Guidelines for Corporate Trademark Licensing

Licensing a trademark in many firms, if it occurs at all, is an incidental ad hoc arrangement. An unorganized approach can mean trouble. It can also mean the firm is losing an opportunity to exploit fully a valuable asset. Tom Meyer, Cathie Tinney, and Terry Tinney argue that trademark licensing is deserving of careful attention and planning.     

Veld products and income generation in the southern Cape Strandveld

Only marginal farming activities take place in the Cape Strandveld area south of Alber‐tinia. While income from farming and wages are low, coloured families in the district are still making a living from traditional, informal occupations. Over a period of one year the activities of roughly fifty coloured families in the Albertinia Strandveld area were studied. These people being mostly illiterate, no formal questionnaire was used, but the author directly participated in their various activities and asked informal questions about their occupations. A questionnaire was sent out by Du Preez (1988) to about 150 white landowners in the area and we discussed these findings in relation to the informal sector study. Activities included thatch reed cutting, mole catching, honey collecting, aloe juice tapping, firewood cutting, hunting, fishing, breaking in horses, picking wild flowers and collecting sour figs. Higher incomes would be generated by improved techniques and expanded markets, but these activities should not be absorbed into the modern and formal economic system.     

A Formal Study of Distributed Meeting Scheduling

Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, requires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or her privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making efficient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting scheduling is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meetings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the process tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed schedulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we have intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling performance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in overconstrained situations, namely, scheduling of high priority meetings at short notice, which requires cancellation and rescheduling of previously scheduled meetings. Our model provides a springboard into deeper investigations of important issues in distributed artificial intelligence as well, and we outline our ongoing work in this direction.     

Negative nominal interest rates: Three ways to overcome the zero lower bound

The paper considers three methods for eliminating the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and thus for restoring symmetry to the domain over which the Central Bank can vary its official policy rate. They are: (1) abolishing currency (which would also be a useful crime-fighting measure); (2) paying negative interest on currency by taxing currency; and (3) decoupling the numéraire from the currency/medium of exchange/means of payment and introducing an exchange rate between the numéraire and the currency; this exchange rate can be set over time to achieve a forward discount (expected depreciation) of the currency vis-à-vis the numéraire when the nominal interest rate in terms of the numéraire is set at a negative level for monetary policy purposes.     

Valuing ARM Rate Caps: Implications of 1970–84 Interest Rate Behavior

This paper computes how coupon rates on hypothetical default-free 1- 3- and 5-year adjustable rate mortgages with various caps and teaser rates issued during the 1970–76 period would have had to be set in order for the ARMs to have earned the market rate of return over a 7 1/2-year holding period. The 1970–84 period includes both a relatively stable interest rate experience (1970–77) and a "worse case" sharply rising rate environment (1977–84). Thus the calculations include the entire gamut of margins that lenders might need to charge for various caps in order to earn the market rate of return. What margins lenders should be charging at any point in time depends on the relative likelihood of future interest rate paths, e.g., the 1970–77 pattern versus the 1977–84 pattern. More formally, the appropriate charge depends on the slope of the yield curve and the perceived volatility of interest rates.