cournot oligopoly with information sharing this paper studies the incentives for information sharing among firms in a cournot oligopoly facing a linear uncertain demand and an affine conditional expectation information structure no information sharing is found to be the unique equilibrium in two cases in which the signals with equal precision are assumed indivisible and infinitely divisible however the nonpooling equilibrium converges to the situation where the pooling strategies are adopted as the amount of information increases hence the efficiency is achieved in the competitive equilibrium as the number of the firm become large

an extension of the internal rate of return to stochastic cash flows the internal rate of return irr is a venerable technique for evaluating deterministic cash flow streams part of the difficulty in extending this measure to stochastic cash flows is the lack of coherent methods for accounting for multiple or nonexistent internal rates of return in deterministic streams recently such a coherent theory has been developed and we examine its implications for stochastic cash flows we devise an extension of the deterministic irr which we call the stochastic rate of return on mean investment it has significant computational and conceptual advantages over the stochastic internal rate for instance in the deterministic case the standard result is that under proper conditions a cash flow stream is acceptable in the sense of positive present value if its internal rate exceeds the interest rate we show that a stochastic cash flow stream is acceptable in the sense of positive certainty equivalent expected value if the rate of return on mean investment has a suitably defined certainty equivalent exceeding the risk free interest rate

evaluating income streams a decision analysis approach most important decision problems virtually all capital investiments and planning situations involve risky cash flows with uncertainties that are resolved over time in most of these problems the decision maker has access to financial markets and may borrow and lend to smooth consumption over time yet because of the difficulty of incorporating these borrowing and lending decisions into the evaluation models these opportunities are rarely explicitly modeled in decision and risk analyses of these investments in this paper we study the errors induced by failing to account for these borrowing and lending decisions and we develop extensions to the standard decision and risk analysis procedures that given certain market and preference assumptions take these borrowing and lending opportunities into account without overburdening the evaluation models

a comparison of var and cvar constraints on portfolio selection with the mean variance model in this paper we analyze the portfolio selection implications arising from imposing a value at risk var constraint on the mean variance model and compare them with those arising from the imposition of a conditional value at risk cvar constraint we show that for a given confidence level a cvar constraint is tighter than a var constraint if the cvar and var bounds coincide consequently a cvar constraint is more effective than a var constraint as a tool to control slightly risk averse agents but in the absence of a risk free security has a perverse effect in that it is more likely to force highly risk averse agents to select portfolios with larger standard deviations however when the cvar bound is appropriately larger than the var bound or when a risk free security is present a cvar constraint dominates a var constraint as a risk management tool

a theory of credibility this paper presents models in which one agent must decide whether to trust another whose motives are uncertain reliability can only be communicated through actions in this context it pays for people to build a reputation based on reliable behaviour someone becomes credible by consistently providing accurate and valuable information or by performing useful services the theory provides a justification for long term arrangements without binding contracts it also describes those situations where it pays an agent to cash in on his reputation many decisions depend on trusting someone consumers must decide whether to believe advertisements banks need to judge the reliability of loan applicants and employers must decide how much responsibility to delegate to their employees this paper attempts to model situations that arise when someone is uncertain about whether to trust the people he deals with in this context reputations for reliability are valuable an agent becomes credible by consistently providing accurate valuable information or by always acting responsibly i analyse a series of simple abstract models of information transmission in the basic model there are two agents the sender s and the receiver r who are to play the game a known finite number of times at each stage both players learn the value of a parameter measuring the importance of that period s play of the game that is the value of making a correct decision and s obtains payoff relevant information s then sends a signal to r who makes a decision that affects the welfare of both players after both players learn the consequences of r s decision the process repeats at each stage r must decide what action to take in order to do that he must assess the credibility of s the difficulty arises because r is uncertain about s s preferences when play begins i model this by assuming that with positive probability s has identical preferences to r s is a friend and with positive probability s has completely opposed preferences to r s is an enemy this uncertainty creates a trade off for enemy senders at each stage providing honest information enhances s s reputation but only at the expense of foregoing an opportunity for immediate gain by duping r the possibility that s is a friend lends credibility to what he says but this credibility may also be exploited by an enemy s the principal equilibrium has the following form in the basic model where s has no control over the importance of a given play s typically conveys accurate information for the first several periods r raises the probability he places on s being friendly after receiving accurate information if he believes that an enemy would have lied to him with positive probability the more important the information the more likely an enemy will attempt to deceive r an enemy will eventually take advantage of r by misleading him when this happens the sender loses all opportunities for deception in the future i

