Should sequels differ from original movies in pre-launch advertising schedule? Lessons from consumers' online search activity

Sequels have become a profitable strategy in the U.S. motion picture industry because of their strong name recognition. However, while the established positioning of a sequel may help insulate it from competing firms' advertising messages, its familiarity may cause moviegoers to be more easily satiated with advertising from the sequel. Therefore, this study examines how sequels differ from original concept movies in terms of their ad effectiveness. We focus our analysis on pre-launch periods, given these periods' importance in shaping the financial outcomes of motion pictures. We consider the weekly online search volume of a movie as a measure of consumer interest in it, and thus as an intermediate response to pre-launch advertising. We then develop a model that assumes ad effectiveness can decline, due to copy and repetition wearout, and increase, due to forgetting, over time. We find that copy wearout is greater for original movies, while repetition wearout and forgetting are greater for sequels. These findings suggest that sequels should allocate more in early pre-launch periods and less immediately before release, relative to originals, to maximize pre-launch consumer interest.     

The structure of information release and the factor structure of returns

We model how firms releasing information on different dates causes the CAPM to fail, requiring an additional factor based on the information structure to price assets. We exemplify this mechanism’s empirical relevance using quarterly earnings announcements, which cluster across months along size and book-to-market. Seventy percent of the alpha reduction from including SMB and HML occurs in the four main earnings announcement months. The information structure factor accounts for all of SMB and HML’s seasonal alpha reduction and one third of their overall alpha reduction. Controlling for size and book-to-market, exposures to SMB and HML vary with firms’ earnings announcement month.     

Forecasting the UK economy with a medium-scale Bayesian VAR

We estimate a Bayesian VAR (BVAR) for the UK economy and assess its performance in forecasting GDP growth and CPI inflation in real time relative to forecasts from COMPASS, the Bank of England’s DSGE model, and other benchmarks. We find that the BVAR outperformed COMPASS when forecasting both GDP and its expenditure components. In contrast, their performances when forecasting CPI were similar. We also find that the BVAR density forecasts outperformed those of COMPASS, despite under-predicting inflation at most forecast horizons. Both models over-predicted GDP growth at all forecast horizons, but the issue was less pronounced in the BVAR. The BVAR’s point and density forecast performances are also comparable to those of a Bank of England in-house statistical suite for both GDP and CPI inflation, as well as to the official Inflation Report projections. Our results are broadly consistent with the findings of similar studies for other advanced economies.     

Change within purchasing and supply management organisations – Assessing the claims from maturity models

It is a wide-held assumption that professional development and change within purchasing and supply management (PSM) organisations can be explained and guided by a maturity model. In this paper the guidance which the maturity model concept offers to understand a PSM organisation's performance is assessed. The methodology is based on the outcomes of a literature review of PSM maturity models, development of an organisational change framework and the learning from three qualitative case studies. An alternative understanding of the development of the PSM organisation is offered through an organisational change framework, composing 1) movement transitions, 2) scalability of change, 3) acceptability of change, and 4) the substantive element of change. The research found that extant PSM maturity models are too rigid for PSM managers to apply, and although maturity models are commonly accepted in PSM literature, in practice, they may produce the opposite effect of what is promised. The PSM maturity models suggest that their application will lead to increased status and influence of PSM within the organisation; expectations that may not be met. PSM organisations’ change processes are subjected to a range of situational and contextual power relations which must be considered in order to advance the specific PSM organisation roles and responsibilities.     

Some issues in blockchain for accounting and the supply chain,with an application of distributed databases to virtual organizations

This paper reviews some recent blockchain‐based applications for information capture, distribution and preservation. As part of that review, this paper examines two key concerns with current blockchain designs for accounting and supply chain transactions: data independence and multiple semantic models for the same information distribution problem. Blockchain applications typically integrate database, application and presentation tiers all in the same ledger. This results in a general inability to query information in the ledger and other concerns. Further, since most applications appear to be private blockchain applications, there is a concern of agents needing to accommodate multiple blockchains depending on who their trading partners are and what they request. Finally, this paper uses a distributed database to design a ‘blockchain‐like’ system for virtual organizations.     

Investor Pessimism and the German Stock Market: Exploring Google Search Queries

We analyze the relationship of retail investor sentiment and the German stock market by introducing four distinct investor pessimism indices (IPIs) based on selected aggregate Google search queries. We assess the predictive power of weekly changes in sentiment captured by the IPIs for contemporaneous and future DAX returns, volatility and trading volume. The indices are found to have individually varying, but overall remarkably high explanatory power. An increase in retail investor pessimism is accompanied by decreasing contemporaneous market returns and an increase in volatility and trading volume. Future returns tend to increase while future volatility and trading volume decrease. The outcome is in line with the conjecture of correction effects. Overall, the results are well in line with modern investor sentiment theory.     

A play-the-winner-type urn design with reduced variability

We propose a new adaptive allocation rule, the drop-the-loser, that randomizes subjects in the course of a trial comparing treatments with dichotomous outcomes. The rule tends to assign more patients to better treatments with the same limiting proportion as the randomized play-the-winner rule. The new design has significantly less variable allocation proportion than the randomized play-the-winner rule. Decrease in variability translates into a gain in statistical power. For some values of success probabilities the drop-the-loser rule has a double advantage over conventional equal allocation in that it has better power and assigns more subjects to the better treatment. Acknowledgments. I thank Stephen Durham, the associate editor, and the referees for their helpful suggestions.     

A computational general equilibrium model with vintage capital

This paper presents a vintage capital model assuming putty–clay investment and perfect foresight. The model is written in discrete time and is simulated by using a second order relaxation algorithm. By computing the eigenvalues of the dynamic system, we have checked the conditions of existence and uniqueness of a solution (Blanchard and Kahn's conditions) and identified the echo effect that characterizes vintage capital models and the related dynamics of creation and destruction. By calibrating the model on French data, it has been proved useful to explain the medium-term movements in the distribution of income in France during the last three decades.     

Beyond Single-Factor Affine Term Structure Models

This article proposes a new approach to testing for the hypothesisof a single priced risk factor driving the term structure ofinterest rates. The method does not rely on any parametric specificationof the state variable dynamics or the market price of risk.It simply exploits the constraint imposed by the no-arbitragecondition on instantaneous expected bond returns. In order toachieve our goal, we develop a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and applyit to data on Treasury bills and bonds for both the United Statesand Spain. We find that the single risk factor hypothesis cannotbe rejected for either dataset.