Beliefs regarding fundamental value and optimal investing

Standard optimal portfolio selection models take no account of the special information that active investors believe they possess. For example, active investors who believe they can place bounds on the price of a security will want to use that information when assessing risk and expected return in order to construct an optimal portfolio. In this paper, we use two continuous-time models to analyze how placing boundaries on the price of a stock affects assessed risk, expected returns, and the optimal holdings of an active investor, and how those vary as a function of the relation between the stock price and the boundaries. In particular, the optimal strategy takes significant long/short positions as the price nears its lower/upper boundary.     

Doing sensory ethnography in consumer research

This paper is a contribution to sensory‐aware cultural consumer research. It suggests that while the audio‐visual domain is unquestionably a crucial ingredient of contemporary consumer culture, there is a pressing need to explore the role of the other senses as well. The study works towards a practice‐based culturalist approach to sensory ethnography, a perspective that allows consumer scholars to empirically account for the cultural aspects of the senses. Through an empirical case study on sport fishing, the paper scrutinizes the challenges and opportunities related to conducting sensory ethnography. In addition, it discusses the benefits of this approach in consumer research.     

Seize the Moment: Financial Crisis and the Making of the Finnish Competition State

In this paper we examine how Finnish Governments dismantled the Nordic welfare state paradigm from the 1990s onwards and adopted Schumpeterian ideas of a competitive workfare state. In the early 1990s, Finland went through a financial crisis that was the most severe in OECD countries since the Second World War and came to play a major role in the paradigm change. In the crisis, the Ministry of Finance gained a central role as a consensus-building power broker, and formulated a political strategy of national competitiveness, which was adopted as a rationale of power for consensual governments and has been maintained since. We suggest that financial crises can become formative moments in which new ideas are adopted and policies are reformulated. They can also become moments which provide opportunity to overcome citizen opinion. In Finland, the wide popular and party support for the Nordic welfare model was not reflected in the new paradigm.     

iNTeg-Risk project: concept and first results

In 2012, the iNTeg-Risk project (www.integrisk.eu-vri.eu) has successfully finished its first 3?years of work. At this point, the project has already yielded a part of large set of results envisaged for its 4.5?years long work plan. This paper recalls the main goals of the project and analyzes the results delivered; as for instance, the work done in single emerging risk representative applications, the work on the development on the iNTeg-Risk paradigm, framework and methodologies of/for emerging risk management, the work on ‘iNTeg-Risk 1StopShop’ (the platform for integrating project results) and its main elements –Risk Atlas, RiskEars (the database of early emerging risk indications/notions), the database of key performance indicators, the work on Safetypedia, etc. The work on harmonization of practices when dealing with emerging risks is certainly the most relevant result in the first years of work on the project. The work has been based on (a) the comparison of different application areas and (b) definition of the elements needed for building the ‘common European approach’ to emerging risks. Some real-life events which took place in the first 2?years of the project (e.g. oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, Fukushima disaster accident in Viareggio, incidents caused by unmanned devices, natural hazards in populated areas, …) have clearly justified some of the choices made in the definition phase of the project. In addition, they have confirmed the need to strengthen the efforts needed to achieve a common understanding about principles of dealing with emerging risks on the broader level – e.g. in the area of EU standardization where the respective preparatory work has started, too.     

Managing safety risks in helicopter maritime operations

Nowadays, helicopters have been used in maritime transportation to serve offshore platforms. This paper outlines methodology for assessing safety risks by operating in the vicinity of helidecks. During each flight, decisions must be made regarding the events that involve interactions between the four safety risk elements – the pilot in command, the aircraft, the environment and the operation. This paper evaluates helicopter crash statistics based on region and flight phase. Data collected were used for developing methodology for computing the helicopter impact frequency into facility of interest. The analysis for helicopter impact frequency calculations is based on number of operations, crash rate, frequency, average length of flight and crash area. Furthermore, the conclusion was defined based on future measurements for helicopter accidents mitigation or reduction. The presented paper contributes to safety risk assessment in helicopter maritime operations.     

Endogenous economic freedom and the wealth of nations: evidence from a panel of countries, 1996–2011

Indexes of economic freedom measure the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries are supportive of economic freedom. The authors find a considerable scope for improvement in Index of Economic Freedom, created by Heritage Foundation, since not all components of index have equal effect on economic well-being. Contrary to Heritage methodology the authors tackle the aggregation bias and highlight that each index component contributes differently to the level of economic freedom and subsequently to the level of income per capita. The level of fiscal freedom and monetary freedom exert the strongest influence on the overall index of economic freedom. Authors present the new endogenous cross-country ranking of 135 countries from Instrumental Variable-Two Stage Least Squares (IV-2SLS) empirical specification which removes the inconsistencies arising from the arbitrary assumption of the equivalent effect of each component on the overall index and, hence, the level of real income per capita.     

Height matters: practicing consumer agency,gender, and body politics

The significance of body and gender in the formation of consumers’ identities and agencies has been widely scrutinized. Nevertheless, this study argues that this formation is not fully understood, unless the role of height is taken into account. It leans on a practice-based perspective and critical auto-ethnographic methodology so as to examine how a distinct agency is fabricated for a short-sized female body by a whole range of social, material, and sensory practices that are continuously enacted across various domains of life. It thereby adds to the existing literature on body, gender, and consumer agency by way of incorporating height into critical inquiries this far mostly concerned with weight; by way of materializing and sensorializing the fabrication of an embodied consumer agency this far addressed in visual terms; and by way of considering everyday life as the site in which it continuously unfolds. These insights bear important implications for the development of body politics.     

Finnish polytechnics as providers of knowledge-intensive services

Polytechnics are newcomers in companies' regional innovation environments in Finland. Particularly in regions with no university of their own or with only few knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) providers, they may become, and in some cases already are, important providers of science-and-technology-related services. The aim of this article is to analyse the roles, possibilities and challenges of polytechnics as public KIBS providers. Also, the position of polytechnics as a tool of Finnish innovation policy will be discussed.