Alice and Bob live in the forest. To sustain themselves, they collect fruits and berries and snare an occasional animal. The nights get cold, but Alice is a skillful fire-builder. Bob has never mastered this art. His fires fizzle and he never seems to collect the right kind of wood. Alice divides her time between collecting food and gathering wood. She does this in such a way that her marginal benefit from time spent collecting food is the same as that from gathering wood. Bob does not attempt to build fires. He spends all of his time gathering food, and every night slinks up and huddles beside Alice’s fire. Bob appreciates the fire’s warmth, but wishes it were larger. Bob has learned to leave morsels of food by the fire for Alice. Warmth and food are both “normal goods ” for Alice. The extra food that Bob leaves induces her to increase her total food consumption, but not by the total amount that Bob leaves for her. She uses some of the time saved by Bob’s gifts to gather more firewood. 1.1 Equilibrium with Unilateral Gifts–An Example Alice’s utility function is U(cA, y) = cAy where cA is the amount of food that she eats and y is the amount of wood on the fire. She has T hours to allocate between collecting food and wood. In an hour, she can collect either one unit of wood or πA units of food. If Bob leaves g units of food by the fire, she maximizes her utility by choosing y = 1

ABSTRACT I model strategic interaction among issuers, underwriters, retail investors, and institutional investors when the secondary market has limited price transparency. Search costs for retail investors lead to price dispersion in the secondary market, while the price for institutional investors is infinitely elastic. Because retail distribution capacity is assumed to be limited for each underwriter‐dealer, Bertrand competition breaks down in the primary market and new issues are underpriced in equilibrium. Syndicates emerge in which underwriters bid symmetrically, with quantities allocated internally to efficiently utilize retail distribution capacity.

ABSTRACT I quantitatively measure the interactions between the media and the stock market using daily content from a popular Wall Street Journal column. I find that high media pessimism predicts downward pressure on market prices followed by a reversion to fundamentals, and unusually high or low pessimism predicts high market trading volume. These and similar results are consistent with theoretical models of noise and liquidity traders, and are inconsistent with theories of media content as a proxy for new information about fundamental asset values, as a proxy for market volatility, or as a sideshow with no relationship to asset markets.

I argue that research on organizational configurations has been limited by a mismatch between theory and methods and introduce set-theoretic methods as a viable alternative for overcoming this mismatch. I demonstrate the value of such methods for studying organizational configurations and discuss their applicability for examining equifinality and limited diversity among configurations, as well as their relevance to other research fields such as complementarities theory, complexity theory, and the resource-based view

The focus of this “OR framing paper” is to introduce the operations research (OR) community to the need for new mathematical modeling of an influenza pandemic and its control. By reviewing relevant history and literature, one key concern that emerges relates to how a population’s heterogeneity may affect disease progression. Another is to explore within a modeling framework “social distancing” as a disease progression control method, where social distancing refers to steps aimed at reducing the frequency and intensity of daily human-to-human contacts. To depict social contact behavior of a heterogeneous population susceptible to infection, a nonhomogeneous probabilistic mixing model is developed. Partitioning the population of susceptibles into subgroups, based on frequency of daily human contacts and infection propensities, a stylistic difference equation model is then developed depicting the day-to-day evolution of the disease. This simple model is then used to develop a preliminary set of results. Two key findings are (1) early exponential growth of the disease may be dominated by susceptibles with high human contact frequencies and may not be indicative of the general population’s susceptibility to the disease, and (2) social distancing may be an effective nonmedical way to limit and perhaps even eradicate the disease. Much more decision-focused research needs to be done before any of these preliminary findings may be used in practice.

Abstract Do CEOs matter more in some countries than in others? Based on a theoretical consideration of three fundamental national‐level institutions—national values, prevailing firm ownership structures, and board governance arrangements—we argue that CEOs in different countries face systematically different degrees of constraint on their latitudes of action, and hence they differ in how much effect they have on firm performance. To test these ideas, we apply a variance components analysis methodology to 15‐year matched samples of 100 U.S. firms, 100 German firms, and 100 Japanese firms. Results provide strong, robust evidence that the effect of CEOs on firm performance—for good and for ill—is substantially greater in U.S. firms than in German and Japanese firms. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study investigates the effects of direct marketing communications and mass marketing communications on the adoption timing of a new e-service among existing customers. The mass marketing communications pertain to both specific new service advertising and brand advertising from both the focal supplier and the competitors. Using a split-hazard approach, the authors determine the effects of the considered marketing communications on adoption timing, accounting for a significant part of the customer base that never adopts the new e-service. They analyze individual adoption behavior with a sample of 6000 customers of a Dutch telecommunications operator over 25 months. The empirical results show that service advertising shortens the time to adoption, even when it is initiated by competitors. Furthermore, an exploratory analysis of the interaction effects between relationship characteristics and marketing efforts suggests that certain mass marketing efforts have a greater effect on loyal customers.

AbstractEffective supply chain practice and information sharing enhances the current supply chain management environment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the integration of information sharing and supply chain practice in supply chain management. Data from 125 North American manufacturing firms were collected. The results show that (1) effective information sharing significantly enhances effective supply chain practice; (2) supply chain dynamism has significant positive influence on effective information sharing as well as effective supply chain practice. Supply chain dynamism has more influence on information sharing than supply chain practice; (3) and effective supply chain practice becomes more important when the level of information sharing increases. The findings show that both effective information sharing and effective supply chain practice are critical in achieving good supply chain performance.

Abstract The proliferation of electronic limit order books operating without dealers raises questions regarding the need for intermediaries with affirmative obligations to maintain markets. We develop a simple model of dealer participation and test it using a sample of less liquid firms that trade on the Paris Bourse. The results indicate that firms with designated dealers exhibit better market quality, and that younger firms, smaller firms, and less volatile firms choose a designated dealer. Around the announcement of dealer introduction, stocks experience an average cumulative abnormal return of nearly 5% that is positively correlated with improvements in liquidity. Overall, these findings emphasize the potential benefits of designing better market structures, even within electronic limit order books, and suggest that purely endogenous liquidity provision may not be optimal for all securities.