Dynamic contracting under imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs

We develop a dynamic principal–agent model to show how imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs about payoff-relevant parameters, agency conflicts, and the agent's implicit incentives to influence the principal's posterior beliefs through his unobservable actions interact to affect optimal dynamic contracts. We make a methodological contribution to the literature by solving the continuous-time contracting problem using a discrete-time approximation approach. We obtain a simple characterization of optimal renegotiation-proof contracts in terms of the solution to a nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE). We then exploit the properties of the ODE to derive a number of novel implications for the dynamics of long-term contracts that alter the intuition gleaned from the previous literature. Optimism has a first-order impact on incentives, investment and output that could reconcile the “private equity” puzzle. Consistent with empirical evidence, the interaction between asymmetric beliefs, risk-sharing and adverse selection costs could cause the time-paths of the agent's incentive intensities to be increasing or decreasing. Our results also suggest that the incorporation of imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs could potentially reconcile empirical evidence of an ambiguous relation between risk and incentives, and a non-monotonic relation between firm value and incentives. Permanent and transitory components of risk have differing effects on incentives, which suggest that empirical investigations of the link between risk and incentives should appropriately account for different components of risk.     

Social Position and Behaviour: A Formalization

Modern society has witnessed anever-increasing development in the social sciences;partly due to changes in mentality, and partly due tothe growing requirements of the economic and political world – requirements which frequently takeon the guise of necessity, as for instance in thecases of market research and electoral opinion polls.Such development has produced an increasing paralleldemand for mathematical accuracy and exactitude inthese fields.The intention here is to rationalize the basic logicand methodology of the sociological procedure; anintention, it is hoped, which could be influential inimproving practical sociological work by rendering itmore comprehensible. This requires the employment offairly sophisticated mathematical and statisticalnotions.Section 1 outlines the definitions considered essential for the rationalization of the basiclogic framework previously described.Section 2 discusses the general concept of statisticalvariance. Section 3 introduces the notion of ``heterogeneity'and offers several propositions linked to this concept.Section 5 revolves around the notion of ``inaccuracy'.Section 6 presents a theorem relating to theimmersion of metric spaces in Banach spaces, andshows how the theorem can be used to constructtheoretically satisfactory immersion algorithms.Section 7 together with the material, which ispreviously introduced in Section 4, outlines thecluster analysis and the principal components methodologies.     

福建省地级市经济发展水平综合评价

文章采用人均GDP、人均第三产业总产值、人均地方财政收入、进出口总额、城镇人口占总人口的比重等9个指标,运用主成分分析方法对福建省9个地级市的经济发展水平进行综合评价,并对其进行了聚类分析,进行分类比较,提出了相应的发展对策。     

钢铁上市公司财务绩效评价与对策分析

采用主成分分析法对我国钢铁上市公司2006年的财务绩效进行了综合评价,并分析了引起绩效优劣的动因。研究表明：2006年钢铁上市公司的综合财务绩效整体较好,仅个别企业表现不佳;大部分企业的财务核心能力接近,两端企业差异较大;财务管理的目标呈内外两极分化。同时,提出了钢铁上市公司提高财务绩效的对策。     

企业竞争力的一种评价方法

讨论了企业竞争力的一种模糊评价方法,归纳了影响竞争力评价的因素。给出了一种应用于企业竞争力评价的指标体系和模糊评价方法,运用主成分分析法确定各指标的权重,为企业竞争力评价提供了一种定量分析方法。     

植入“过度自信”因素的委托-代理合同研究

传统的委托代理关系研究假设委托人和代理人都是完全理性的,但大量研究表明,双方参与人并非完全理性,最显著的非理性表现就是过度自信。本文将行为经济理论与委托-代理理论相结合,把代理人过度自信的因素引入Holmstorm—Milgrom模型中,对代理人的参与约束条件进行了改进,建立了代理人过度自信情况下的委托-代理模型。研究结果表明,代理人的过度自信水平与代理人的绝对风险规避度和努力成本以及外生不确定性因素有关,代理人适当过度自信将给委托-代理双方带来更高的收益。     

Forecasting inflation in China

This paper forecasts inflation in China over a 12-month horizon. The analysis runs 15 alternative models and finds that only those considering many predictors via a principal component display a better relative forecasting performance than the univariate benchmark.     

基于PCA/FCM的企业信用评价研究

针对我国企业信用评价问题的特点,文章分析了企业信用评价基本原则和主要影响因素,建立了企业信用评价指标体系。企业信用评价是一类包括一系列独立变量的分类问题,将主成分分析与模糊理论引入信用评价中,构建基于PCA/FCM的企业信用评价模型,这使得模型更接近人们的思维方式、指标赋权更为客观。应用该模型及SPSS11.0、MATLAB7.0对所选企业研究显示:该模型非常有效和实用。     

城市公交行业顾客满意度测评及其提升对策——以合肥市为例

城市公交作为城市经济运转的动脉,已经成为国内城市发展规划中的重中之重。然而,目前在城市公交行业占主体地位的国有公交企业却亟待提高营运效益,增强企业活力,以摆脱经营上的困境。立足于安徽省省会城市合肥市的公交行业,通过实证研究与规范研究相结合的方式,针对城市公交行业的顾客满意度测评及其提升对策问题进行了较为深入的探讨。     

基于城市竞争力分析的城市定位——以青岛市为例

城市定位离不开区域条件的分析,但是区域分析不能仅局限于城市所在腹地,应根据需要在不同层次的区域进行综合比较。文章以青岛市为例,借助城市竞争力分析的框架,探讨了城市定位的定量化分析。根据地理学区域的思想,结合研究对象的行政地位和区位特点,从全国、东南沿海、山东省三种层次的区域分析了青岛市的城市地位和竞争力,指出了目前城市发展过程中的相对优势和不足,借此对青岛市进行了科学定位。