The Impact of Comparative Food Price Information on Consumers and Grocery Retailers: Some Preliminary Findings of a Field Experiment

There is reason to believe that consumers face a difficult task in securing adequate and accurate information upon which to judge relative price levels of competing foodstores. The objective of the research reported here was to investigate the potential of retail food price reporting for correcting this information problem. Both consumer and grocery retailer responses to this comparative food price information were analyzed. A pretest-post-test design with four pairs of experimental-control cities (with replications at two levels of concentration) was employed to collect price data. A modified Solomon-four group design was used for surveys of food consumers in experimental and control cities. The results of analysis of variance models lend support to the hypothesis that price reporting can lower the relative level of food prices, both for items individually identified in a price report and items not identified in the report. The magnitude of this effect varied among the cities. It appears that consumers' role in this experiment was a passive one: consumer behavior and patronage patterns did not change in a manner that would consistently reinforce the competitive effects of the price reports.     

PORTFOLIO BEHAVIOUR AND ASSET PRICING IN A CHARACTERISTICS FRAMEWORK

We have applied the characteristics model to the problem of portfolio behaviour and asset pricing. By defining assets in terms of characteristics, we generated individual demands for assets which depended on the prices of assets, the technological relationship between assets and asset characteristics, and the individual's preferences for different characteristics. In general, the characteristics model cannot be readily aggregated across individuals. However, when we assumed that the assets-characteristics technology had a simple form which was common to all individuals, market-clearing conditions could be used to derive an asset pricing model. Finally, we showed that the characteristics model provides a unified approach to the problem of preference-based portfolio behaviour and asset pricing. A number of existing models can be interpreted as characteristics models: the state-preference model, the parameter-preference model, the capital asset pricing model and the inter-temporal capital asset pricing model.     

Decentralized Investment Management: Evidence from the Pension Fund Industry

Using a unique data set, we document two secular trends in the shift from centralized to decentralized pension fund management over the past few decades. First, across asset classes, sponsors replace generalist balanced managers with better‐performing specialists. Second, within asset classes, funds replace single managers with multiple competing managers following diverse strategies to reduce scale diseconomies as funds grow larger relative to capital markets. Consistent with a model of decentralized management, sponsors implement risk controls that trade off higher anticipated alphas of multiple specialists against the increased difficulty in coordinating their risk‐taking and the greater uncertainty concerning their true skills.     

Fundamental Economic Variables,Expected Returns,and Bond Fund Performance

In this article, we develop relative pricing (APT) models that are successful in explaining expected returns in the bond market. We utilize indexes as well as unanticipated changes in economic variables as factors driving security returns. An innovation in this article is the measurement of the economic factors as changes in forecasts. The return indexes are the most important variables in explaining the time series of returns. However, the addition of the economic variables leads to a large improvement in the explanation of the cross-section of expected returns. We utilize our relative pricing models to examine the performance of bond funds.     

Simple Technical Trading Rules and the Stochastic Properties of Stock Returns

This paper tests two of the simplest and most popular trading rules—moving average and trading range break—by utilizing the Dow Jones Index from 1897 to 1986. Standard statistical analysis is extended through the use of bootstrap techniques. Overall, our results provide strong support for the technical strategies. The returns obtained from these strategies are not consistent with four popular null models: the random walk, the AR(1), the GARCH-M, and the Exponential GARCH. Buy signals consistently generate higher returns than sell signals, and further, the returns following buy signals are less volatile than returns following sell signals, and further, the returns following buy signals are less volatile than returns following sell signals. Moreover, returns following sell signals are negative, which is not easily explained by any of the currently existing equilibrium models.     

No System Is Perfect: Understanding How Registration‐Based Editorial Processes Affect Reproducibility and Investment in Research Quality

The papers in this volume were published through a Registration‐based Editorial Process (REP). Authors submitted proposals to gather and analyze data; successful proposals were guaranteed publication as long as the authors lived up to their commitments, regardless of whether results supported their predictions. To understand how REP differs from the Traditional Editorial Process (TEP), we analyze the papers themselves; conference comments; a survey of conference authors, reviewers, and attendees; and a survey of authors who have successfully published under TEP. We find that REP increases up‐front investment in planning, data gathering, and analysis, but reduces follow‐up investment after results are known. This shift in investment makes individual results more reproducible, but leaves articles less thorough and refined. REP could be improved by encouraging selected forms of follow‐up investment that survey respondents believe are usually used under TEP to make papers more informative, focused, and accurate at little risk of overstatement.