Problems now and in the past

In some places, voices are raised today which assert that development aid is not worth the noise that is being made about it, because the industrialised countries went through exactly the same phase of development by their own, unaided efforts and still had arrived where they are now. Any development aid, so it is said, will only paralyse the determination of LDCs to aid themselves. The author discusses this assertion in the following article.     

Weltweiter Globalisierungsprozeß erfordert gestaltende Eingriffe der Politik

In der Januarausgabe 2007 des WIRTSCHAFTSDIENST ver?ffentlichten wir einen Aufsatz von Professor Thomas Apolte mit dem Titel „Warum die Politik die Globalisierung nicht liebt“. Hierzu eine Replik von Professor Heiko K?rner und Professor Gisela Kubon-Gilke sowie eine Erwiderung von Professor Thomas Apolte.     

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in the Workplace Under the ADA in the Wake of Sutton and Its Companions

The terms Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) refer to a neurological impairment that affects the individual's ability to sustain attention and to behave in a calm, rational manner. ³ Although this disorder has long been considered to be restricted to childhood, recent research has demonstrated that many children carry it over into adult life and take it with them into the workplace. Most U.S. courts have treated AD/HD as a disability covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). ⁴ However, in the summer of 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court made three decisions that will undoubtedly affect the future status of AD/HD and other impairments under the ADA. This article examines those decisions, how they affect the employment rights of AD/HD-afflicted employees, and the changes they will probably bring to litigation in this area. Because we have many reservations about the court's decisions, we not only voice our criticisms of the decisions, but also offer an alternative approach.     

Metagame analysis of competitive strategy

The need for effective competitive strategy planning for a firm's survival and growth has long been recognized to be important. The identification and selection of good, or robust, market strategies must be based on the anticipation of the likely strategies of significant competitors, who should ideally be visualized as undergoing a similar process of assessing their own and other's goals and probable strategies. This paper reviews and evaluates the traditional economic and game theoretic approaches to competitive strategy analysis and presents an application of metagame analysis—an approach which has not previously been used in the strategic business environment. This approach, which appears to have some significant advantages over both economic and game theoretic approaches has been utilized and evaluated in a business firm (Dutta and King, forthcoming). An illustration of its use, which is based on a real-world application, is discussed.     

A contingent-claim integration of cost-volume-profit analysis with capital budgeting*

Abstract. This paper integrates cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis into the theory of capital budgeting by modeling the profit function in the CVP relation as put and call options on sales revenue. Such an approach is shown to be particularly useful when the profit function is piecewise linear, such as when there are multiple break-even points, or when the profit function is truncated. The results are of general applicability because such an approach does not require making assumptions about the decision maker's risk attitude. This claim is proven by showing that certain well-known decision models in the extant literature can be derived as specific cases from the results. The paper also shows how the CVP analysis can be extended to the case in which there is a dependence of the firm's cash flows on macroeconomic variables. Specifically, it applies to the CVP analysis the state-contingent claim approach to capital budgeting of Banz-Miller (1978) and relates the option valuation approach to Banz and Miller's framework. A numerical example using the state prices of Banz-Miller is provided. Résumé. Les auteurs associent l'analyse coût-volume-profit (CVP) à la théorie de l'établissement du budget des investissements en intégrant la fonction de profit dans l'interaction CVP à titre d'option de vente et d'achat sur le produit des ventes. Cette methode semble particulièrement utile lorsque la fonction de profit est linéaire mais morcelée. Il en ainsi, par exemple, lorsqu'il existe plusieurs seuils de rentabilité ou lorsque la fonction de profit est tronquee. Les résultats peuvent êtres généralisés puisqu'une méthode de ce genre n'exige pas la formulation d'hypothèses relatives à l'attitude du décideur à l'egard du risque. Cette affirmation est étayée par les auteurs qui montrent que certains modèles décisionnels bien connus dans la documentation existante peuvent être dérivés des résultats obtenus sous forme de cas précis. Les auteurs montrent également comment l'analyse coût-volume-profit peut être étendue au cas où les flux monétaires de l'entreprise dépendent de variables macroéconomiques. De façon précise, ils appliquent à l'analyse coût-volume-profit la méthode des créances conditionnelles à un état proposée par Banz et Miller pour établir le budget des investissements, et ils relient la méthode d'évaluation de l'option à la formule de Banz et Miller. Les auteurs proposent un exemple numérique dans lequel ils recourent aux prix de l'état de Banz-Miller.