Agent-Based E-Supply Chain Decision Support

The global Internet economy is expected, over time, to give rise to increasingly agile practices where new supply chain arrangements are dynamically set up in response to changing business conditions and demands for highly customized products and services. To implement these "e-supply chain" practices, enterprises need the ability to rapidly evaluate new business opportunities and dynamically identify the best potential supply chain partners to respond to them. They also need the ability to effectively coordinate production and delivery of goods or services across the resulting value chains. In this article, we introduce MASCOT, an agent-based decision support environment for dynamic supply chain management. MASCOT agents help users distributed across multiple organizations and across different levels within a given enterprise to collaborate on the development and revision of supply chain solutions, as they evaluate different business opportunities (e.g., requests for bids from potential customers) and different sourcing options. This article also discusses new coordination protocols, developed within the context of MASCOT and aimed at better exploiting the power of finite capacity scheduling functionality across the supply chain. Empirical results are presented quantifying the benefits afforded by these new protocols under different loads and supply chain configurations.     

Catching-Up Investment without Regulatory Commitment

This paper analyses a regulated firms incentives to undertake catching-up investments when the firm has private information about the initial technology and the regulator is unable to commit himself to incentive contracts prior to the firms investment decision. In the absence of commitment power, the firm takes into account that the investment decision may serve as a signal to the regulator about the firms initial technology. Any pure strategy equilibrium of the signaling game is shown to be pooling in the sense that the efficient type mimics the inefficient type by investing. By not following this strategy, the efficient type reveals its efficiency to the regulator, who responds by inducing the firm to produce without rents. Restricting attention to undefeated pooling equilibria, the level of investment is shown to be lower than the first-best level.     

Temporal Aggregation in Repeated Sales Models

Over the years, repeated sales models have come to wide and even commercial use. However, considering the subset of dwellings sold twice entail several challenges. Small sample problems constitute a special concern in repeated sales models, since sample sizes tend to be smaller than hedonic methods based on all transactions in a given period of time. Moreover, a cluster of observations in one time period does not only influence the index corresponding to that particular time period, but all other estimated indexes. A simulation approach is used to study the interplay between sample size and temporal aggregation. The analysis shows that serious mis-measurements may occur even in cases where the statistical diagnostic tools like R ² and t-values and empiric standard deviations indicate good explanatory power. However, the risk of serious biases driven by sparse data sets tends to be small, even if the actual estimated price curve show signs of under-smoothing. Mis-measured curves have unstable estimates with respect to temporal aggregation. Two repeated models, one with a slightly finer time partition achieved by adding one more time dummy, used on the same sample can alter the index estimate at a given time with as much at 10–15%. The simulations reveal that varying temporal aggregation is a powerful diagnostic tool and should be employed routinely. The last part of the paper shows that choosing an appropriate temporal aggregation involves more than merely a balance between under-smoothing and over-smoothing. Efficiency questions tend to be better addressed by a higher temporal aggregation, than a good overall estimation of the price curve alone calls for.      

The role of house prices in the monetary policy transmission mechanism in small open economies

We analyse the role of house prices in the monetary policy transmission mechanism in Norway, Sweden and the UK, using structural VARs. A solution is proposed to the endogeneity problem of identifying shocks to interest rates and house prices by using a combination of short-run and long-run (neutrality) restrictions. By allowing the interest rate and house prices to react simultaneously to news, we find the role of house prices in the monetary transmission mechanism to increase considerably. In particular, house prices react immediately and strongly to a monetary policy shock. Furthermore, the fall in house prices enhances the negative response in output and consumer price inflation that has traditionally been found in the conventional literature. Moreover, we find that the interest rate responds systematically to a change in house prices. However, the strength and timing of response varies between the countries, suggesting that housing may play a different role in the monetary policy setting.     

Endogenous housing market cycles

Housing markets tend to display positive serial correlation as well as considerable volatility over time. We present a heterogeneous agent model illustrating the connection between adaptive expectations and housing market fluctuations. A dwelling serves as a shelter, as a vehicle for investment and as mortgage collateral. Interesting dynamics arise as the valuation of these three properties changes over time through the interaction of buyers, sellers and mortgagees. In the absence of credit constraints imposed by mortgagees, house prices oscillate mildly around the equilibrium price. However, credit constraints imposed by mortgagees can affect market dynamics quite dramatically with periods of mild oscillations interrupted by violent collapses. This chaotic behavior arises even though buyers, sellers and mortgagees agree on market forecasts.     

A METHOD FOR IMPROVED CAPITAL MEASUREMENT BY COMBINING ACCOUNTS AND FIRM INVESTMENT DATA

We propose a new method for estimating capital stocks at the firm level by combining business accounts information and investment data. The method also produces capital estimates at the sector or industry level by summing individual firms' capital stocks and appropriately inflating this sum to account for firms not included in the data set. Our approach has two major advantages compared with the much used Perpetual Inventory Method (PIM). First, long investment series are not necessary. Second, sector capital estimates are automatically adjusted for changes in the capital stock because of entry and exit of firms. While capital growth rates in Norwegian manufacturing were only 1 percent on average during 1993–2004 according to national accounts figures, our method yields much higher growth rates of 5.5 percent on average.     

Inflation and firm growth: A reassessment

Investigations into the impact of inflation on firm growth have resulted in ambiguous conclusions within the economic growth and financial management literature. This paper will attempt to clarify this situation and describe conditions under which firm growth will be helped or hindered by inflaction. This is accomplished by constructing a financial modelling framework which incorporates the findings of earlier research and allows the various effects to be contrasted and cumulatively assessed. Our findings suggest that conditions under which inflation may be beneficial to firm growth do exist but are realistically improbable.     

Regulation of Quality and the Ratchet Effect: Does Unverifiability Hurt the Regulator?

The paper considers a regulatory relationship in which the quality of the output produced by the firm may be hard to verify. When the regulators commitment power is unlimited, one finds that unverifiability always hurts the regulator. Here it is shown that this need no longer be the case if the regulators commitment power is limited. If unverifiability makes the regulator offer low-powered incentive schemes, the firms rent from having private information about the technology is reduced. In long-term relationships, such a reduction in the information rent mitigates the ratchet effect, and by means of numerical examples it is shown that this positive effect of unverifiability may dominate the standard static cost of unverifiability.     

Far out or alone in the crowd: a taxonomy of peers in DEA

A method is presented for classifying strongly efficient units in DEA as interior or exterior, and as self-evaluators or active peers. The exterior strongly efficient units are found by running the enveloping procedure “from below”. There is no firm production-function evidence of the efficiency of exterior self-evaluators. Interior self-evaluators are more likely to have active peers as neighbours in more directions and may therefore represent technology. When performing a second stage regression analysis of efficiency scores, exterior self-evaluators should be removed. The proportion of exterior active peers also provides information on whether the variable specification is supported by the data.

Chronische Obstipationen gezielt behandeln

Die chronische Obstipation ist nach wie vor ein Tabuthema – auch in Kliniken und Pflegeeinrichtungen. Dabei ist das Beschwerdebild gerade in der station?ren Altenpflege sehr verbreitet und beeinflusst die Lebensqualit?t der Bewohner oft betr?chtlich. Wie ?u?ert sich das Krankheitsbild und welche Ursachen liegen ihm zu Grunde?