Tourism firms’ environmental rankings and financial performance: a multidimensional scaling approach

The relationship between firms' environmental initiatives and financial performance continues to generate considerable interest. Despite the progress made in the study of this relationship, there is a paucity of research addressing tourism sector firms’ simultaneous environmental and financial performance. This research sheds light on the link between tourism-related firms’ environmental and financial performance. Results indicate that firms that performed well financially ranked higher on environmental initiatives. This suggests that firms’ financial performance may influence environmental performance since firms with good financial performance are better able to allocate more resources to support environmental initiatives. However, since investments in environmental initiatives require financial and manpower resources, firms should only invest in such initiatives if resources are not diverted from core functions, since such actions could affect overall firm viability. Results also indicated that firms that have adopted green initiatives can be classified into four clearly defined categories: progressive firms, which includes firms that simultaneously excel on green initiatives and financial performance; repressive firms or those that perform poorly on both; aggressive firms or those that perform admirably financially but poorly on environmental initiatives; and green firms or firms that perform admirably on green initiatives but poorly financially.     

Acquisition pattern analysis for evolutionary database marketing

Insight into the order in which clients acquire products can be important for determining relevant cross-sell offers for the firm's clients and for the development of long-term relationships with clients. Acquisition pattern analysis studies the prototypical orders in which products are acquired. However, previous studies into acquisition patterns were based on survey data. This paper investigates the applicability of acquisition pattern analysis to transactional data, the most commonly available data in business settings.     

Option listing: market quality revisited

We test for changes in liquidity around LEAPS option introduction and find two results that address important disputes in the literature. First, we find that the impact of LEAPS upon share liquidity does not occur until 23 days after the LEAPS are introduced. Our findings are in conflict with Danielsen et al.’s (J Financ Quant Anal 42:1041–1062, 2007) findings that liquidity improves before option introduction, and are consistent with the findings of Kumar et al. (J Finance 53:717–732, 1998). Second, we find that share volume increases before option introduction and so the volume increase can be predictive of option listing, but the shift in volume does not occur early enough to drive the exchange’s introduction decision.     

A qualitative approach to Markovian equilibrium in infinite horizon economies with capital

Using lattice programming and order theoretic fixpoint theory, we develop a new class of monotone iterative methods that provide a qualitative theory of Markovian equilibrium decision processes for a large class of infinite horizon economies with capital. The class of economies includes models with public policy, valued fiat money, monopolistic competition, production externalities, and various other nonconvexities in the production sets. The results can be adapted to construct symmetric Markov equilibrium in models with many agents and market incompleteness. As the methods are constructive, they provide the foundations for a rigorous analysis of numerical approximation schemes that study extremal Markovian equilibrium. Equilibrium comparative statics results relative to the space of economies are available. Of independent interest, we provide new conditions for preserving complementarity under maximization, and new generalized envelope theorems for nonconcave dynamic programming problems. Our fixed point algorithms are sharp, and are able to distinguish sufficient conditions under which Markovian equilibrium form a complete lattice of Lipschitz continuous, uniformly continuous and semicontinuous monotone functions as well as unique continuously differentiable equilibrium.     

An Optimal Currency Basket to Minimize Output and Inflation Volatility: Theory and an Application to Hong Kong

In this paper we develop a theoretical model of an optimal currency basket for a small open economy. A currency basket for the home economy is defined as a chosen weighted average of a subset of foreign currencies, and an optimal currency basket is taken to be one that minimizes a given weighted average of the expected output volatility and expected inflation volatility. This theoretical model is then applied to Hong Kong, which has adopted a currency board system for close to 30 years. We estimate an optimal currency basket for Hong Kong and compare its performance with the existing currency board system as well as with currency baskets whose weights are given by export and import trade shares.