销售要找到＂关键人物＂

作为一个商业新手,你不得不为每一笔销售而拼尽全力。如果情况变成有一群稳定的、连续的、热情的准客户群主动找上门来,是不是很美妙呢？来自于客户和其他企业家的推荐能帮你把你的新公司列入备选名单。但要想达到上述效果,只是散发名片、在家人和朋友中间口口相传是远远不够的。你必须与影响者（influencers）建立关系那些有能力影响对你公司看法的人、或那些和你的最佳准客户一对一地打交道时能进行直接推荐的人。     

Health Information Technology and Financing's Next Frontier: The Potential of Medical Banking

Calls to action for widespread adoption of electronic health records have come from a broad spectrum of the private and public sectors. The problem, to date, is not that information does not exist, as much as that the data have not been organized around the patient. An integrated Personal Health Record is a patient- or family-centered technology designed to capture not only the contacts with health care providers, but also personal information on insurance, diet, and personal preferences that a physician's health record will not capture. Medical banking, based on a new technology platform called the Integrated Health Card, is emerging as a solution to the problem of collecting and combining information from the electronic health record with personal health information. It may also be the only way for fledging health savings accounts to enable the price and quality transparency of the medical market that has been called for repeatedly in this decade. In analyzing the political and patient applications of widespread adoption of this new innovation, the positive contributions to social welfare are very likely to outweigh the negative.     

Currency returns, market regimes and behavioral biases

Covered interest rate parity assumes that there is no risk premium on the hedged returns on currencies. However, empirical evidence indicates that risk premiums are not identically zero, and this is referred to as the forward premium puzzle. We show that there exist market regimes, within which behavioral biases affect decisions, and a type of parity holds within regimes. The foreign exchange market switches between regimes where there is a premium. This paper presents various tests for the hypotheses of currency regimes and regime dependent risk premiums. Based on the existence of regimes, a diversified currency portfolio is created with a mean-variance criterion. Using the Federal Exchange Rate Index as a proxy for the currency benchmark and the U.S. T-Bill as the risk free asset, the similarity between the benchmarks and the implied equilibrium hedged and unhedged portfolios provides evidence for regimes and decision bias. Within each regime interest rate parity is appropriate for modeling currency returns.     

Nash-equilibria in a heterogeneous oligopoly with fuzzy information

We consider a model of an oligopolistic market with heterogeneous firms and products where neither the cost nor the demand functions are common knowledge. Instead, each firm only has some vague ideas about the price strategies adopted by its competitors which is modelled by a fuzzy set. In analogy to the notion of an "equilibrium of actions and beliefs" we define and characterize a generalized Nash-equilibrium and show its existence under general conditions. Furthermore, the impact of the fuzzy information on the equilibrium outcome is analyzed by means of a comparative static analysis within a particular model framework.Received: 28 May 2002, Accepted: 25 December 2002, JEL Classification: D43, D80, L13We wish to thank Bernhard F. Arnold, the editor Murat Sertel , and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Of course, we are responsible for all remaining errors.     

The economics of university computer provision: a case study in public production and cost

Is the provision of computer services in British universities provided efficiently? The pattern of expenditure in the last twenty years is explored and a study is made of current spending across universities. Variations in unit computing costs and the output of computing expreience is studied for British universities using conventional cost and production function estimation. In addition the three-demensional production surface for the output of computer provision is estimated using distance weighted techniques. This case study has more general applicability to other areas of public production and cost.     

They're not employees, they're people

In this essay, business thinker Peter Drucker examines the changing dynamics of the workforce--in particular, the need for organizations to take just as much care and responsibility when managing temporary and contract workers as they do with their traditional employees. Two fast-growing trends are demanding that business leaders pay more attention to employee relations, Drucker says. First is the rise of the temporary, or contract, workers; 8 million to 10 million temp workers are placed each day worldwide. And they're not just filling in at reception desks. Today, there are temp suppliers for every kind of job, all the way up to CEO. Second, a growing number of businesses are outsourcing their employee relations to professional employee organizations (PEOs)--third-party groups that handle the ever mounting administrative tasks associated with managing a company's employees. (Managers can easily spend up to one-quarter of their time on employee-related rules, regulations, and paperwork.) Driving these trends, Drucker observes, is the shift from a dependency on manual labor to create wealth and jobs to a dependency on specialization and knowledge. Leaders are increasingly trying to keep up with the needs of many small groups of product or service experts within their companies. Temps and PEOs free up leaders to focus on the business rather than on HR files and paperwork. But if organizations outsource those functions, they need to be careful not to damage relationship with their people in the process, Drucker concludes. After all, developing talent is business's most important task--the sine qua non of competition in a knowledge economy.     

Technological innovation and real investment booms and busts

We investigate why new, high-risk technologies can attract excessive and often unprofitable investment. We develop an equilibrium model in which rational, risk-averse agents overinvest in a risky technology, possibly to the point that its expected return is negative. Overinvestment results from relative wealth concerns which arise endogenously from the imperfect tradability of future endowments. Competition over future consumption leads to an indirect utility for wealth with “keeping up with the Joneses” properties that can induce herding. Because overinvestment increases with the risk of the technology, our model can explain why new, risky technological innovations may promote investment bubbles.     

A New Typology for Economic Sectors with a view to Policy Implications

This paper is an attempt to tease out a typology of economic sectors based on a systems approach to innovation and economic growth that may be useful for policy analysis. The typology explored here revolves around novel products rather than ethereal knowledge-producing entities. This insight goes back to Allyn Young (1928) and Joseph Schumpeter (1934) who argued that the introduction of new goods was the engine of economic growth. More precisely, our typology of sectors focuses on novel products which are efficiency-enhancing within and between sectors through the market mechanism. The scheme revolves around the relationship between 'Enabling' and 'Recipient' sectors (which gives the typology its name: ER), and offers a lens for viewing and interpreting a substantive part of the mechanics of modern economic growth. The last part of the paper briefly discusses a few immediate policy implications, although it has the potential for greater use and value in this regard.     

R&D employment effects of financial slack generated by R&D tax exemption: The importance of firm-level contingencies

This paper focuses on R&D employment effects due to financial slack generated by an R&D tax exemption scheme in Belgium. The tax exemption is granted without firm-level requirements, which facilitates testing firm-level contingencies on the influence of the generated financial slack. We find that R&D employment effects increase with the level of the R&D tax exemption related to financial slack resources and that this positive relation is more outspoken for older firms and for firms with an intermediate share of R&D tax exemptions in the overall mix of R&D policy support. No effects are found for firm size and its R&D intensity. These findings suggest targeting the R&D tax exemption support according to firm characteristics to obtain longer term R&D employment effects. The focus on R&D employment adds to the literature on the evaluation of R&D policies which is largely oriented toward R&D expenditure and innovation outputs.