A Group Utility Maximizer Mechanism for Land Assembly

Buyers requiring large parcels of land for development purposes engage several owners in a bilateral trade seeking monetary payment in exchange for land – a business transaction most often referred to in the literature as the problem of land assembly. To avoid the holdout problem which is a typical consequence of such negotiations necessitates a good pricing strategy that meets the subjective valuation considerations of the owners and protecting property rights to warrant a fair and efficient outcome. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature that includes contributions from game theory in the form of Nash bargaining, Bayesian theory for incomplete information, auction theory and Mechanism Design which have individually enriched this field and proposed credible solutions. In this paper, we consider a setting that has a single buyer and N sellers. We take a Mechanism Design approach to study the assembly problem in a utilitarian framework, where we associate risk-averse utility functions with the sellers. Given a set of reserve prices reported by sellers, and their risk-aversion behaviour, we seek an incentive-compatible mechanism that simultaneously maximizes the sum of individual expected utilities while delivering a Pareto optimal per-seller penalty-reward structure. We show how this mechanism, inspired and adapted from the actuarial Risk Exchange concept in the Insurance industry, can be fruitfully applied to the land assembly problem, yielding an efficient and optimal solution to the holdout problem, while making very minimal demands on knowledge of sellers valuations. The working of the mechanism is illustrated with a simple example.     

BRITAIN TOO SANGUINE ON MINIMUM WAGE

This article examines and summarises the history and research regarding minimum wages in the USA and the UK. Despite a gradual shift in opinions among policy‐makers, empirical research generally confirms the traditional hypothesis that disemployment effects accompany the imposition of minimum wages that exceed the market wage.     

PRICE EFFECTS OF SHOPPING HOURS REGULATION: EVIDENCE FROM GERMANY

This article investigates the price effects of shopping hours legislation in order to evaluate empirically the theoretical argument that such regulations protect consumers from price increases. The paper first provides a review of the literature; it then analyses the data prior to and following the liberalisation of German shopping hours regulations in 2006 and 2007 in order to estimate the effects of these changes. The article finds that liberalisation resulted in a fall in prices. This conclusion adds to a growing body of literature suggesting that shopping hours regulations entail significant economic costs.     

An econometric analysis of mobile services growth across regions of India

Quick deployment, competition, and reduced prices have propelled the growth of mobile services in India much like in other developing and transitional countries. India has the second largest mobile subscriber base in the world, and continues to exhibit phenomenal growth. It is the objective of this study to determine the effect of different techno-economic variables on the growth of mobile services in India. The demographic, economic and market variables vary widely across regions of developing countries such as India. Though a number of cross-country studies exist, this is one of the first attempts to study the growth of mobile services across service areas of a country. We model the growth of mobile services using technology diffusion framework, incorporating other variables that impact growth. Our analysis of panel data using the model indicates that competition and network effects are the significant factors that positively affect growth of mobile services in India. The traditional factors such as income, population and fixed line penetration do not have any significant impact on the adoption of mobile services.     

Advertising productivity: developing an agenda for research

Despite its importance, research on advertising productivity is limited and fragmentary. This article consolidates the major research streams on different facets of productivity. This consolidation allows us to identify and prioritise various issues that need to be addressed, and thereby develop a comprehensive research agenda for this area.     

TRACTABLE ROBUST EXPECTED UTILITY AND RISK MODELS FOR PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION

Expected utility models in portfolio optimization are based on the assumption of complete knowledge of the distribution of random returns. In this paper, we relax this assumption to the knowledge of only the mean, covariance, and support information. No additional restrictions on the type of distribution such as normality is made. The investor’s utility is modeled as a piecewise‐linear concave function. We derive exact and approximate optimal trading strategies for a robust (maximin) expected utility model, where the investor maximizes his worst‐case expected utility over a set of ambiguous distributions. The optimal portfolios are identified using a tractable conic programming approach. Extensions of the model to capture asymmetry using partitioned statistics information and box‐type uncertainty in the mean and covariance matrix are provided. Using the optimized certainty equivalent framework, we provide connections of our results with robust or ambiguous convex risk measures, in which the investor minimizes his worst‐case risk under distributional ambiguity. New closed‐form results for the worst‐case optimized certainty equivalent risk measures and optimal portfolios are provided for two‐ and three‐piece utility functions. For more complicated utility functions, computational experiments indicate that such robust approaches can provide good trading strategies in financial markets.     

Heterogeneous Beliefs,IPO Valuation,and the Economic Role of the Underwriter in IPOs

We empirically analyze the economic role of the underwriter in initial public offerings (IPOs), distinguishing between the “certification” and “market power” hypotheses. We find that equity in high‐reputation underwriter backed IPOs is priced higher and further away from intrinsic value than that in low‐reputation underwriter backed IPOs. Our results are robust to controlling for the endogenous selection of firms to take public by underwriters. Overall, our results support the market power hypothesis and reject the certification hypothesis, indicating that the role of underwriters is to obtain the highest possible valuation for the IPOs that they back rather than to price the equity close to intrinsic value.     

A multi-attribute diffusion model for forecasting the adoption of investment alternatives for consumers

This article develops a diffusion model that incorporates potential adopters' perceptions of the relevant innovation attributes in explaining the rate of adoption of an innovation. Data from 14 investment alternatives currently available to consumers are used to develop a multi-attribute diffusion model for forecasting the acceptance of a potential investment alternative. Limitations and further extensions of the proposed model are also discussed.     

Do More Risk-Averse Investors Have Lower Net Worth and Income?

This study examines the relationship between attitude toward risk and both net worth and income. The data are obtained from a financial diary kept by a national, scientifically selected sample of more than 3000 households. Results show that both net worth and income are negatively related to risk aversion.     

International acquisitions in the united states: Evidence from returns to foreign bidders

This paper provides evidence on the minimally explored topic of abnormal returns earned by stockholders of foreign bidders seeking to acquire a target firm in the USA. Four sources of influence on abnormal returns are identified: changes in net wealth of the bidder associated with changes in exchange rates; possible value-destroying managerial discretionary behavior by bidders with excess cash flows, as suggested by Jensen; comparative advantages for foreign bidders domiciled in relatively favorable tax jurisdictions; ownership status of the target, i.e. whether the target is an entire firm and whether it involves divested assets. The study includes 77 firms from 10 countries. The results show that stockholders of foreign bidders earn significant, negative abnormal returns surrounding the announcement of an acquisition in the USA. These abnormal returns become increasingly negative over the 15 days after the announcement of the acquisition, indicating that more information about the acquisition is revealed to investors subsequent to the initial announcement. Cross-sectional regressions indicate that relative exchange rates and cash positions explain variation in abnormal returns. A decline in the value of the dollar increases abnormal returns for the foreign bidder, thus supporting the net wealth hypothesis. The results also show that cash-rich foreign firms tend to enjoy higher abnormal returns when making acquisitions in the USA. The result provides support for the Froot and Stein cash-constrained hypothesis rather than for Jensen's free-cash-flow theory.