Betting against sentiment? Seemingly unrelated anomalies and the low-risk effect

The negative CAPM alphas of high-beta and high-variance stocks are attributable to an unaccounted factor in the CAPM. We use eight seemingly unrelated anomalies to construct a composite factor in the spirit of the optimal orthogonal portfolio (FOP). Accounting for FOP re-establishes a positive relation between beta and average returns in time series regressions as well as cross-sectional and explains the negative alphas of high-beta and high-variance stocks. To analyze economic drivers behind FOP, we perform a horse race between leverage constraints, investor sentiment, and disagreement. Our results highlight investor sentiment as the most promising explanation for the low-risk effect.     

Retail customers' self-awareness: The deindividuation effects of others

The presence of others often affects retail shopping behavior. Other customers tend to increase one's self-awareness and cause negative self-conscious emotions. This research's findings suggest fellow customers also mitigate focal customers' evaluative concerns. Deindividuation theory, which posits that other customers create anonymity and reduce self-awareness, helps explain this phenomenon. A laboratory experiment and a quasi-experimental field study in a retail setting support the notion that the presence of other customers creates a deindividuation effect on a focal customer during unwanted social evaluation from salespeople. Results show a small group of other customers resulted in lower levels of emotional discomfort and behavioral inhibition than either an empty store or a larger group size, suggesting a U shape relationship.     

Shaping the Next Incarnation of Business Intelligence

The body of knowledge generated by Business Intelligence (BI) research is constantly extended by a stream of heterogeneous technological and organizational innovations. This paper shows how these can be bundled to a new vision for BI that is aligned with new requirements coming from socio-technical macro trends. The building blocks of the vision come from five research strings that have been extracted from an extensive literature review: BI and Business Process Management, BI across enterprise borders, new approaches of dealing with unstructured data, agile and user-driven BI, and new concepts for BI governance. The macro trend of the diffusion of cyber-physical systems is used to illustrate the argumentation. The realization of this vision comes with an array of open research questions and requires the coordination of research initiatives from a variety of disciplines. Due to the embedded nature of the addressed topics within general research areas of the Information Systems (IS) discipline and the linking pins that come with the underlying Dynamic Capabilities Approach such research provides a contribution to IS.     

Imperfect legal unbundling of monopolistic bottlenecks

We study an industry with a monopolistic bottleneck supplying an essential input to several downstream firms. Under legal unbundling the bottleneck must be operated by a legally independent upstream firm, which may be partly or fully owned by an incumbent active in downstream markets. Access prices are regulated but the upstream firm can perform non-tariff discrimination. Under perfect legal unbundling the upstream firm maximizes only own profits; with imperfections it is biased and to some extent accounts also for the incumbent’s downstream profits. We show that increasing the incumbent’s ownership share increases total output if the upstream firm’s bias is sufficiently small, while otherwise effects are ambiguous. Stronger regulation that reduces the bias without changing ownership shares generally increases total output. We also endogenize the bias and show that it can depend non-monotonically on the ownership share.     

The Euro Area in Between Crises? Considerations on Fiscal Policies and Rules

Intereconomics - Credibility of the revised fiscal rules will be crucial so that vulnerable countries can benefit from confidence effects. National ownership will be key in that respect and can be...     

The competitiveness situation of the EU meat processing and beverage manufacturing sectors

The status of competitiveness for the two most important food and beverage manufacturing sectors (meat processing and beverage manufacturing) in 13 EU countries is analysed empirically, using 1995-2002 Eurostat data. After a review of earlier agribusiness competitiveness studies, an industrial competitiveness index is proposed as a composite measure for multidimensional economic performance, covering profitability, productivity and output growth. The index approach enables relative competitiveness comparisons across industries, countries and over time. The results show that during 1999-2002, as compared to 1995-1998, for both sectors overall competitiveness in real terms slightly increased. At the same time, overall competitiveness also seems to have converged slightly across countries, implying that sector performance has become more similar. However, the two country rankings differ considerably, as do the change patterns during the analysed period.     

The Potential for Appreciative Inquiry in Tourism Research

Tourism is an engine of economic growth, but its capacity to contribute to good health is only starting to be documented. This paper describes a forthcoming research project with the Ethiopian immigrant community in the Australian state of Victoria. The project aims to discover if writing about positive holiday experiences that involve visits to friends and relatives improves the community's mental health – alleviates depression levels and increases levels of happiness. The role of holidays in improving mental health is of increasing interest to the tourism industry. This research note highlights the importance of understanding the benefits of holidays for individual well-being; this paper outlines a methodological approach for investigating these benefits.