Machine learning improves accounting estimates: evidence from insurance payments

Review of Accounting Studies - Managerial estimates are ubiquitous in accounting: most balance sheet and income statement items are based on estimates; some, such as the pension and employee stock...     

The (real) need for a human touch: testing a human–machine hybrid topic classification workflow on a New York Times corpus

Quality & Quantity - The classification of the items of ever-increasing textual databases has become an important goal for a number of research groups active in the field of computational...     

Business Process Modeling from the Control Perspective: The AI Planning Approach

This paper proposes a new approach for modeling business processes using the AI-Planning paradigm. Based on the concepts of agents, actions, constraints and goals, the AI-Planning approach allows explicit representation of various types of internal controls. Different threats to business processes, such as fraud, can be modeled as planning tasks—that is, finding a sequence of actions that intend to achieve a defined set of goals. Applying modeled threats to models of business processes, a planning reasoner can generate hypothetical scenarios of exposures. Because of its ability to explicitly represent threats, controls and exposures, we argue that the AI-Planning approach is useful for business process modeling from the control perspective.© 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hungary's Bankruptcy Experience, 1992-93

Policymakers working on enterprise restructuring should takea close look at Hungary's experience with bankruptcy reformsince 1992. This article provides detailed data on a randomlyselected stratified sample of actual cases filed in the firsttwo years after the enactment of the law. These data are supplementedwith information obtained from interviews with judges, liquidators,and firms involved in the bankruptcy process to give an overallpicture of the process in the first two years of its implementation.The bankruptcy process in Hungary has indisputably spurred institutionbuilding in the courts, the trustee profession, and the banks.It may also have succeeded broadly in separating viable fromunviable firms. It did little, however, to further either deeprestructuring or the exit of ailing firms. The changes in incentivesand institutions that are needed to make bankruptcy work intransition economies invariably take time. Hungary's initiative,albeit imperfect, was a bold start toward reform.     

Weathering Tight Economic Times: The Sales Evolution of Consumer Durables Over the Business Cycle

Despite their obvious importance, not much marketing research focuses on how business-cycle fluctuations affect individual companies and/or industries. Often, one only has aggregate information on the state of the national economy, even though cyclical contractions and expansions need not have an equal impact on every industry, nor on all firms in that industry. Using recent time-series developments, we introduce various measures to quantify the extent and nature of business-cycle fluctuations in sales. Specifically, we discuss the concept of cyclical volatility, and derive a dynamic comovement elasticity between the economy as a whole and the cyclical fluctuations in various performance series. To further enhance our understanding of how consumers adjust their purchasing behavior across different phases of the business cycle, two other notable features related, respectively, to the relative size of the peaks and troughs and the rate of change in upward and downward parts of the cycle, are explicitly considered. Of specific interest in this respect are the notion of deepness and steepness asymmetry. We apply these concepts to a broad set (24) of consumer durables, for which we analyze the cyclical sensitivity in their sales evolution. In that way, we (i) derive a novel set of empirical generalizations, and (ii) test different marketing theory-based hypotheses on the underlying drivers of cyclical sensitivity.Consumer durables are found to be more sensitive to business-cycle fluctuations than the general economic activity, as expressed in an average cyclical volatility of more than four times the one in GNP, and an average dynamic comovement elasticity in excess of 2. This observation calls for an explicit consideration of cyclical variation in durable sales. Interestingly, the combined evidence across all durables suggests that asymmetry is present in the speed of up- and downward movements, as durable sales fall much quicker during contractions than they recover during economic expansions. Finally, key variables related to the industrys pricing activities, the nature of the durable (convenience vs. leisure), and the stage in a products life cycle tend to moderate the extent of cyclical sensitivity in durable sales patterns.     

Collaborative design research: Lessons from continuous auditing

In this paper we discuss Collaborative Design Research – a hybrid methodology for undertaking design science research in collaboration with industry partners – that has been applied to the area of Continuous Auditing and which also has wider applicability to AIS research. Collaborative Design Research has a role at the time in the evolution of a field when early adopting practitioners have made the decision to implement an innovation, but there is as yet no established product or set of best practices that makes it obvious what they should do. We discuss eight key issues facing researchers attempting to do collaborative design research: 1) choice of implementation partner (IP), 2) choice of projects, 3) managing expectations, 4) building on the expertise of the IP, 5) introducing innovation to the IP, 6) project evaluation and reassessment, 7) cost and resource management, and 8) publishing results.     

Agenda chasing and contests among news providers

This article studies competition in contests with a focus on the news industry that is increasingly influenced by social media. The model assumes publishers to pick a single topic from a large pool based on the topics' prior “success” probabilities, thereby “chasing” potentially successful topics. Firms that publish topics that become successful divide a “reward” which can change with the number of competing firms and the number of successful topics. The results show that share structures can be categorized into three types that, in turn, lead to qualitatively different outcomes for the contest.     

The Informational Role of Manufacturer Returns Policies: How They Can Help in Learning the Demand

Returns policies are usually thought of as being a way to insure retailers against excess inventory. The work of Pellegrini (1986), Chu (1993), Lin (1993) and Padmanabhan and Png (1997) highlights the fact that there is considerably more to returns policies than just a mechanism for insurance. Our work identifies a heretofore undocumented rationale for returns policy: its role in learning the demand for a new product. The model of manufacturer–retailer interaction assumes that the demand is uncertain but correlated across time periods. Thus, its true nature is revealed over time via the realization of sales. The speed of such learning depends on the size of the inventory at the retail level which in turn can be strategically influenced by the manufacturer through a returns policy. In such environments, we show that a returns policy may be a way for the manufacturer to learn the demand of a new product.     

The Signaling Impact of Low Introductory Price on Perceived Quality and Trial

Economic signaling theory suggests that consumers interpret price withinthe context of market conditions. Under specific conditions it predicts thatlow price may signal high quality. Results from an experiment designed totest the behavioral assumptions underlying this prediction indicate thatconsumers intentions to purchase conform to the predictions of economicsignaling theory, but their judgments of product quality do not. The resultssuggest that consumers' response to signals may be more complex thanpreviously shown.