Countries’ adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-sized Entities (IFRS for SMEs) – early empirical evidence

The International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-sized Entities (IFRS for SMEs) is increasingly being adopted in a number of jurisdictions. Despite the economic importance of non-publicly accountable entities, little is known about what factors influence countries' decisions to adopt IFRS for SMEs. In a unique sample of 128 countries, we find that countries that are not capable of developing their own local generally accepted accounting principles are more likely to adopt IFRS for SMEs. We also provide evidence that in jurisdictions where full IFRS have been applied to private firms, the likelihood of adoption of IFRS for SMEs increases, suggesting that jurisdictions reduce the financial reporting burden on SMEs. Moreover, in line with prior literature, there is evidence that countries with a relatively low quality of governance institutions are more likely to adopt this new set of accounting standards. The results also hold under alternative measures and different estimation approaches. Overall, our results are helpful in understanding the worldwide diffusion of IFRS for SMEs. Standard setters and regulators might consider our study in the future development of accounting harmonisation of non-publicly accountable entities.     

Do casinos pay their customers to become risk-averse? Revising the house money effect in a field experiment

The house money effect predicts that individuals show increased risk-seeking behavior in the presence of prior windfall gains. Although the effect’s existence is widely accepted, experimental studies that compare individuals’ risk-taking behavior using house money to individuals’ risk-taking behavior using their own money produce contradictory results. This experimental field study analyzes the gambling behavior of 917 casino customers who face real losses. We find that customers who received free play at the entrance showed not higher but significantly lower levels of risk-taking behavior during their casino visit, expressed through lower average wagers. This study thus provides field evidence against the house money effect. Moreover, as a result of lower levels of risk seeking, endowed customers yield better economic results in the form of smaller own-money losses when leaving the casino.     

Der Luxus »intellektueller Boheme« Zum Tod von Alphons Silbermann (1909–2000)

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Destructive behavior in a Fragile Public Good game

Socially destructive behavior in a public good environment–like damaging public goods–is an underexposed phenomenon in economics. In an experiment we investigate whether such behavior can be influenced by the very nature of an environment. To that purpose we use a Fragile Public Good (FPG) game which puts the opportunity for destructive behavior (taking) on a level playing field with constructive behavior (contributing). We find substantial evidence of destructive decisions, sometimes leading to sour relationships characterized by persistent hurtful behavior. While positive framing induces fewer destructive decisions, shifting the selfish Nash towards minimal taking doubles its share to more than 20%.     

Exact and approximate D-optimal designs in polynomial regression

If the sample sizen is large enough, then the exact polynomial regression designs obtained by rounding the weights of the approximate D-optimal design to integral multiples of 1/n are D-optimal. This was shown by alaevskiî (1966) and Gaffke (1987). In this note, an efficient algorithm to determine the minimum sample sizen _d for a polynomial model of degreed is derived from a condition given by Huang (1987). Under an additional assumption we show that the conditions of Gaffke and Huang are equivalent; we verify the additional assumption for polynomial degreed40.     

Chebyshev interpolation for parametric option pricing

Recurrent tasks such as pricing, calibration and risk assessment need to be executed accurately and in real time. We concentrate on parametric option pricing (POP) as a generic instance of parametric conditional expectations and show that polynomial interpolation in the parameter space promises to considerably reduce run-times while maintaining accuracy. The attractive properties of Chebyshev interpolation and its tensorized extension enable us to identify broadly applicable criteria for (sub)exponential convergence and explicit error bounds. The method is most promising when the computation of the prices is most challenging. We therefore investigate its combination with Monte Carlo simulation and analyze the effect of (stochastic) approximations of the interpolation. For a wide and important range of problems, the Chebyshev method turns out to be more efficient than parametric multilevel Monte Carlo. We conclude with a numerical efficiency study.     

Accounting information,salesforce compensation and acquisition of new customers

The need for the management accounting system (MAS) to support marketing decisions has been identified in literature and practice. Accordingly, several improvements have been suggested with the main intention of providing more detailed information on marketing segments. Yet, even with respect to these improved systems it has to be acknowledged that the quality of the information provided will not be identical for all marketing segments: it can be assumed that it will be more precise for existing segments, which are already served by the firm, than for new ones, with which the firm has comparatively little experience. Further, it has to be considered that the MAS will seldom be the only source of useful information, as the example of the good salesforce having gained a ‘deep understanding’ of the market while doing his job shows. A problem arises if the acquisition of this additional information is (personally) costly and unobservable and therefore has to be motivated by incentive compensation schemes. This paper emphasizes that standard compensation contracts, as recommended by literature and practice, may fail to induce goal-congruent behaviour. It is shown that ranking commission rates according to the profitabilities reported by the MAS may be dysfunctional and that a non-intuitive rank order may be necessary to motivate the salesforce to become better informed and to use this knowledge appropriately.     

Verification of Web Service Compositions: An Operationalization of Correctness and a Requirements Framework for Service-oriented Modeling Techniques

Web service compositions coordinate Web services of different enterprises. They are expected to constitute the foundation of service-oriented architectures, to improve business processes as well as to foster intra- and inter-organizational integration. Especially in inter-organizational contexts, quality of service referring to non-functional requirements and conformance to functional requirements are becoming vital properties. With Web service compositions being asynchronous and distributed systems, the latter property – which is also called correctness – can be shown best by verification. This paper examines from a system-theoretic perspective how correctness can be operationalized for Web service compositions. It also proposes a requirements framework for service-oriented modeling techniques so that correctness can be shown by verification and Web service compositions can be modeled intuitively. In order to show the framework’s principle applicability, an example approach is analyzed with respect to the corresponding requirements.     

An alternative to the weighted score card approach to measuring performance: An analysis of English and Welsh probation boards

The UK government published a weighted score card approach in 2003 to analyse the performance of Probation Boards in England and Wales. However, there has not been a thorough analysis of whether non-parametric methods could provide more advanced options for analysing performance than the standard Weighted Score Card approach – a variant of the Balanced Score Card. Our results show there is considerable divergence in the ranks of Probation Boards from that of the WSC when we include the input variable ‘resource expenditure’ within a DEA model, calling into question recent policy initiatives to increase efficiency in the national probation service.