Assessing ‘meta-services’: customer's perceived value and behaviour

‘Meta-services’ are delivered by firms cooperating together through a network. How customers perceive such services has been scarcely studied. The main assumption here is that, after experiencing services delivered by networked firms, the consumers synthesise their perceptions in terms of the perceived value of the network and that this global assessment will better announce behavioural intentions than the commonly used satisfaction index. Passengers travelling on long-haul flights with a global airline alliance experience such ‘meta-services’ and were questioned through a dedicated survey to test a structural equation model. Most hypotheses are not contradicted by the data. Unlike most recent studies referring to perceived value, this concept is seen here as one-dimensional and is measured by a rather simple scale. This allows distinguishing the value concept from its determinants. Specific variables, such as effective coordination, information and harmonisation, proved also to be useful when measuring customers’ valuation of ‘meta-services’.     

Testing for Parameter Stability in Dynamic Models across Frequencies*

This paper contributes to the econometric literature on structural breaks by proposing a test for parameter stability in vector autoregressive (VAR) models at a particular frequency ω, where ω ∈ [0, π]. When a dynamic model is affected by a structural break, the new tests allow for detecting which frequencies of the data are responsible for parameter instability. If the model is locally stable at the frequencies of interest, the whole sample size can then be exploited despite the presence of a break. The methodology is applied to analyse the productivity slowdown in the US, and the outcome is that local stability concerns only the higher frequencies of data on consumption, investment and output.     

Affirmative action in education: Evidence from engineering college admissions in India

This paper examines an affirmative action program for “lower-caste” groups in engineering colleges in India. We study both the targeting properties of the program, and its implications for labor market outcomes. We find that affirmative action successfully targets the financially disadvantaged: the upper-caste applicants that are displaced by affirmative action come from a richer economic background than the lower-caste applicants that are displacing them. Targeting by caste, however, may lead to the exclusion of other disadvantaged groups. For example, caste-based targeting reduces the overall number of females entering engineering colleges. We find that despite poor entrance exam scores, lower-caste entrants obtain a positive return to admission. Our estimates, however, also suggest that these gains may come at an absolute cost because the income losses experienced by displaced upper-caste applicants are larger than the income gains experienced by displacing lower-caste students. Limited sample sizes in our preferred econometric specifications, however, prevent us from drawing strong conclusions from these labor market findings.     

Banking and Debt Crises in Europe: The Dangerous Liaisons?

The potential mutation of the Sub-Prime banking crisis into a sovereign debt one in Euro area countries is investigated. After reviewing the criteria used to measure the debt vulnerability, the balance sheet approach is presented in order to illustrate the potential connections between these two types of crises. A graphical analysis yields evidence that at the end 2009 the probability of observing a Euro area country defaulting is less likely than six month before. Nevertheless, the serious threats, which concern Greece and Ireland, do not permit us to exclude the occurrence of a contagious, or self-fulfilling, sovereign debt or currency crises in Euro area in the future.     

Learning by Failing: A Simple VaR Buffer

We study in this article the problem of model risk in VaR computations and document a procedure for correcting the bias due to specification and estimation errors. This practical method consists of “learning from model mistakes”, since it dynamically relies on an adjustment of the VaR estimates – based on a back‐testing framework – such as the frequency of past VaR exceptions always matches the expected probability. We finally show that integrating the model risk into the VaR computations implies a substantial minimum correction to the order of 10–40% of VaR levels.     

Reporting missing data: a study of selected articles published from 2003–2007

Missing data (MD) is prevalent in empirical social science research (Allison, http://books.google.ca/books?id=ZtYArHXjpB8Canddq=missing+dataandprintsec=frontcoverandsource=blandots=ziTBvDHxWbandsig=Uiy83xDbWSO4HeBSth0Q_oZIrQandhl=enandei=q6A7Su25ApnIM-eYlccOandsa=Xandoi=book_resultandct=resultandresnum, 2001; Rubin in J Am Stat Assoc 91:473?C489, 1996). Furthermore, inconsistencies in the reporting and treatment of MD have been documented (Peugh and Enders in Rev Educ Res 74:525?C556, 2004). The goal of the current project was to examine how MD was reported and treated in 68 studies issued from a refereed educational journal. It was observed that a fifth of the quantitative articles reviewed actually treated MD, using mainly deletion methods and only 10% of the explicit articles explained MD. Overall, MD reported or inferred averaged about 33% of cases and was commonly associated with missing subjects. Only three articles provided the actual percentages of MD. The results suggest that there may be a lack of consistency in how MD is reported and treated and that studies may remain deficient in how MD is addressed. The importance of the study was to signal tendencies in reporting and treating MD, to provide tentative explanations for such trends, to propose hypotheses for future empirical studies in the field, and to offer an initial set of practical guidelines for including addressing, explaining, and treating MD in educational research.     

Complexity of Outsourcing Contracts and Ex Post Transaction Costs: An Empirical Investigation*

abstract In this article, we use Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the Resource‐Based View (RBV) of the firm to study outsourcing agreements. We develop an original approach of contract complexity and analyse the links among exchange hazards (i.e. specificity and environmental uncertainty), the contractual aspects of outsourcing (control, incentives, penalties, price and flexibility clauses) and the level of ex post transaction costs. Both contract complexity and ex post transaction costs are operationalized and measured. Our empirical research analyses 82 outsourcing contracts. This article uses three different dimensions (proximity to the core business, switching costs and adaptation costs) to assess the strategic importance of an outsourced activity. Our findings extend TCE's validity for the outsourcing of activities with a strategic value. Finally, this study offers an indirect measurement of ex post transaction costs. In short, to restrict vendor opportunism, contracts must contain incentives and penalties, as well as pricing and monitoring clauses.     

Storage and security of supply in the medium run

This paper analyzes the role of private storage in a market for a commodity (e.g. natural gas) whose supply is subject to the threat of an irreversible disruption. We focus on the medium term in which seasonality of demand and exhaustibility can be neglected. We characterize the price and inventory dynamics (accumulation, drainage and limit stocks) in a competitive equilibrium with rational expectations. We show the robustness of our results to alternative scenarios in which either a disruption has finite duration or the crisis is foreseen. During the crisis consumers may put pressure on the Government to intervene, but too severe antispeculative measures would inefficiently discourage storage. Practical solutions to this dilemma cause welfare losses that we characterize and quantify.     

Two-machine flow shop scheduling of polyurethane foam production

This paper studies a two-machine flow shop scheduling problem with a supporting precedence relation. The model originates from a real production context of a chemical factory that produces foam-rubber products. We extend the traditional two-machine flow shop by dividing the operations into two categories: supporting tasks and regular jobs. In the model, several different compositions of foam rubber can be mixed at the foam blooming stage, and products are processed at the manufacturing stage. Each job (product) on the second machine cannot start until its supporting tasks (parts) on the first machine are all finished and the second machine is not occupied. The objective is to find a schedule that minimizes the total job completion time. The studied problem is strongly NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a branch-and-bound algorithm incorporating a lower bound and two dominance rules. We also design a simple heuristic and an iterated local search (ILS) algorithm to derive approximate solutions. The performances of the proposed algorithms are examined through computational experiments.