covenants in venture capital contracts this paper studies how covenants are included in contracts between venture capitalists vcs and entrepreneurs i show that vcs hold covenanted veto rights even though they are shareholders who have access to other powerful governance solutions unlike bank loans and bonds venture capital vc contracts exhibit considerable variation in their contractual designs i exploit this variation to confirm the argument that covenants are in place to overcome a conflict of interest that arises from debt like contractual features of a venture capitalist s preferred stock in particular i find that contracts with higher fixed payoffs include 1 6 more covenants than do contracts with lower fixed payoffs similarly vc contracts with no vc board majority requirement include 0 6 more covenants than do contracts that require a vc board majority covenants are also more common with older companies and when fewer vcs invest in a round my findings contribute to both the debt covenant literature and the entrepreneurial finance literature this paper was accepted by brad barber finance

efficient tax reform in a dynamic model of general equilibrium the welfare gain of a shift from capital to a labor income tax is determined in a model of intertemporal optimization with infinite horizon and variable labor supply the welfare impact of small tax changes is computed by an approximation method around the steady state when the difference between the growth rate and the discount rate is small the welfare impact of tax reform depends mainly on the parameters of the production function

trade association disclosure rules incentives to share information and welfare in this article i propose a monopolistic competition framework to analyze the effects of different disclosure rules used by trade associations on the incentives to share information and on the welfare of consumers firms and society this framework is appropriate whenever a single firm cannot influence aggregate market magnitudes and serves as a benchmark for the analysis of information pooling agreements abstracting from strategic considerations i report two main results first a policy of nonexclusionary disclosure destroys the incentives to share information while exclusionary disclosure preserves them second information sharing increases expected total surplus with cournot competition but decreases it with bertrand competition in the context of a quadratic normal model with demand uncertainty

newsvendor solutions via conditional value at risk minimization abstract in this paper we consider the minimization of the conditional value at risk cvar a most preferable risk measure in financial risk management in the context of the well known single period newsvendor problem which is originally formulated as the maximization of the expected profit or the minimization of the expected cost we show that downside risk measures including the cvar are tractable in the problem due to their convexity and consequently under mild assumptions on the probability distribution of products demand we provide analytical solutions or linear programming lp formulation of the minimization of the cvar measures defined with two different loss functions numerical examples are also exhibited clarifying the difference among the models analyzed in this paper and demonstrating the efficiency of the lp solutions

what drives value creation in investment projects an application of sensitivity analysis to project finance transactions abstract evaluating the economic attractiveness of large projects often requires the development of large and complex financial models model complexity can prevent management from obtaining crucial information with the risk of a suboptimal exploitation of the modelling efforts we propose a methodology based on the so called differential importance measure d to enhance the managerial insights obtained from financial models we illustrate our methodology by applying it to a project finance case study we show that the additivity property of d grants analysts and managers full flexibility in combining parameters into any group and at the desired aggregation level we analyze investment criteria related to both the investors s and lenders perspectives results indicate that exogenous factors affect investors sponsors and lenders in different ways whether exogenous variables are considered individually or by groups

strategic information revelation we analyze the problem in which agents have non public information and are to play an asymmetric information game the agents may reveal some or all of their information to other agents prior to playing this game revelation is via exogenously specified certifiable statements the equilibria resulting from various revelation strategies are used to determine equilibrium revelation of information sufficient conditions are provided for complete revelation of all private information a number of examples are provided illustrating when revelation will or will not occur in commonly analyzed games many economic problems are characterized by the presence of both strategic behaviour on the part of individuals and by asymmetric information models encompassing both of these characteristics have been used successfully to examine questions in many fields usually using the concept of bayesian nash equilibrium as the solution concept typically the agents information is given exogenously and is fixed throughout the analysis modelling the information structure as static is appropriate for some problems but not for all in particular situations that are inherently dynamic most economic encounters allow for some interchange between the agents before the outcome is settled irrevocably in such circumstances it is possible that at least one or more of the agents possessing non public information may be able to reveal part or all of his information to one or all of the other agents in the economy during the course of their contact to the extent that such a communication is believed by the other agents the priors of the other agents will change and we will have what is in essence a new asymmetric information game new in

