When should entrepreneurs expedite or delay opportunity exploitation?

We theorize on the performance implications of the timing at which entrepreneurs stop exploring their business opportunities and start exploiting them. Using an optimal-stopping approach, we characterize the time when exploitation should begin based primarily on when an entrepreneur's ignorance has been sufficiently reduced through knowledge accumulation. This “ignorance threshold” captures a tradeoff between the time needed to increase legitimacy and the necessity to act now to minimize competition. Changes in legitimacy and competition are based on how entrepreneurs manage their knowledge (tacit versus explicit) under differing degrees of novelty for the business opportunity. These changes, in turn, impact the performance and timing of opportunity exploitation.     

Conflicting Views of Markets and Economic Justice: Implications for Student Learning

This paper describes a flaw in the teaching of issues related to market economics and social justice at American institutions of higher learning. The flaw we speak of is really a gap, or an educational disconnect, which exists between those faculty who support market-based economies and those who believe capitalism promotes economic injustice. The thesis of this paper is that the gap is so wide and the ideas that are promoted are so disconnected that students are trapped into choosing one or the other position (or neither) and are left unable to link the two sides of the discussion. Such an educational process is not one that produces free and reasoned discernment. In this paper, we briefly relate how we came to be aware of the disconnect and its harms. We present evidence that a pedagogical gulf exists within the teaching of markets and capitalism at American universities – faculty interviews, course syllabi, portions of the corpus of material generally referred to as Catholic Social Thought, as well as references to traditional, mainstream economic theory. Further, we give evidence of the confusion and frustration among students this gulf causes. We suggest possible reasons for the gulf–primarily through an investigation of the differences in underlying assumptions and misperceptions that exist between two divisions within universities. We conclude by suggesting a set of curricular changes designed to improve teaching. The authors’ aim is not to change people’s minds. It is to change their teaching. The authors believe that these curricular changes will leave students less frustrated and better prepared for a life of significant service – with improved critical thinking skills.David F. Carrithers is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Finance in the Albers School of Business & Economics at Seattle University. He has taught at Seattle University since 1985, in the areas of corporate and entrepreneurial finance. Mr. Carrithers earned an MBA from the University of Washington in 1984. Dean Peterson is assistant professor of economics at Seattle University. His research interests focus on the history of economic thought. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois in 1994.     

Multi-Stakeholder Labour Monitoring Organizations: Egoists,Instrumentalists, or Moralists?

This article examines four leading multi-stakeholder labour monitoring organizations. All operating in the maquiladora industry, these organizations are viewed in light of the growing global trend toward industry self-regulation, or what has been referred to as the ‘global out-sourcing of regulation’. Their Board compositions, codes of conduct and monitoring and enforcement strategies are all examined as a means of tentatively positioning these organizations along an ‘egoist-instrumentalist-moralist’ ethical culture continuum. Such a framing provides insights into the perceived salience of these organizations’ broader stakeholders, the effectiveness of codes of conduct on workplace practices more generally, and the role that ethics plays in the governance and accountability of these increasingly important types of organizations. Jeff S. Everett teaches financial accounting at the University of Calgary's Haskayne School of Business. Along with his research on maquilas, Jeff conducts research in the areas of professional ethics, environmental accounting, and accounting education. Dean Neu is a professor of accounting at the Haskayne School of Business. His research examines how accounting numbers play a crucial role in shaping public perceptions and public policy. Currently a research assistant at the Haskayne School of Business. Daniel Martinez is examining issues related to fair trade, corruption, and economic development in indigenous communities.     

亚克力板的发展状况

本文重点介绍亚克力板的生产技术，应用及市场需求。     

Which bank is the “central” bank?

Liquidity flows through a financial network cannot be accurately described using external processing constraints alone. Behavioral aspects of participants also matter. A method similar to Google's PageRank procedure is used to produce a ranking of participants in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System in terms of their daily liquidity holdings. Accounting for differences in banks’ processing speeds is essential for explaining why observed distributions of liquidity differ from the initial distributions, which are determined by the credit limits selected by banks. Delay tendencies of banks are unobservable in the data and are estimated using a Markov model.     

Poverty and probability: aspiration and aversion to compound lotteries in El Salvador and India

Some experimental participants are averse to compound lotteries: they prefer simple lotteries that depend on only one random event, even when the simple lotteries offer lower expected value. This paper proposes that many behavioral “investments” represent more compound risk for poorer people—who often face multiple dimensions of deprivation—than for richer people. As a result, identical aversion to compound lotteries can prevent investment among poorer people, but have no effect on richer people. The paper reports five studies: two initial studies that document that aversion to compound lotteries operates as an economic preference, two “laboratory experiments in the field” in El Salvador, and one Internet survey experiment in India. Poorer Salvadoran women who choose a compound lottery are 27 percentage points more likely to have found formal employment than those who chose a simple lottery, but lottery choice is unrelated to employment for richer women. Poorer students at the national Salvadoran university choose more compound lotteries than richer students, on average, implying that aversion to compound lotteries screened out poorer aspirants but not richer ones. Poorer and lower-caste Indian participants who choose compound lotteries are more likely than those who choose simple lotteries to have a different occupation than their parents, which is not the case for better-off participants. These findings suggest that the consequences of aversion to compound lotteries are different in the context of poverty and disadvantage.     

Decentralized credit and monetary exchange without public record keeping

Summary. We relax a standard assumption on the matching technology in a search model of money. In particular, agents may remain in a long-term partnership as long as it is in their self-interest. With this simple modification, it is possible to support self-enforcing, intertemporal trade which resembles credit without a public record keeping device. We examine conditions for co-existence of currency and credit and the welfare gains/losses associated with the introduction of money.Received: 20 April 2003, Revised: 10 July 2003JEL Classification Numbers: E0.An earlier version of this paper was entitled Money and Search with Enduring Relationships. We wish to thank Narayana Kocherlakota, Rachel Kranton, Jeff Lacker, Andrei Shevchenko, Shouyong Shi, Ted Temzelides, Chris Waller, and especially David Andofolatto, Gabriele Camera, Drew Saunders, and Randy Wright for helpful comments on that earlier draft, as well as seminar participants at the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University, American Economic Association Meetings, Summer Econometric Society Meetings, and NBER Summer Workshop. Corbae wishes to thank the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis for research support.Correspondence to: D. Corbae     

Trust, contracting and the prospectus process

This study explores the role of trust and the ways in which trust is created within the prospectus process. It is argued that trust is a necessary condition for economic exchange and that trust must exist prior to contracting. The theoretical analysis provided deconstructs the contract as the original event and points to the limitations of traditional accounting analyses in understanding economic exchange. In addition, examples from the prospectus process are used to illustrate how some of the capital market institutions and institutional practices that we observe create and recreate the trust necessary for exchange.