The Development of the Institutional Investor: The Case of Australian Life Insurers 1945–85

This paper considers the post‐war development of asset management practices among Australian life insurers, which have historically been among the largest institutional investors in Australia. A complex process of adaptation and organisational restructuring allowed life insurers to transform from basic investors of policy‐holders’ funds to large multifaceted institutional investors in just three decades. Three stages in the development of investment practices are identified. These phases trace the process of expanding existing knowledge bases; diversification; and the acquisition of new skills; consolidation and the integration of these skills into institutional structures; thus completing one cycle of organisational learning and setting the stage for the next.     

ROTARIANS AGAINST MALARIA: PHILANTHROPIC ENTERPRISE IN ACTION

Action by voluntary agencies to eradicate preventable diseases in Africa demonstrates how entrepreneurship can be combined with philanthropy to achieve results that are far more effective than traditional methods of distributing help through bureaucratic mechanisms.     

The Forgone Gains of Incomplete Portfolios

This article proposes a test for the cost-based explanationof nonparticipation, by estimating a lower bound to the forgonegains of incomplete portfolios; these are in turn a lower boundto the costs that could rationalize nonparticipation in financialmarkets: high bounds would imply implausibly high costs. Assumingisoelastic utility and a relative risk aversion of three orless, for the stock market I estimate an average lower boundof between 0.7 and 3.3 percent of consumption. Since total annual(observable plus unobservable) participation costs are likelyto exceed these bounds, the cost-based explanation is not rejectedby this test.     

Developing a core competency model of innovative culinary development

This research investigates core competencies of innovative culinary development (ICD) by deep interviews, Delphi and Analytic Network Process (ANP). Stage I of this research employs a Delphi study that involves 16 participants to provide initial innovative culinary competencies based on 20 interviews of executive chefs, R&D managers and culinary artists. After gaining the consensus from the experts, dimensions and items of competencies are identified during Stage II. Also, ANP is adopted to determine the relative weights among the competency criteria and emphasize the interdependent relationships, thus increasing the accuracy of the results.