the optimal portfolio problem with coherent risk measure constraints one of the basic problems of applied finance is the optimal selection of stocks with the aim of maximizing future returns and constraining risks by an appropriate measure here the problem is formulated by finding the portfolio that maximizes the expected return with risks constrained by the worst conditional expectation this model is a straightforward extension of the classic markovitz mean variance approach where the original risk measure variance is replaced by the worst conditional expectation the worst conditional expectation with a threshold a of a risk x in brief wcea x is a function that belongs to the class of coherent risk measures these are measures that satisfy a set of properties such as subadditivity and monotonicity that are introduced to prevent some of the drawbacks that affect some other common measures this paper shows that the optimal portfolio selection problem can be formulated as a linear programming instance but with an exponential number of constraints it can be solved efficiently by an appropriate generation constraint subroutine so that only a small number of inequalities are actually needed this method is applied to the optimal selection of stocks in the italian financial market and some computational results suggest that the optimal portfolios are better than the market index 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

information sharing and oligopoly in agricultural markets the role of the cooperative bargaining association we study incentives for information sharing among agricultural intermediaries in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output information sharing always increases expected grower and total surplus but may reduce expected intermediary profits even when expected profits increase with information sharing intermediary firms face a prisoner s dilemma where it is privately rational to withhold information given that other firms report truthfully this equilibrium can be avoided if firms information reports are verifiable and if firms commit to an ex ante contract that enforces participation in information sharing we show how agricultural bargaining legislation can implement such a contract with the bargained farm price representing a sufficient statistic of all information held by intermediary firms

imperfect competition in agricultural markets and the role of cooperatives a spatial analysis important characteristics of many agricultural markets are costly to transport raw products and relatively few processors one or more of which is often a cooperative this paper analyzes pricing behavior in these oligopsonistic spatial markets and focuses specifically upon the conjecture that cooperatives may have a procompetitive effect on the behavior of rival non co op processors the existence and magnitude of a procompetitive effect is shown to depend upon a number of structural and strategic factors including competitive relations among the non co op processors and a cooperative s membership and pricing policies

covenants and collateral as incentives to monitor although monitoring borrowers is thought to be a major function of financial institutions the presence of other claimants reduces an institutional lender s incentives to do this thus loan contracts must be structured to enhance the lender s incentives to monitor covenants make a loan s effective maturity and the ability to collateralize makes a loan s effective priority contingent on monitoring by the lender thus both covenants and collateral can be motivated as contractual devices that increase a lender s incentive to monitor these results are consistent with a number of stylized facts about the use of covenants and collateral in institutional lending modern finance theory suggests that financial intermediaries such as commercial banks insurance companies and finance companies monitor and control their borrowers on behalf of other investors 1 this article investigates how the loans made by these institutions can be structured so as to best enhance the institutions role as delegated monitors covenants and collateral are common features of loans made by financial institutions but these features are somewhat difficult to justify consider loan covenants clauses in a loan contract that require the borrower to take or refrain from various actions berlin and mester 1992 magee and sridhar 1994 and park 1994 show that by giving institutions the right to renegotiate or call loans when covenants are violated covenants serve as tripwires that enhance the flexibility and efficiency of financial contracting also as documented in smith and warner 1979 control rights from covenants reduce borrower adverse selection or moral hazard nevertheless by allowing institutions to demand repayment based on any information contractible or not

the cyclical behavior of strategic inventories this paper presents a model in which inventories are used by a duopoly to deter deviations from an implicitly collusive arrangement higher inventories allow firms to punish cheaters more strongly and can thus help to maintain collusion we show that when demand is high the incentive to deviate increases so that increases in inventories may be optimal for the duopoly this rationalizes the observed positive correlation between inventories and sales in our empirical section we show that as our model predicts this correlation is more important in concentrated industries we also provide several examples where inventories have been a factor in cartel behavior

