通向市场的新道路

对于传统的市场营销人员来说,组织本身即意味着架构:不同的产品、销售渠道和客户群。但对于新型的营销组织而言,在瞬息万变的市场环境中,传统的架构已经不能推动价值的攀升     

Whistle-Blowing for Profit: An Ethical Analysis of the Federal False Claims Act

This paper focuses on the 1986 Amendments to the False Claims Act of 1863, which offers whistle-blowers financial rewards for disclosing fraud committed against the U.S. government. This law provides an opportunity to examine underlying assumptions about the morality of whistle-blowing and to consider the merits of increased reliance on whistle-blowing to protect the public interest. The law seems open to a number of moral objections, most notably that it exerts a morally corrupting influence on whistle-blowers. We answer these objections and argue that the law is not objectionable on these grounds. Since there are no compelling moral objections to the law, it is appropriate and acceptable to judge the law in terms of its economic costs and benefits. We assess the most salient of these and conclude that the benefits outweigh the costs. We suggest that a mechanism similar to the Act should be considered for protecting stockholders’ interests in the private sector. We conclude by making several proposals for improving the existing legislation. The authors' names are listed in alphabetical order. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Society for Business Ethics August 2004.     

Most-Favored Treatment Provisions as Nondiscrimination Guarantees

A firm employs suppliers who make specific investments. Because output demand is uncertain and the cost of enumerating contingencies high, the firm retains some unilateral control over the input quantities it purchases. To allay suppliers’ concerns over potential opportunism the firm must commit not to pit them against one another ex post by threatening to buy less from those who refuse to discount their prices. By extending most-favored treatment guarantees the firm commits not to discriminate. In some circumstances this generates efficient and opportunism-free outcomes. In others it is less effective but may remain attractive relative to other options. Evidence from field market contracts for natural gas corroborates this nondiscrimination hypothesis.     

Symmetry and order in the portfolio allocation problem

Summary. This research studies the role of multivariate distribution structures on random asset returns in determining the optimal allocation vector for an expected utility maximizer. All our conclusions pertain for the set of risk averters. By carefully disturbing symmetry in the distribution of the, possibly covarying, returns, we ascertain the ordinal structure of the optimized allocation vector. Rank order of allocations is also established when a permutation symmetric random vector is mapped into the returns vector through location and scale shifts. It is shown that increased dispersion in the vectors of location and scale parameters benefit, ex-ante, investors as does a decrease in the rank correlation coefficient between the location and scale parameter vectors. Revealed preference comparative static results are identified for the location and scale vectors of asset returns. For most issues addressed, we arrive at much stronger inferences when a safe asset is available. Received: August 8, 2000; revised version: January 8, 2001     

An algebraic theory of portfolio allocation

Summary. Using group and majorization theory, we explore what can be established about allocation of funds among assets when asymmetries in the returns vector are carefully controlled. The key insight is that preferences over allocations can be partially ordered via majorized convex hulls that have been generated by a permutation group. Group transitivity suffices to ensure complete portfolio diversification. Point-wise stabilizer subgroups admit sectoral separability in fund allocations. We also bound the admissible allocation vector by a set of linear constraints the coefficients of which are determined by group operations on location and scale asymmetries in the rate of returns vector. For a distribution that is symmetric under a reflection group, the linear constraints may be further strengthened whenever there exists an hyperplane that separates convex sets. Received: May 15, 2001; revised version: March 20, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" Journal paper No. J-19797 of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa. Project No. 3463, and supported by Hatch Act and State of Iowa funds. Correspondence to: D. A. Hennessy