments of political acceptability to producers and government. In this article, optimal rules for production and disposal are derived and solved and a new policy is proposed. Then the model is applied to the disposal of Australia's wool stockpile. Results show that centralised disposal will almost always be preferred to privatisation of the stockpile. Centralised disposal is also preferred to quarantining the stockpile if interest rates are high, but quarantining is preferred if interest rates are low. Centralised disposal and quarantining are not optimal, however. Optimal production and disposal combines the efficiency of privatisation with the market power of centralised disposal. To achieve this, the property rights to the stockpile can be redefined using payment-in-kind certificates and individual transferable entitlements. The payment-in-kind certificates assign ownership of the stockpile to individual producers who then make both production and disposal decisions. The individual transferable entitlements allow the industry to produce efficiently and extend market power from the central bureaucracy to producers. For the Australian wool stockpile, optimal production and disposal would benefit the industry by an estimated $2.7 billion.     

The Usefulness of Direct and Indirect Cash Flow Disclosures

We investigate the ability of disclosed operating cash flow and indirect accruals components to explain annual returns for a sample of Australian firms. Consistent with claims made by accounting standard setters, we find evidence of significant explanatory power for disclosed operating cash flow components beyond aggregate operating cash flows when they also have significant incremental predictive power for future (one year ahead) operating cash flows. Accrual components also have incremental explanatory power for returns. In addition, we find evidence of significant explanatory power for operating cash flow components beyond estimates of the components (based on other financial statement disclosures) for firms with large differences between disclosed and estimated components.     

在日常工作过程中使用SPC

统计质量控制（SQC），以控制图为人们所熟悉，源于休哈特20世纪20年代在芝加哥城外的西方电气厂的工作。     

Product attributes and models of multiple discreteness

Demand for product characteristics is examined within the context of models that allow for both corner and interior solutions corresponding to zero and non-zero demand. Product attribute information is associated with marginal utility and curvature (satiation) parameters of various utility functions. Empirical applications demonstrate the need for incorporating characteristics in a fairly general way. We also compare our approach to an ideal point and pure Lancasterian versions of our nonlinear utility model. The data support our model over either the ideal point or Lancasterian variants.