debt covenant violations and managers accounting responses abstract this paper examines accounting changes costs of default and accounting based covenants violated by 130 firms reporting violations in annual reports i find that managers of firms approaching default respond with income increasing accounting changes and that the default costs imposed by lenders and the accounting flexibility available to managers are important determinants of managers accounting responses i also document that private lending agreements are the first violated that net worth and working capital restrictions are the most frequently violated restrictions and that in 52 percent of the cases lenders require concessions from borrowers to resolve default

contracts and exits in venture capital finance using a sample of european venture capital vc investments i study the relation between vc contracts and exits the data indicate that ex ante stronger vc control rights increase the likelihood that an entrepreneurial firm will exit by an acquisition rather than through a write off or an ipo my findings are robust to controls for a variety of factors including endogeneity and cases in which the vc preplans the exit at the time of contract choice my findings are consistent with control based theories of financial contracting such as aghion and bolton 1992

risk shifting through nonfinancial contracts effects on loan spreads and capital structure of project finance deals we study capital structure negotiation and cost of debt financing between sponsors and lenders using a sample of more than 1 000 project finance loans worth around us 195 billion closed between 1998 and 2003 we find that lenders i rely on the network of nonfinancial contracts as a mechanism to control agency costs and project risks ii are reluctant to price credit more cheaply if sponsors are involved as project counterparties in the relevant contracts and finally iii do not appreciate sponsor involvement as a contractual counterparty of the special purpose vehicle when determining the level of leverage

portfolio selection under distributional uncertainty a relative robust cvar approach robust optimization one of the most popular topics in the field of optimization and control since the late 1990s deals with an optimization problem involving uncertain parameters in this paper we consider the relative robust conditional value at risk portfolio selection problem where the underlying probability distribution of portfolio return is only known to belong to a certain set our approach not only takes into account the worst case scenarios of the uncertain distribution but also pays attention to the best possible decision with respect to each realization of the distribution we also illustrate how to construct a robust portfolio with multiple experts priors by solving a sequence of linear programs or a second order cone program

the role of obsolescence and inventory costs in providing commitment this paper modifies the cournot and stackelberg models to allow the firms to sell less than they have produced and to store the unsold portion of their output as inventory even if one of the firms can choose its output before the other if it is costless to carry unsold goods forward then the cournot outcome emerges we show however that costs of carrying the inventory forward endow the firms with a limited degree of commitment to sell what they have produced this partially restores the first mover advantage if the firms choose their outputs simultaneously the cournot outcome emerges and has locally consistent conjectures

marginal excess burden in a dynamic economy abstract this note describes the computation of the marginal welfare cost of factor taxation in a dynamic representative agent perfect foresight general equilibrium model we find that this excess burden varies substantially across instruments and is sensitive to anticipation effects

duopoly information equilibrium cournot and bertrand abstract in a duopoly model where firms have private information about an uncertain linear demand it is shown that if the goods are substitutes not to share information is a dominant strategy for each firm in bertrand cournot competition if the goods are complements the result is reversed furthermore the following welfare results are obtained 1 i with substitutes in cournot competition the market outcome is never optimal with respect to information sharing but it may be optimal in bertrand competition if the products are good substitutes with complements the market outcome is always optimal 2 ii bertrand competition is more efficient than cournot competition 3 iii the private value of information to the firms is always positive but the social value of information is positive in cournot and negative in bertrand competition

preplanned exit strategies in venture capital abstract this paper empirically considers the role of preplanned exits the investor s initial strategy to sell the investee firm via an acquisition or an initial public offering ipo at the time of initial contract with the entrepreneur legal conditions and investor versus investee bargaining power in the allocation of cash flow and control rights in entrepreneurial finance we introduce a sample of 223 entrepreneurial investee firms financed by 35 venture capital funds in 11 continental european countries and these data indicate the following first preplanned acquisition exits are associated with stronger investor veto and control rights a greater probability that convertible securities will be used and a lower probability that common equity will be used the converse is observed for preplanned ipos second investors take fewer control and veto rights and use common equity in countries of german legal origin relative to socialist scandinavian and french legal origin third more experienced entrepreneurs are more likely to get financed with common equity and less likely to be financed with convertible preferred equity while more experienced investors are more likely to use convertible preferred equity and less likely to use common equity

