The appraisal of ordinary shares by Saudi investors

This paper reports on a questionnaire survey about share valuation practices among investors and their intermediaries in Saudi Arabia. The findings suggest that fundamental analysis is used most by investor respondents where a P/E multiple is applied to an earnings forecast to generate a prediction of future price. However, technical analysis is also used to a much greater extent than in developed markets. Finally, the results indicate that quarterly and annual reports as well as newspapers are widely consulted by investors when forming their expectations about share valuations.     

Discontinuous innovation and supply relationships: strategic dalliances

The authors address the need for supply relationships to generate, support, and respond to discontinuous innovation (DI), noting that established ways of working appear insufficient. The peculiarities of DI are explained and contrasted with well-known concepts within innovation. The need for customer firms to be both closely collaborative with suppliers while also exploring potential, unpredictable DI elsewhere is proposed, by means of strategic dalliances . A model is presented for understanding and exploring this emerging management challenge.     

Orange County Bankruptcy: Financial Contagion in the Municipal Bond and Bank Equity Markets

We examine the spillover wealth effects of the Orange County, California bankruptcy announcement in December 1994 on municipal bonds, municipal bond funds, and bank stocks. This bankruptcy is prominent because of unprecedented losses and because it was caused by a highly leveraged derivatives strategy rather than a shortage of tax revenues and excess spending. We find contagion in the bond market with significantly negative abnormal returns for municipal bond funds without direct exposure to Orange County and for non‐Orange County municipal bonds. In addition, our findings suggest the contagion spills over to the common stocks of investment and commercial banks that deal in or use derivatives; however, the equities of banks unexposed to derivatives are not affected.     

Monitoring the mean and the variance of a stationary process

We deal with the problem of how deviations in the mean or the variance of a time series can be detected. Several simultaneous control charts are introduced which are based on EWMA (exponentially weighted moving average) statistics for the mean and the empirical variance. The combined X − S² EWMA chart is extended to time series. Further simultaneous charts are considered. The comparision of these schemes shows that the residual attempt must be favored if a variance change is present.     

Conservation finance and sustainable tourism: the acceptability of conservation fees to support the Tambopata National Reserve,Peru

Protected areas are key to the conservation of global biodiversity and ecosystem services; however, their success is contingent upon adequate funding. One possibility to increase funding for park management is to “sell” a wider suite of ecosystem services “produced” by protected areas, such as carbon sequestration. We conducted 420 tourist surveys to analyze willingness to pay (WTP) for ecosystem service benefits via a conservation fee in the Tambopata National Reserve in Peru. We also interviewed eight tour operators about their perceptions of the proposed fee. The average stated WTP was 15 USD. Sixty-six percent of tourists stated they would pay 10 USD or more, which, if actually paid, would have resulted in 318,000 USD for park management in 2015. Most respondents stated they would pay an additional fee if it supported biodiversity conservation or local ecosystem services, such as water, but less than 10% of tourists were motivated by carbon sequestration as a reason to pay the fee. Most tour operators supported the additional fee. Our findings suggest that tourists are willing to pay higher fees to support conservation but that interest in paying for additional ecosystem services from parks may not extend to global and intangible benefits such as carbon sequestration.     

Testing Fairness Principles for Public Environmental Infrastructure Decisions

Group Decision and Negotiation - Public infrastructure decisions affect many stakeholders with various benefits and costs. For public decisions, it is crucial that decision-making processes and...     

The Ethical Frameworks of Social Media Policies Among U.S. Nonprofit Organizations: Legal Expectations,Dialogic Prescriptions,and a Dialectical Model

Nonprofit organizations are experiencing a new world of fundraising, marketing, and stakeholder engagement on a scale previously unseen and due largely to social media. This study investigated the extent to which nonprofits craft social media policies using ethical frameworks to guide online activity mindful of this new reality. Assessing the top 100 U.S. nonprofits and their social media policies, this study examined the 80,000 words of text extant within the available 55 nonprofit social media policies and found emergent themes that articulate the current ethical state of nonprofit social media policies. Hand-coding processes yielded themes of engagement, responsibility, privacy, protection, transparency, and respect. Computer-coding additionally aggregated these themes into larger themes of privacy, sharing, communication, accuracy, inaccuracy, engagement, and dialogue. Further analysis explored the ways in which nonprofit social media policies imply a dialectical model of ethical frameworks between legal and dialogic dimensions.     

Beyond the Urban–Suburban Divide: Urbanization and the Production of the Urban in Zurich North

Starting from current debates on ‘global suburbanism' and ‘postsuburbia', this article explores the changes that the former ‘urban periphery' of Zurich North has experienced in the last three decades. It mobilizes Henri Lefebvre's triadic concept of conceived, perceived and lived space in aid of an analysis of the profound urban transformations that can be observed. The construction of a new tramline serves as a guideline for an analysis of the implementation of new governance arrangements strengthening cross‐border cooperation between individual municipalities and new strategies of cooptation and expertise. This resulted in the production of new urban structures which led to a more densely woven and connected urban fabric primarily providing spaces for the headquarter economy and middle‐class housing. Concomitantly, great efforts have been made to create new public spaces, an urban image and even an urban atmosphere. These have proved at least partially successful, thus promoting a symbolic redefinition of the former urban periphery as a distinctively ‘urban' space. Conventional definitions and concepts no longer suffice to adequately understand such novel urban forms, leading to the conclusion that division into an ‘urban' and a ‘suburban' world is no longer a useful tool for urban analysis.     

PAALiativ: Technik als Chance?

Assistenztechnologie im Wohnumfeld — Die Terminalphase des Lebens in h?uslicher Umgebung verbringen zu k?nnen entspricht dem Wunsch der meisten Menschen. In Oldenburg startete mit PAALiativ ein Projekt, mit dem exemplarisch nach M?glichkeiten der technischen Unterstützung für ein selbstbestimmtes Leben Schwerstkranker gesucht wird.