Ant colony optimization for disaster relief operations

This paper presents a meta-heuristic of ant colony optimization (ACO) for solving the logistics problem arising in disaster relief activities. The logistics planning involves dispatching commodities to distribution centers in the affected areas and evacuating the wounded people to medical centers. The proposed method decomposes the original emergency logistics problem into two phases of decision making, i.e., the vehicle route construction, and the multi-commodity dispatch. The sub-problems are solved in an iterative manner. The first phase builds stochastic vehicle paths under the guidance of pheromone trails while a network flow based solver is developed in the second phase for the assignment between different types of vehicle flows and commodities. The performance of the algorithm is tested on a number of randomly generated networks and the results indicate that this algorithm performs well in terms of solution quality and run time.     

Does knowledge of finance mitigate the gender difference in financial risk-aversion?

We investigate the gender difference in financial risk aversion using a survey of finance professors from universities across the United States. We compare their actual portfolio allocations to that of respondents in the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). We find that among highly educated individuals, women are significantly more risk averse than men. However, we find that when men and women have both attained a high level of financial education, they are equally likely to invest a significant portion of their portfolio in risky assets, suggesting that financial education mitigates the gender difference in financial risk aversion.     

Subordinate board structures

The board of directors is a flat governance structure where each director has an equal vote in determining the collective actions taken by the group. Yet, some boards choose to delegate authority for specific tasks to numerous committees, while others choose to create relatively few subcommittees of the board. We investigate the determinants of subordinate board structures, exploring both their benefits and costs. Using a sample of the S&P 1500 we find that subordinate board structures are positively related to board size and the proportion of outside directors, even after controlling firm characteristics such as complexity and ownership structure. Further tests indicate that these board structures can offset the negative associations that board size and the proportion of outsiders can have with firm performance. Yet, in firms with relatively small or insider oriented boards, where co-ordination problems among directors or social loafing may be less pronounced, we find that subordinate board structures are negatively related to firm performance. Categorizing committees as either monitoring or advisory, we find that both types of committees appear related to firm performance. Taken as whole, these results are consistent with the idea that subordinate board structures can be a costly remedy to alleviate problems that arise with larger, more outsider dominated boards.     

The impact of transactional and relational strategies in business markets: An agenda for inquiry

The impetus for the special issue of Industrial Marketing Management is the importance of understanding the implications of transactional and relational strategies in business-to-business contexts. The objective of the special issue is to integrate conceptual and empirical research in this area. We highlight research that extends current thinking in the area to ensure that this special issue serves an impetus for future research on this important topic.     

Understanding Retail Managers’ Role in the Sales of Products and Services

This research investigates the influence of retail chain-level activities (e.g., district supervisor directives and policies) and store manager behaviors on the sale of physical products versus services. Using data gathered within a U.S.-based retail automotive parts chain, the authors discover that to sell services, especially in competitive environments, store managers should focus on sales planning and transformative leadership behaviors, which accentuate both the long-term planning horizon and the effects of managerial actions. In less competitive environments though, a more transactional approach (e.g., selling orientation) can be effective for selling services. Alternatively, to sell products, store managers’ selling effort appears to be the most important driver of success, and a transformative leadership approach may be detrimental when the retailer faces a high level of direct competition. In total, the findings suggest that corporate chain activities, such as the level and clarity of store managers’ goals and supervisor monitoring, influence store manager behaviors, which in turn affect the sale of physical products and services.     

The Role of Market Sentiment in Asset Allocations and Stock Returns

Abstract

The authors investigate the role of mutual fund flows in incorporating market sentiment into asset prices. They show that retail investors adjust their investments among mutual fund categories in response to changes in market sentiment. Consistent with sentiment-induced price pressure through fund flows, they further find that firms favored by mutual funds, such as large-cap, dividend payers, and firms with high institutional ownership are sensitive to market sentiment. The authors construct a pricing factor representing sentiment risk and find that the sentiment factor is significant in standard asset pricing models and robust to various sorting procedure.     

The effect of career breaks on the working lives of women

In this paper we examine the effect of career breaks on the working lives of women using survey data from the state of Queensland in Australia. After estimating the income penalty faced by women with career interruptions – according to the duration of, and reasons for, the interruptions – we seek to address a wider set of issues regarding: patterns of job change and income gains or losses related to job change; determinants of career re-entry plans; and satisfaction with hours worked. As women increasingly combine motherhood and employment, they face both penalties and costs, particularly if they have taken a career break in order to care for their young. This general labor market failure that penalizes motherhood should be addressed by relevant measures related to their income, working hours, and the type and status of employment, particularly on their re-entry into employment after a child-related career break.     

Cheaper,Greener and More Efficient: Rationalising UK Carbon Prices

Current UK energy use policies, which primarily aim to reduce carbon emissions, provide abatement incentives that vary by user and fuel, creating inefficiency. Distributional concerns are often given as a justification for the lower carbon price faced by households, but there is little rationale for carbon prices associated with the use of gas to be lower than those for electricity. We consider reforms that raise carbon prices faced by households and reduce the variation in carbon prices across gas and electricity use, improving the efficiency of emissions reduction. We show that the revenue raised from these reforms can be recycled in a way that ameliorates some of the distributional concerns. Whilst such recycling is not able to protect all poorer households, existing policy also makes distributional trade‐offs, but does so in an opaque and inefficient way.     

CREDIBLY IDENTIFYING SOCIAL EFFECTS: ACCOUNTING FOR NETWORK FORMATION AND MEASUREMENT ERROR

Understanding whether and how connections between agents (networks) such as declared friendships in classrooms, transactions between firms, and extended family connections, influence their socio‐economic outcomes has been a growing area of research within economics. Early methods developed to identify these social effects assumed that networks had formed exogenously, and were perfectly observed, both of which are unlikely to hold in practice. A more recent literature, both within economics and in other disciplines, develops methods that relax these assumptions. This paper reviews that literature. It starts by providing a general econometric framework for linear models of social effects, and illustrates how network endogeneity and missing data on the network complicate identification of social effects. Thereafter, it discusses methods for overcoming the problems caused by endogenous formation of networks. Finally, it outlines the stark consequences of missing data on measures of the network, and regression parameters, before describing potential solutions.