Perception of Accuracy, Information value, Information systems, Decision making

Reviews the book "The Taxation of Specialised Occupations and Professions," Brian Laventure.

Reviews the book "A Survey of Basic Accounting," 3rd ed., by R.F. Salmonson, Roger H. Hermanson and James Don Ewards.

Reviews the book "Canadian Financial Accounting: Principles and Issues," by I.S. Rosen and M.H. Granof.

[This paper emphasizes the importance of endogenous (price) uncertainty as distinct from the standard exogenous uncertainty about the state of the world. Markets where agents can enter into forward contracts contingent upon future spot prices are studied with respect to existence of equilibrium, occurrence of speculation, and efficiency.]

I wish to dedicate the paper to Mark Perlman, who guided this Journal until now. Perlman's help and encouragement in preparing this paper were characteristically vigorous and scholarly. I wish to express appreciation to the Hoover Institution where an early draft was written and to E. S. Shaw for his comments on that draft. Alex Cukierman, Brian Kantor, Scott Richard, and E. Roy Weintraub made several helpful suggestions, and Karl Brunner suffered through many discussions about Keynes and Keynesians. Many people read and commented on the previous draft, and their suggestions and criticisms have helped me to see points I would have missed. I am grateful especially to Paul Davidson and Donald Moggridge. Davidson commented generously and helpfully on almost every page. Moggridge helped me to strengthen my argument and graciously made available sections of volume 27 of Keynes's Collected Writings that had not been published at the time.

This paper consolidates the results of some recent work on the relation between forward prices and futures prices. It develops a number of propositions characterizing the two prices. These propositions contain several testable implications about the difference between forward and futures prices. Many of the propositions show that equilibrium forward and futures prices are equal to the values of particular assets, even though they are not in themselves asset prices. The paper then illustrates these results in the context of two valuation models and discusses the effects of taxes and other institutional factors.