incorporating asymmetric distributional information in robust value at risk optimization value at risk var is one of the most widely accepted risk measures in the financial and insurance industries yet efficient optimization of var remains a very difficult problem we propose a computationally tractable approximation method for minimizing the var of a portfolio based on robust optimization techniques the method results in the optimization of a modified var measure asymmetry robust var arvar that takes into consideration asymmetries in the distributions of returns and is coherent which makes it desirable from a financial theory perspective we show that arvar approximates the conditional var of the portfolio as well numerical experiments with simulated and real market data indicate that the proposed approach results in lower realized portfolio var better efficient frontier and lower maximum realized portfolio loss than alternative approaches for quantile based portfolio risk minimization

portfolio optimization under loss aversion abstract we present an integrated methodological approach for selecting portfolios the proposed methodology is focused on incorporation of investor s preferences in the mean risk framework we propose a risk measure calculated with the downside part of the portfolio return distribution which we argue captures better the practical behavior of the loss averse investor we establish its properties study the link with stochastic dominance criteria point out the relations with conditional value at risk and lower partial moment of first order and give the explicit formula for the case of scenario based portfolio optimization the proposed methodology involves two stages firstly the investment opportunity set efficient frontier is determined and secondly one single preferred efficient portfolio is selected namely the one having the highest expected utility value three classes of utility functions with loss aversion corresponding to three types of investors are considered the empirical study is targeted on assessing the differences between the efficient frontier of the proposed model and the classical mean variance mean cvar and mean lpm1 frontiers we firstly analyze the loss of welfare incurred by using another model instead of the proposed one and measure the corresponding gain loss of utility secondly we assess how much the portfolios really differ in terms of their compositions using a dissimilarity index based on the 1 norm we describe and interpret the optimal solutions obtained and emphasize the role and influence of loss aversion parameters values and of constraints three types of constraints are studied no short selling allowed a certain degree of diversification imposed and short selling allowed

the welfare cost of capital income taxation in a growing economy the welfare cost of capital income taxation is analyzed in a general equilibrium framework where the private sector is represented by a competitive household endowed with perfect foresight and an infinite life the value of the welfare cost depends essentially on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the production function numerical estimates are presented for different values of the parameters of the model the welfare gain obtained by the abolition of the capital income tax is smaller when the private sector is not endowed with perfect foresight it is reduced by about 40 percent when expectations are myopic the allocation efficiency cost of the corporate tax dwarfs the intertemporal welfare cost

can the production smoothing model of inventory behavior be saved the production smoothing model of inventory behavior has a long and venerable history and theoretical foundations that seem very strong yet certain overwhelming facts seem not only to defy explanation within the production smoothing framework but actually to argue that the basic idea of production smoothing is all wrong most prominent among these is the fact that the variance of detrended production exceeds the variance of detrended sales this paper first documents the stylized facts then it derives the production smoothing model rigorously and explains how the model can be amended to make it consistent with the facts finally it reviews the theoretical and empirical evidence and tries to draw some tentative conclusions

relying on the information of interested parties we investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information we find that if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result if the decisionmaker is unsophisticated or not well informed competition is not generally sufficient if the interested parties interests are sufficiently opposed however or if the decisionmaker is seeking to advance the parties welfare then competition can reduce or even eliminate the decisionmaker s need for prior knowledge about the relevant variables and for strategic sophistication in other settings only the combination of competition among information providers and a sophisticated skepticism is sufficient to allow effective decisionmaking

risk analysis with contractual default does covenant breach matter abstract mergers and acquisitions m a private equity and leveraged buyouts securitization and project finance are characterized by the presence of contractual clauses covenants these covenants trigger the technical default of the borrower even in the absence of insolvency therefore borrowers may default on loans even when they have sufficient available cash to repay outstanding debt this condition is not captured by the net present value npv distribution obtained through a standard monte carlo simulation in this paper we present a methodology for including the consequences of covenant breach in a monte carlo simulation extending traditional risk analysis in investment planning we introduce a conceptual framework for modeling technical and material breaches from the standpoint of both lenders and shareholders we apply this framework to a real case study concerning the project financing of a 64 million euro biomass power plant the simulation is carried out on the actual model developed by the financial advisor of the project and made available to the authors results show that both technical and material breaches have a statistically significant impact on the net present value distribution and this impact is more relevant when leverage and cost of debt increase