Who does the law treat as a “consumer” and why does it matter? How should China’s notion of a “consumer” best be articulated within the law and applied in practice? This article will attempt to answer these intriguing questions by first focusing on the approach taken to define a “consumer” in China’s Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests before examining the legal notion of a “consumer” in comparative perspective, in order to further understand the competing rationales behind the consumer protection law. This article will explore this Chinese definition of a “consumer” to propose how China’s vague and unworkable statutory definition of a ‘consumer’ should be amended in future.
Journal of Business Ethics - By synthesizing the argumentation theory of new rhetoric with research on heuristics and motivated reasoning, we develop a conceptual view of argumentation based on... 相似文献
Knoblock and Korf have determined that abstraction can reduce search at a single agent from exponential to linear complexity (Knoblock 1991; Korf 1987). We extend their results by showing how concurrent problem solving among multiple agents using abstraction can further reduce search to logarithmic complexity. We empirically validate our formal analysis by showing that it correctly predicts performance for the Towers of Hanoi problem (which meets all of the assumptions of the analysis). Furthermore, a powerful form of abstraction for large multiagent systems is to group agents into teams, and teams of agents into larger teams, to form an organizational pyramid. We apply our analysis to such an organization of agents and demonstrate the results in a delivery task domain. Our predictions about abstraction's benefits can also be met in this more realistic domain, even though assumptions made in our analysis are violated. Our analytical results thus hold the promise for explaining in general terms many experimental observations made in specific distributed AI systems, and we demonstrate this ability with examples from prior research.This research has been sponsored, in part, by the National Science Foundation under grants IRI-9015423 and IRI-9010645, by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and by a Bell Northern Research Postgraduate Award. 相似文献
In the current essay, the author draws on his experience as a serving member of the Armed Forces to discuss the problem of developing military leaders capable of mitigating the disruptive nature of war. Specifically, it discusses the staff ride, a comprehensive analysis of historical events conducted through observation, reflection, and discussion, to develop in leaders an understanding that nothing ever works out the way a leader intends or expects. For the military leader facing the uncertainty and ambiguity of modern combat, this lesson from history is arguably the most essential. 相似文献
Firm management typically claims that voluntary accounting method changes (VACs) are made to enhance the informativeness of
earnings by better matching accounting practices with economic reality. In contrast, skeptics argue that managers adopt new
accounting procedures to opportunistically manage earnings and influence their firm’s stock price. In this paper, we investigate
these alternative motives for VACs. Specifically, we investigate whether VACs cause equity prices to deviate from their fundamental
values in the short-term by studying the long-run stock-price performance for a sample of firms that voluntarily change accounting
methods. In addition, we investigate changes in earnings informativeness by examining the behavior of earning response coefficients
and the relationship between earnings and future cash flows in years surrounding the VAC event. In contrast to prior research,
we find little evidence that a strategy based solely on the earnings effect of a VAC can generate abnormal returns. While
we find weak evidence of post-VAC abnormal returns for extreme VACs, this result appears to be driven by the accruals anomaly
documented in Sloan [Sloan, R. G. (1996). The Accounting Review, 71, 289–315]. Our evidence further suggests that earnings informativeness is not significantly altered by voluntary changes
in accounting methods. Taken together, our evidence suggests the market recognizes the financial statement effects of alternative
acceptable accounting methods and efficiently processes the valuation implications of VACs.
Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) has become an important tool in analyzing the financial situation of insurance companies. Constant development and documentation of DFA tools has occurred during the last years. However, several questions concerning the implementation of DFA systems have not been answered in the DFA literature to date. One such important issue is the consideration of management strategies in the DFA context. The aim of this paper is to study the effects of different management strategies on a non-life insurer’s risk and return profile. Therefore, we extend the results of a recent working paper by Eling / Parnitzke / Schmeiser (2007) with two variants and test these variants numerically within a DFA simulation study. 相似文献
In this study, we provide evidence on the pricing of other comprehensive income (OCI) that differs from most evidence in prior
research. Prior archival research has largely concluded that OCI is not priced by investors. In contrast, we provide evidence
in the post-SFAS 130 period that OCI is priced on a dollar-for-dollar basis as is predicted by economic theory for transitory
income items. We attribute this finding to our use of post-SFAS 130 as-reported measures of OCI rather than pre-SFAS 130 as-if estimates of OCI measures. Furthermore, we document that two components of OCI, foreign currency translation adjustment and
unrealized gains/losses on available-for-sale securities, are priced by investors. In the post-SFAS 130 period, we also find
that the type of financial statement in which firms report OCI and its components affects pricing, consistent with the conclusions
of prior experimental research. However, our evidence suggests that investors pay greater attention to OCI information reported
in the statement of changes in equity, rather than in a statement of financial performance. This could be attributed to investors
becoming more familiar in the post-SFAS 130 period with the predominant reporting of OCI and its components in the statement
of changes in equity. These findings may be relevant to both the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International
Accounting Standards Board, which jointly are undertaking a new project that, in part, is addressing financial statement presentation
of OCI items.
This paper utilizes calculated historical volatility and GARCH models to compare the historical price volatility behavior
of crude oil, motor gasoline and heating oil in U.S. markets since 1990. We incorporate a shift variable in the GARCH/TARCH
models to capture the response of price volatility to a change in OPEC’s pricing behavior. This study has three major conclusions.
First, there was an increase in volatility as a result of a structural shift to higher crude oil prices after April 1999.
Second, volatility shocks from current news are not important since GARCH effects dominate ARCH effects in the variance equation.
Third, persistence of volatility in all commodity markets is quite transitory, with half-lives normally being a few weeks.
RÉSUMÉ: Ce travail s’intéresse aux approches théoriques de l’entreprise coopérative (ou autogérée). On revient, dans un premier temps, sur les analyses économiques de l’entreprise coopérative par le courant dominant de la théorie économique. Les apports de l’économie néoclassique et néo‐institutionnelle dans ce domaine sont présentés et critiqués. Le c?ur de l’article est consacré au développement d’une approche institutionnelle et non‐standard de l’entreprise coopérative. Pour cela, on s’appuie notamment sur les travaux d’Albert Hirschman, d’Amartya Sen et de l’Economie des Conventions, des textes de philosophie politique sont également mobilisés (Rosanvallon, Ricoeur, Berlin). Une telle démarche suppose de prendre en compte la complexité des comportements individuels et les capacités réflexives des individus (concept de métapréférence), ce qui a des conséquences directes sur l’analyse que l’on peut faire de l’entreprise coopérative. On se propose alors de caractériser cette dernière comme une forme d’organisation politico‐économique originale ‐permettant l’expression d’une réflexivité de nature collective portant sur des objectifs, des règles mais aussi des valeurs‐ dans laquelle les individus construisent eux‐mêmes l’environnement institutionnel qui supporte la coordination dans l’activité productive.相似文献