Business Ethics in a Transition Economy: Will the Next Russian Generation be any Better?

This study investigated students’ perceptions of ethical organizational climates, attitudes towards ethical issues, and the perceived relationship between ethical behavior and success in business organizations. Comparisons were made between the attitudes of these future managers with previously published studies of Russian managers’ attitudes. A survey of 100 business students in three Moscow universities showed that their attitudes toward ethical behavior were more negative than those of Russian managers. No significant differences were found in the perceptions or attitudes of students who had attended an ethics course and those that did not. The implications for both managers and researchers were reported.     

Scalability and robustness of a network resource allocation system using market-based agents

In this paper, we consider issues associated with scalability and robustness in designing a market-based multi-agent system that allocates bandwidth in a communications network. Specifically, an empirical evaluation is carried out to assess the system performance under a variety of design configurations in order to provide an insight into network deployment issues. This extends our previous work in which we developed an application that makes use of market-based software agents that compete in decentralised marketplaces to buy and sell bandwidth resources in a network that is partitioned into regions, each with a separate market server. We investigate the average call success rate and average message load per market server, as the number of markets are scaled up in a fixed size network. The same investigations are performed in the presence of single market failures. Finally, for both the failure and non-failure cases, a trade-off is found between their average call success rates and message load per server in order to find an optimum number of regions to deploy in the network.     

Excess Returns to R&D-Intensive Firms

Recent studies indicate that both current R&D investment levels and current or recent changes in R&D investment are positively associated with subsequent excess (risk-adjusted) stock returns. The tentative explanation offered for these results is that shares of R&D-intensive firms are mispriced because investors fail to see through earnings distortions caused by conservative accounting for R&D costs. However, an alternative explanation is that conventional controls for risk do not completely capture the riskiness of R&D-intensive firms, causing measured excess returns for these firms to be biased upward. This study provides evidence useful for distinguishing between the mispricing and risk explanations for R&D-related excess returns. Overall, our empirical results suggest that the positive association between R&D investment levels and excess returns is more likely to result from failure to control adequately for risk than from mispricing. On the other hand, our results do not rule out the possibility of a second source of excess returns that are due to mispricing and that are associated with changes in the level of R&D investment.     

Reward-to-Risk Ratios in the Treasury-Bill Market

We estimate the ex‐ante reward per unit of spot‐rate volatility (the reward‐to‐risk ratio) for U.S. Treasury bills on a monthly basis and find that these ratios vary predictably over time. Reward‐to‐risk ratios are positively autocorrelated; month‐to‐month changes in these ratios are negatively autocorrelated. Variation in these ratios contributes at least as much variation to ex‐ante excess returns as does variation in interest‐rate volatility. Because ex‐ante volatility and the rewards to volatility vary independently, variation in ex‐ante premiums is greater than the variation attributable to changing volatility alone.