Expert Systems: An Emerging Technology for Selecting New Product Winners

Sundaresan Ram and Sudha Ram describe INNOVATOR, an expert system that they have developed to assess the success potential of new products in the financial services industry. They provide details on key aspects of the system: how knowledge is collected from experts and encoded; how a user interacts with the system to obtain recommendations on specific new products; and how the inference engine of the system arrives at the final recommendation. They discuss how INNOVATOR can, if necessary, be linked to external databases for additional data inputs. The authors also recommend alternative ways of eliciting the expertise of new product planners and different ways of programming their knowledge into the system. They highlight the key advantages that an expert system provides over conventional new product planning models. With its ability to detect potential winners early, an expert system like INNOVATOR can significantly contribute to the new product development process.     

Hayek the Neoclassical Font: A Review Essay on Hayek’s Challenge

Caldwell sets out to answer the question: what can neoclassical economists of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, learn from Hayek’s writings? His reply constitutes an intellectual tour de force of the neoclassical approach. If neoclassical economists read only one book on Hayek, this would have to be it. Caldwell is not just sympathetic and open, his objective is nothing less than to demonstrate to neoclassical economists, clearly and trenchantly, just how much they have to gain from certain of Hayek’s writings. He succeeds remarkably.     

The Urgency of Profitable Losses

The central flaw in the policies both of privatising state-owned assets and contracting out local authority services is that they protect existing producers. Sudha Shenoy, of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, uses the 'Austrian' analysis of constant change in conditions of supply and demand to show why all producers must be exposed to the threat of loss from dissatisfied     

Twenty-five years of Living Under Contract: Contract farming and agrarian change in the developing world

The expansion of contract farming schemes through regions of the developing world in the era of the globalization of agriculture raises questions that are central to the study of agrarian political economy. Contract farming has extended the footprint of commodity production and integrated land and labour not otherwise captured in forms of direct production and marketing. 25 years after the publication of Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, a foundational collection edited by Peter Little and Michael Watts, it is necessary to take stock of the most prominent developments in the practice of contract farming and in the political economy literature studying it. The ultimate contribution of Living Under Contract was framing contract farming as expressing the unevenness of power relations in agriculture and grounding it in specific political, historical and social contexts that were not examined in the mainstream accounts. This introduction to the special issue revisits the questions that have remained relevant or re-emerged in the political economy literature on contract farming; it raises new questions that reflect contemporary developments and it explains how the papers in this collection contribute to the expansion of the theoretical and empirical horizons of the research on contemporary contract farming in low and middle-income countries.     

Financial controller turnover: An early warning sign of deteriorating financial reporting quality

This study examines the relation between financial controller turnover and public firms’ financial reporting quality. Exploiting a special institutional setting in China, where financial controllers along with CEOs and CFOs are required to attest to the accuracy and completeness of firms’ annual reports, we find that: (a) financial controller turnover is negatively associated with financial reporting quality, (b) the negative relation between financial controller turnover and financial reporting quality is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, in firms with weaker corporate governance, and in areas with higher regulatory enforcement intensity, and (c) financial controller turnover is not related to real earnings management. Further analyses show that financial controller turnover is associated with the incidence of subsequent financial report restatements and enforcement actions by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). Financial controller turnover also precedes top executive turnover and can be viewed as an early warning sign of deteriorating financial reporting quality. Such information content is incremental to that of top executive turnover. Our analyses also show that firms with financial controller turnover have higher initial stock returns but underperform their counterparts in the long run.