Entry limiting agreements: First‐mover advantage,authorized generics,and pay‐for‐delay deals

During patent litigation, pay‐for‐delay (P4D) deals involve a payment from a patent holder of a branded drug to a generic drug manufacturer to delay entry and withdraw the patent challenge. In return for staying out of the market, the generic firm receives a payment, and/or an authorized licensed entry at a later date, but before the patent expiration. We examine why such deals are stable when there are multiple potential entrants. We combine the first‐mover advantage for the first generic with the ability of the branded manufacturer to launch an authorized generic (AG) to show when P4D deals are an equilibrium outcome. We further show that limiting a branded firm's ability to launch an AG before entry by a successful challenger will deter such deals. However, removing exclusivity period for the first generic challenger will not.     

Periodic strategies in optimal execution with multiplicative price impact

We study the optimal execution problem with multiplicative price impact in algorithmic trading, when an agent holds an initial position of shares of a financial asset. The interselling decision times are modeled by the arrival times of a Poisson process. The criterion to be optimized consists in maximizing the expected net present value of the gains of the agent, and it is proved that an optimal strategy has a barrier form, depending only on the number of shares left and the level of the asset price.     

Real Investment Implications of Employee Stock Option Exercises

This paper examines a real cost of awarding employee stock options. Based on the observation that managers are extremely concerned about earnings-per-share dilution in equity related compensation, we predict and find that firms experiencing significant employee stock option (ESO) exercises shift resources away from real investments towards the repurchase of their own stocks. We further find weak evidence of a decline in subsequent firm performance (as measured by return on assets) for several years following the cut in discretionary investments as a result of stock option exercises, though this result is sensitive to the metric used to measure performance. Collectively, our findings indicate that ESO exercises potentially impose a real cost on the firm in terms of foregone investment opportunities.     

THE LAST MILE: AN EXAMINATION OF EFFECTS OF ONLINE RETAIL DELIVERY STRATEGIES ON CONSUMERS

The Internet has increased the level of importance of the end‐consumer market to transportation carriers. In two between subject experiments, carrier disclosure on retail merchant websites is examined as a strategic differentiation strategy. Predictions are offered concerning effects of carrier disclosure strategies on product delivery‐related expectations, consumer attitudes, and intentions to purchase a product online. Results from Study 1 reveal significant differences between disclosure and nondisclosure of the carrier for numerous product delivery‐related variables, as well as many differences between the six carriers examined in this first study. Study 2 extends these findings by showing that providing consumers with a choice of carrier leads to increased levels of satisfaction with the online experience and greater willingness to buy, relative to nondisclosure and disclosure strategies.     

Feature selection methods involving support vector machines for prediction of insolvency in non‐life insurance companies

We propose two novel approaches for feature selection and ranking tasks based on simulated annealing (SA) and Walsh analysis, which use a support vector machine as an underlying classifier. These approaches are inspired by one of the key problems in the insurance sector: predicting the insolvency of a non‐life insurance company. This prediction is based on accounting ratios, which measure the health of the companies. The approaches proposed provide a set of ratios (the SA approach) and a ranking of the ratios (the Walsh analysis ranking) that would allow a decision about the financial state of each company studied. The proposed feature selection methods are applied to the prediction the insolvency of several Spanish non‐life insurance companies, yielding state‐of‐the‐art results in the tests performed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A progress report: The ‘quality of life’ in a method of integrated planning: Aspects of an Italian research project, ‘Progetto Quadro’

This paper describes the main concepts and approaches of a method of integrated planning developed in Italy. This work, still in the research phase, is sponsored by the Italian government agency responsible for economic planning.

Formally entitled ‘Progetto Quadro’, the project involves construction of a reference framework composed of a set of highly disaggregated socio-economic accounts. This includes a resource-use analysis of structural and functional interdependencies of the economic system and of its operation with regard to a societally inspired program-structure.     

Sample attrition and labor force dynamics: Evidence from the Spanish labor force survey

In this paper we examine a number of issues that arise in investigating labor force dynamics using the Spanish Labor Force Survey (EPA). These issues are by no means specific to the Spanish case and apply to most European-style labor force surveys. Our main conclusions may be summarized as follows. First, survey nonresponse cannot be neglected. Second, the EPA tends to underestimate employment and participation of high-educated young people, and to overestimate those of the low-educated elderly. Finally, we find little evidence that attrition causes important selection biases in estimating quarterly transition probabilities.     

An alternative procedure for imputing missing data based on principal components analysis

This work entailed tackling the significant problem of missing data which was solved by identifying a new substitution procedure, following an empirical approach based on the analysis of the information contained in the entire set of data collected. This procedures offers a number of advantages compared to other techniques commonly mentioned in the statistical–methodological literature.     

Lessons From Italy: A Good Pension System Needs an Effective Broader Social Policy Framework

Intereconomics - Italy, which is sometimes considered a laggard in terms of social and economic reforms, can boast a pension system that is, by and large, functioning sufficiently well in terms of...     

Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior: Use of Local Language for Market Communication—A Study in Region Friuli Venetia Giulia (Italy)

Cross-cultural consumer behavior is of market interest due to globalization of marketplaces, migration, multicultural marketplaces, and diffusion in the EU of many languages. The objective of this study is to check whether the local language used in a marketing communication could affect the consumers’ preferences for food products. The theoretical foundation is the consumer motivational approach that goes deeper into motivations interfering with the consumers’ preference order. The multivariate conjoint analysis is used to evaluate the preferences for attributes described in different languages. A number of students from the University of Udine (located in the northeastern part of Italy) have been submitted to interviews to examine their preferences for a simulated sandwich package reporting information in different languages, distributed by vendor machine. The results suggest that the consumer’s reaction to local language depends on sociodemographic profile, cultural background, language knowledge, and family education, and the local language could actually be used as a market tool for market segmentation. These results are of interest to many EU countries with bilingual communities such as Spain, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland, and most of the Italian regions where local languages are still alive.