保险业要么锁定客户，要么收购

贝恩公司调查发现,仅有1／10的保险公司成功地实现连年持续地创造价值。许多公司最终表现欠佳的主要原因在于,他们严重误判自己提供客户所需产品／服务的能力。当高级主管被问及是否认为本公司提供最佳客户体验时,77％的高管自认为是,但仅有6％的客户认同。那么,究竟什么才是保险业实现最佳股东回报的关键呢?     

Are school counselors an effective education input?

We exploit within-school variation in counselors and find that one additional counselor reduces student misbehavior and increases boys’ academic achievement by over one percentile point. These effects compare favorably with those of increased teacher quality and smaller class sizes.     

Role thinking: Standing in other people’s shoes to forecast decisions in conflicts

When forecasting decisions in conflict situations, experts are often advised to figuratively stand in the other person’s shoes. We refer to this as “role thinking”, because, in practice, the advice is to think about how other protagonists will view the situation in order to predict their decisions. We tested the effect of role thinking on forecast accuracy. We obtained 101 role-thinking forecasts of the decisions that would be made in nine diverse conflicts from 27 Naval postgraduate students (experts) and 107 role-thinking forecasts from 103 second-year organizational behavior students (novices). The accuracy of the novices’ forecasts was 33% and that of the experts’ was 31%; both were little different from chance (guessing), which was 28%. The small improvement in accuracy from role-thinking strengthens the finding from earlier research that it is not sufficient to think hard about a situation in order to predict the decisions which groups of people will make when they are in conflict. Instead, it is useful to ask groups of role players to simulate the situation. When groups of novice participants adopted the roles of protagonists in the aforementioned nine conflicts and interacted with each other, their group decisions predicted the actual decisions with an accuracy of 60%.     

Group concept mapping methodology: toward an epistemology of group conceptualization,complexity, and emergence

Quality & Quantity - Group concept mapping is a participatory mixed-methods approach to social and behavioral research that integrates qualitative group processes with multivariate statistical...     

A note on the evaluation of long-run investment decisions using the sharpe ratio

This paper reexamines the use of the Sharpe ratio to measure the performance of large and small company stocks along with corporate bonds over different holding periods. It builds on previous research which cites the effects of serial correlation and non-normality in the creation of estimation error in the calculation of the Sharpe ratio. It finds that higher order moments such as skewness and kurtosis are a further source of error that must be accounted for when making inferences about asset performance.     

Exchange‐rate volatility and US–Hong Kong industry trade: is there evidence of a ‘third country’ effect?

In an effort to better understand the determinants of trade flows worldwide, researchers have recently incorporated external volatility (in addition to that of the partners’ bilateral exchange rate) into their models. The so‐called ‘third country’ effect is present if adding this term changes the bilateral volatility estimates that are found when external volatility is omitted. This study examines US exports to Hong Kong for 143 industries, and imports from Hong Kong for 110 industries, and finds two key results. First, expected inflation due to Hong Kong's dollar peg leads to increased US exports in a large number of industries. Second, comparing our results with those of a previous study shows strong evidence of a ‘third country’ effect, especially for US imports. Nonparametric tests suggest that these effects differ by sector: for both exports and imports. Manufacturing industries that enjoy a large trade share are less likely to experience this effect once external volatility is incorporated into the analysis.     

Stock market-driven investment: new evidence on information,financing and agency effects

This study provides a theoretical model and empirical analysis to jointly examine the information, financing and agency effects, the three channels through which the stock market can actively influence corporate investment decisions and firm performance. First, stock market affects corporate investments, and such impact varies with different market valuation measures, types of investments and firm characteristics. Second, stock market valuation affects investments through the channel of corporate financing, supporting the financing hypothesis. Third, stock market-driven investments have differential impacts on the future operating performance of firms. Investments driven by market valuation of firm-specific information have a positive effect on future performance. In contrast, investments driven by market-wide sentiment have a negative effect on future performance. Fourth, consistent with the information hypothesis, market-driven investments are value-enhancing for firms with better external monitoring by analysts and institutional investors. Lastly, consistent with the agency hypothesis, market-driven investments are value-destroying when firms lack external monitoring, proper managerial incentives and independent board of directors.     

First mover or higher quality? Optimal product strategy in markets with positive feedbacks

Conventional wisdom holds that in markets with positive feedbacks being first to market can matter more than product quality. In this paper, we test that intuition within a generalized Pólya urn model. We find that if we assume constant feedbacks, in the long run, higher quality products dominate the market regardless of initial market shares, contradicting the common wisdom. However, when we allow for variable feedbacks, initial advantages persist almost indefinitely. Thus, the choice of whether to rush to market or focus on quality depends on market characteristics such as whether the positive feedbacks result from more consistent returns to scale or from more variable social influences.