危机处理之道

危机是无法彻底避免的,但企业可以预见危机,并且在危机发生后,有效管理、控制危机,最终让危机消弭于无形。如今,明智、负责的企业都建立了危机应对制度,以帮助自己未雨绸缪,并且在出现危机局势后更加有效地做出反应,这样的制度包含以下要素：     

Planned Changes in Accounting Principles for UK Life Insurance Companies: A Preliminary Investigation of Stock Market Impact

The Association of British Insurers' (ABI) proposals for an 'accruals' method would have the effect of 'front-loading' profits reported on life assurance business compared with the traditional 'statutory solvency' basis. The ABI argued that adoption of the method would lead to a more realistic valuation of life company shares. This research tests this view by investigating, by means of an event study, the stock market impacts of the announcements of the proposals and the initial releases of 'accruals' profits, utilising a recently developed methodology for allowing for the effect of industry and event date clustering. The results found here do not provide any evidence to substantiate the ABI's view, although they do indicate that, where companies signal a change in the allocation of results as between shareholders and policyholders, share prices do reflect the perceived change in shareholder wealth. Moreover, it is argued that the accruals method itself may be more appropriately seen as reflecting and enabling a more pervasive change in managerial approach, refocusing on adding value for shareholders rather than policyholders. Any improvement in share prices resulting from this development might therefore only be expected to be very gradual and hard to distinguish from the impact of other effects.     

Sustainable water storage by agricultural businesses: Strategic responses to institutional pressures

Management of water storage in agriculture is under increasing public scrutiny. In Australia, water is being stored unsustainably by agricultural businesses, putting communities downstream at risk. Yet, sustainable water storage management institutional policy mechanisms remain disjointed around the country. This study seeks to investigate the problem through application of Oliver's (1991) strategic response typology to a survey of 404 agribusiness managers in four different institutional environments. Findings highlight the importance of social aspects of water storage and sharing in agribusiness regions and industries, and suggest that increased manager connectedness could reduce resistance to water storage policy pressures. The results not only provide beneficial guidance for policymakers faced with potentially catastrophic flood and drought conditions exacerbated by poor water storage management practice, but also add support to those found by Clemens and Douglas (2005), indicating the robustness of this theoretical approach for solutions to modern problems faced by business, policymakers and society.     

FRACAS: A Computerized Aid for Reasoning in Tax

Problem solving in the tax domain requires two kinds of knowledge: of the law itself and of how the law has been applied in the past. The need for the second factor arises as a result of the ambiguity of natural language. The problem solver requires information on how the courts have adjudicated specific cases in the past. This information would then provide the basis for reasoning about the current case. In this paper we address the issue of developing a system which will retrieve relevant historical cases. The cases are stored using a frame representation scheme and the users can retrieve cases by specifying either attributes alone or attributes and values associated with them. Currently the system has been implemented in Pascal on a Cray. The case base contains 250 cases relating to Section 183 of the tax code.