Lexicographic compositions of multiple criteria for decision making

This paper considers two distinct procedures to lexicographically compose multiple criteria for social or individual decision making. The first procedure composes M binary relations into one, and then selects its maximal elements. The second procedure first selects the set of maximal elements of the first binary relation, and then within that set, chooses the maximal elements of the second binary relation, and iterates the procedure until the Mth binary relation. We show several distinct sets of conditions for the choice functions representing these two procedures to satisfy non-emptiness and choice-consistency conditions such as contraction consistency and path independence. We also examine the relationships between the outcomes of the two procedures. Finally we investigate under what conditions the outcomes of each procedure are independent of the order of lexicographic application of the criteria.     

SUBJECTIVE PROBABILITIES IN GAMES: AN APPLICATION TO THE OVERBIDDING PUZZLE*

This article illustrates how the joint elicitation of subjective probabilities and preferences may help us understand behavior in games. We conduct an experiment to test whether biased probabilistic beliefs may explain overbidding in first‐price auctions. The experimental outcomes indicate that subjects underestimate their probability of winning the auction, and indeed overbid. When provided with feedback on the precision of their predictions, subjects learn to make better predictions, and to curb significantly overbidding. The structural estimation of different behavioral models suggests that biased probabilistic beliefs are a driving force behind overbidding, and that risk aversion plays a lesser role than previously believed.     

Corporate Governance and Market Valuation of Publicly Traded Real Estate Companies: Evidence from Europe

With respect to the increasing significance of transparency and corporate governance, the study at hand investigates the impact of a broad set of principal corporate governance mechanisms on the market valuation of publicly traded real estate companies from the UK, France, the Netherlands and Germany, while addressing major econometric shortcomings of previous corporate governance studies, including omitted variable bias, endogeneity and reverse causality. The results of the analysis have important practical implications for strategic decision-making of both top-executives of publicly traded real estate companies as well as investors.     

Mapping retailing research with bibliometric indicators

Our study aims to give a global perspective regarding scientific research on retailing for the 1990–2014 period. The research shows a knowledge-domain-map that identifies the collaboration networks between authors and the links between journals. This was conducted through a bibliometric study that can be viewed with Visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software. The results show that the Journal of Retailing and Management Science is the current leader in the field. In addition, Morgan and Hunt’s (1994) article in the Journal of Marketing is the most cited source to date.     

Business and the Public Affairs of Slavery: A Discursive Approach of an Ethical Public Issue

This article aims at understanding how “ethical public issues” are created, and dealt within a public arena. Here, we view ethical public issues as social constructs, which are the results of issue framing contests. Such an approach will enable us to understand how ethical public issues emerge and are shaped by strategizing actors (including firms, NGOs, the media, and governments), in an attempt to impose their own definition and preferred solution to the issue. We also propose key factors which explain the success of a framing attempt, and evidence of such success. The empirical case of the labor conditions in West Africa’s cocoa industry is used to illustrate this theoretical framework and methodological approach.     

Why do most countries set high tax rates on capital?

We consider tax competition in a world with tax bases exhibiting different degrees of mobility, modeled as mobile and immobile capital. An agreement among countries not to give preferential treatment to mobile capital results in an equilibrium where mobile capital is nevertheless taxed relatively lightly. In particular, one or two of the smallest countries, measured by their stocks of immobile capital, choose relatively low tax rates, thereby attracting mobile capital away from the other countries, which are then left to set revenue-maximizing taxes on their immobile capital. This conclusion holds regardless of whether countries choose their tax policies sequentially or simultaneously. In contrast, unrestricted competition for mobile capital results in the preferential treatment of mobile capital by all countries, without cross-country differences in the taxation of mobile capital. Nevertheless our main result is that the non-preferential regime generates larger expected global tax revenue, despite the sizable revenue loss from the emergence of low-tax countries. By extending the analysis to include cross-country differences in productivities, we are able to resurrect a case for preferential regimes, but only if the productivity differences are sufficiently large.     

Meanings and practices of learning from incidents: a social constructivist perspective of incident reporting systems

Incident reporting systems (IRSs) are used in many organisations as tools that promote safety by allowing to collectively learn from incidents. In this paper, we propose a social constructivist approach to learning from incidents, in which the focus is not purely on safety, but on the technology of incident reporting itself. We employ Wiebe Bijker’s work on the Social Construction of Technology to open up the analysis of a specific IRS in use at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center. For this purpose, we carried out 28 interviews with key local actors and collected documents and observation notes. Such social constructivist perspective provides detailed insight into the practices of reporting and the meanings of learning from incidents. Our research shows that various actors within the organisation frame the IRS differently. These framings each have their own implications for the vulnerability of the organisation.     

Strategic evaluation and selection of R&D projects

The most important families of R&D project evaluation and selection methodologies and associated techniques are briefly reviewed. For each family, generally one or two methods were chosen to be analysed from the point of view of the integration with the strategy. But, first some definitions and some aspects of the new strategic role of the evaluation and selection of R&D projects, which were in mind during the interviews, are presented.
Finally, some empirical results of the use of these methodologies in France and Japan are presented. The strong and weak points of the most prevalent methods are described as they are considered by the users.     

Pricing CIR Yield Options by Conditional Moment Matching

We propose an approximation scheme for the pricing of yield options in the CIR model using conditional moment matching based on the gamma and lognormal distributions. This method is fast and simple to implement, and it shows a high degree of accuracy without being subject to the numerical instabilities that can be encountered with more sophisticated approaches.