Becoming a high-performance work organization: the role of security,employee involvement and training

The emerging employment system characterized by a high degree of employment security with flexible job assignments, employee involvement in problem solving and continuous improvement, and continuous training of employees is discussed. This model is called the SET system (for Security, Employee involvement and Training) and it is examined by means of case studies of five US firms that are attempting to establish or maintain a SET system. It is found that SET systems are difficult to implement in a gradual and partial manner. The three elements of SET reinforce one another and firms that are successful in adopting SET have made an investment to implement all three SET elements simultaneously. Four factors that impede implementation of a SET system are then identified.     

Optimal dividends under a drawdown constraint and a curious square-root rule

Finance and Stochastics - In this paper, we address the problem of optimal dividend payout strategies from a surplus process governed by Brownian motion with drift under a drawdown constraint,...     

Erklärung der persuasiven Wirkung von Werbung

This article summarises the results of previously discussed and analysed advertising effects using a model of these effects. The model presented includes three mediating variables (attitude toward the advertisement, advertisement cognitions, and brand cognitions) and two moderating variables (involvement and frequency of exposure). We also discuss the relevance of these five concepts. In addition, we present empirical studies to support particular elements of our model. We see the contribution of this model in the fact that it represents a basis for investigating the direct and indirect effects of advertising concepts (e.g. advertisement variation in the case of increasing exposure) and for analysing the impact of recipients’ characteristics (e.g. their familiarity with advertising object or their mood) on attitudes toward the brand. Furthermore, such a model provides an informative basis with regard to the question of which dimensions of advertising effects should be considered when optimizing advertisements.     

OPTIMAL REINSURANCE AND DIVIDEND DISTRIBUTION POLICIES IN THE CRAMÉR-LUNDBERG MODEL

We consider that the reserve of an insurance company follows a Cramér-Lundberg process. The management has the possibility of controlling the risk by means of reinsurance. Our aim is to find a dynamic choice of both the reinsurance policy and the dividend distribution strategy that maximizes the cumulative expected discounted dividend payouts. We study the usual cases of excess-of-loss and proportional reinsurance as well as the family of all possible reinsurance contracts. We characterize the optimal value function as the smallest viscosity solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and we prove that there exists an optimal band strategy. We also describe the optimal value function for small initial reserves.