Linear programming,busing and educational administration

Linear programming and other operations research techniques have been used to assist school administrators and planners in assigning students to schools to achieve racial balances. A linear programming approach to the school busing problem is analyzed in some detail. Six different linear programming models allow examination of the effects of changes in the parameters of the models upon assignment of students. Various ways in which school officials may use the solutions to the models and the postoptimality analysis of the models for educational planning are discussed.     

Amnesties and Co-operation

One of the costs of anticipated amnesties is current and future non-compliance with the law. Relatively to a no-amnesty situation, efficient enforcement policies may therefore differ when an amnesty is offered. To study this question, a model is built in which individuals impose a cost on society when they commit a crime. When a criminal participates in an amnesty, or (to a lesser extent) when he is caught, some fraction of the social cost is recovered, reflecting co-operation with the authorities. The analysis characterizes efficient anticipated amnesties. It is shown that the efficient level of enforcement may be smaller in the case of an anticipated amnesty than in a no-amnesty situation. The reason is that despite the increase in the initial number of criminals generated by the amnesty, many criminals eventually participate in it. If participants in the amnesty are very co-operative, then a large proportion of the social cost is recovered making the initial increase in the number of criminals less costly. The optimal level of the reduced sanction imposed on those who participate in the amnesty is also characterized.     

European versus American Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative

China has started to deploy its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the European Union (EU), and the EU in turn has regional and global interests that intersect with the BRI's scope. Subject to future adjustments of China's BRI strategy, the initiative's potential contribution to the EU requirements for infrastructure development could be significant, even though its modalities in the EU are inevitably different from those in countries that are poorer or have more difficult financial market access. The EU's attitude to the BRI, however, has not yet fully coalesced. Despite superficial similarities in public discourses, the EU has a profoundly distinct perspective from that of the US on the BRI, and more generally on the rise of China and its growing global influence. For the EU, the BRI generates challenges but also potential benefits. The EU should improve its ability to welcome sensible BRI projects, including through the adoption of greater reform of screening frameworks for foreign direct investment. More generally, the EU should enhance its ability to define policies independent of the US on China and the challenges resulting from China's rise. China should also make further efforts to foster a constructive relationship with the EU.     

Asymmetric Learning from Prices and Post‐Earnings‐Announcement Drift

Motivated by research in psychology and experimental economics, we assume that investors update their beliefs about an asset's value upon observing the price, but only when the price clearly reveals that others obtained private information that differs from their own private information. Specifically, we assume that investors learn from the price of an asset in an asymmetric manner—they learn from the price if they observe good (bad) private information and the price is worse (better) than what is justified based on public information alone. We show that asymmetric learning from an asset's price leads to post‐earnings‐announcement drift (PEAD), and that it generates arbitrage opportunities that are less attractive than alternative explanations of PEAD. In addition, our model predicts that PEAD will be concentrated in earnings surprises that are not dominated by accruals, and it also predicts that earnings response coefficients will decline in the magnitude of the earnings surprises.     

Time,trading and algorithms in financial sector security

This article examines the financial security issues raised by the rapid development of high-frequency trading (HFT). HFT involves automated algorithmic trading of financial instruments where the objective is to reduce the time scale between the initiation and execution of trades to microseconds (or even nanoseconds) so as to reap competitive advantage. After outlining the contours of a HFT world, the presentation goes on to discuss some of its important consequences and implications. Several matters are discussed in this context: market manipulation, hacking, index construction and violence. Of particular significance for the notion of financial security is the issue of time as embodied in algorithmic trading. In turn this raises concerns over the regulation and management of this new field of financial innovation and trading activity.     

V-ROOM: a virtual meeting system with intelligent structured summarisation

With the growth of virtual organisations and multinational companies, virtual collaboration tasks are becoming more important for employees. This paper describes the development of a virtual meeting system called V-ROOM. An exploration of facilities required in such a system has been conducted. The findings highlighted that intelligent systems are needed, especially since information that individuals have to know and process is vast. The survey results showed that meeting summarisation is one of the most important new features that should be added to virtual meeting systems for enterprises. This paper highlights the innovative methods employed in V-ROOM to produce relevant meeting summaries. V-ROOM’s approach is compared to other methods from the literature, and it is shown how the use of metadata provided by parts of the V-ROOM system can improve the quality of summaries produced.