On the Importance of National Culture for the Design of Information Systems

In this contribution a literature review is conducted to illustrate how national culture influences phases of the design of information systems. For this purpose, we review the literature in order to identify reliable and commonly approved findings as well as still open remaining questions. Fundamentally, our literature review is a comprehensive framework that sets typical dimensions of system design as well as main types of cultural research in relation to each other. The existing research results in the area of national culture are classified along the levels of system design and attributed to typical phases of the design of information systems. It thus becomes apparent that in the domain of culture and information system design it is often only the design subject or the design object that is addressed. Contributions that connect both levels rarely exist. In our review, only a limited number of publications could be identified that covered concrete phases of the development providing system design, implementation, as well as verification and validation. From a theoretical perspective, there is an obvious dominance of Hofstede??s cultural dimensions that well address single topics of the design, such as user interface and inter cultural problems in development teams. Other domains, however (e.g., technology and architecture), are inadequately explained. Further, a predominantly phenomenological focus becomes obvious. The observed cultural phenomena and the connected interpretations are usable in a limited way for concrete development initiatives. The contribution ends with the vision of a theory for the culturally sensitive design of socio-technical information systems that absorbs current scientific knowledge and unites it in a structured approach.     

RISK MEASURES AND CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS FOR PROCESSES

In this paper we propose a generalization of the concepts of convex and coherent risk measures to a multiperiod setting, in which payoffs are spread over different dates. To this end, a careful examination of the axiom of translation invariance and the related concept of capital requirement in the one-period model is performed. These two issues are then suitably extended to the multiperiod case, in a way that makes their operative financial meaning clear. A characterization in terms of expected values is derived for this class of risk measures and some examples are presented.     

How do business and financial cycles interact?

This paper analyzes the interactions between business and financial cycles using an extensive database covering 44 countries for the period 1960:1–2010:4. Our analysis shows that there are strong linkages between the different phases of business and financial cycles. In particular, recessions associated with financial disruptions, notably house and equity price busts, tend to be longer and deeper than other recessions. Conversely, while recoveries following asset price busts tend to be weaker, recoveries associated with rapid growth in credit and house prices are often stronger. These findings emphasize the importance of financial market developments for the real economy.     

The Ethical Dimension of Leadership in the Programmes of Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is an overall management philosophy that includes a set of principles whose application is increasing. In fact, the business world and public institutions, such as hospitals, universities or city councils, are implementing quality programs. However, despite the wide diffusion of TQM, the success rate of this type of initiative is limited and the results, heterogeneous. Academics and professionals are therefore trying to identify the keys that explain the success or failure of this kind of initiative. Different explanations have been given, but most of the literature agrees that managerial commitment, implication and leadership are indispensable elements in a successful implementation of TQM. Nevertheless, a study on the specialised literature shows a terminological confusion between managerial commitment and managerial leadership. Is it the same to have a committed manager in the implementation process as to have a leader of the implementation process? The author of this paper defends the thesis that "commitment" and "leadership" are not synonymous, and states that only managerial leadership is able to promote and sustain profound organisational changes. The paper will show that, to understand the previous distinction, it is necessary to consider the ethical dimension of leadership. While committed managers may lead the process by using exclusively their power (with the necessary resource assignment), those who are leaders need authority. Authority goes further than power by generating a kind of confidence (trust) that is able to influence the members of the organisation and bring about profound changes, more than power alone can do.     

Role of Trade in Satisfying U.S. Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Demand

Increases in U.S. consumer incomes result in an increase in imports' share of U.S. consumption. Although U.S. consumers reduce the quantity demanded in response to higher import prices, the reduction is sufficiently inelastic that exporter revenue increases. U.S. Free Trade Agreements have made fresh fruits and vegetables available throughout the year and may also have broadened the U.S. marketing window for imports. Now U.S. food safety regulations favor large operations that can absorb the fixed and seasonal food safety related costs. Therefore, the brunt of the increased import competition is borne by small and medium-size producers.     

Smoke in the (Tariff) Water

As the economic crisis deepened and widened, fears of a return to the protectionist spiral of the 1930s become more common. However, an important difference between the 1930s and today is the existence of the World Trade Organization and the legal limits it imposes on the protectionist responses members can pursue. The first objective of this paper is to assess the extent to which applied tariffs can be legally raised without violating bound tariff obligations and compare it with what is economically feasible. The second objective is the examination of whether individual countries have taken advantage of these legal tariff hikes as protectionist responses during economic crises, after the creation of the WTO. Results suggest that the policy space left when looking at what is economically possible is indeed quite large. However, in the recent past little of the available policy space has been used by countries suffering from an economic crisis.     

Local volatility under rough volatility

Several asymptotic results for the implied volatility generated by a rough volatility model have been obtained in recent years (notably in the small-maturity regime), providing a better understanding of the shapes of the volatility surface induced by rough volatility models, supporting their calibration power to SP500 option data. Rough volatility models also generate a local volatility surface, via the so-called Markovian projection of the stochastic volatility. We complement the existing results on implied volatility by studying the asymptotic behavior of the local volatility surface generated by a class of rough stochastic volatility models, encompassing the rough Bergomi model. Notably, we observe that the celebrated “1/2 skew rule” linking the short-term at-the-money skew of the implied volatility to the short-term at-the-money skew of the local volatility, a consequence of the celebrated “harmonic mean formula” of [Berestycki et al. (2002). Quantitative Finance, 2, 61–69], is replaced by a new rule: the ratio of the at-the-money implied and local volatility skews tends to the constant $1/(H+3/2)$ (as opposed to the constant 1/2), where H is the regularity index of the underlying instantaneous volatility process.     

Entropy martingale optimal transport and nonlinear pricing–hedging duality

The objective of this paper is to develop a duality between a novel entropy martingale optimal transport (EMOT) problem and an associated optimisation problem. In EMOT, we follow the approach taken in the entropy optimal transport (EOT) problem developed in Liero et al. (Invent. Math. 211:969–1117, 2018), but we add the constraint, typical of martingale optimal transport (MOT) theory, that the infimum of the cost functional is taken over martingale probability measures. In the associated problem, the objective functional, related via Fenchel conjugacy to the entropic term in EMOT, is no longer linear as in (martingale) optimal transport. This leads to a novel optimisation problem which also has a clear financial interpretation as a nonlinear subhedging problem. Our theory allows us to establish a nonlinear robust pricing–hedging duality which also covers a wide range of known robust results. We also focus on Wasserstein-induced penalisations and study how the duality is affected by variations in the penalty terms, with a special focus on the convergence of EMOT to the extreme case of MOT.