learning to believe in sunspots a number of authors have shown that competitive economies may possess sunspot equilibria that is rational expectations equilibria in which purely extrinsic uncertainty affects equilibrium prices and allocations 2 such results demonstrate that it does not require a lack of faith in the rationality of market participants to believe that competitive markets may be subject to purely speculative fluctuations driven solely by expectations 3 the mere existence of sunspot equilibria as solutions to a system of marketclearing conditions however might not be judged sufficient to indicate that competitive markets with rational participants could ever be subject to speculative instability the sunspot equilibria represent states of affairs in which agents act differently in the case of different realizations of the sunspot variable and it is rational for each agent to do so but it might be thought unlikely that the beliefs of all the participants in the market could ever come to be coordinated so as to bring about an equilibrium of that kind it is rational to believe that sunspots convey information about future states of affairs once the economy is in a sunspot equilibrium but why would rational agents ever begin to believe in such a thing so as to create the conditions under which the belief is rational in order to address such a question one must go beyond the mere statement of the conditions for equilibrium and discussion of what states of affairs satisfy them one must specify an explicit dynamic process according to which the beliefs of agents adjust when out of equilibrium any exercise of this kind is necessarily unsatisfactory as there is no univocal meaning for the postulate of rational behavior outside of an equilibrium it may well be the case that

corporate philanthropic disaster response and ownership type evidence from chinese firms response to the sichuan earthquake this article examines whether the charitable giving amount and likelihood of firm response to catastrophic events relate to firms ownership type using a unique dataset of listed firms in china where state ownership is still prevalent based on the data of chinese firms response to the 2008 sichuan earthquake we find that the extent of corporate contributions for state owned firms following this disaster is less than that for private firms state owned firms are also less likely to respond in this disaster compared to private firms the results also reveal that firm size profitability geography cash resource available and leverage affect firms philanthropic disaster response behavior in china

a unified bilevel programming framework for price based market clearing under marginal pricing market clearing in restructured power systems is mostly implemented through an offer based setting with the goal of maximizing social welfare this approach leads to sound results from an economic viewpoint when generation offers reflect true production costs however offers may significantly differ from actual costs in practice thus yielding undesired distortion under a marginal pricing scheme this paper presents a general bilevel programming framework for alternative market clearing procedures dependent on market clearing prices rather than on offers the resulting nonlinear mixed integer bilevel programming formulation is transformed into an equivalent single level mixed integer linear program suitable for efficient off the shelf software the bilevel formulation is investigated through a particular instance of price based market clearing driven by consumer payment minimization this problem has recently received considerable attention due to the open challenges posed from both modeling and computational perspectives numerical results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach

ants rationality and recruitment this paper offers an explanation of behavior that puzzled entomologists and economists ants faced with two identical food sources were observed to concentrate more on one of these but after a period they would turn their attention to the other the same phenomenon has been observed in humans choosing between restaurants after discussing the nature of foraging and recruitment behavior in ants a simple model of stochastic recruitment is suggested this explains the herding and epidemics described in the literature on financial markets as corresponding to the equilibrium distribution of a stochastic process rather than to switching between multiple equilibria

competition and corporate governance in transition this paper examines the elements of institutional development critical to the enhancement of company performance in transition economies this includes initial conditions forms of privatization institutional frameworks and the competitiveness of markets comparing empirical evidence the paper concludes that there is a clear distinction in effectiveness of policies followed and their impact between central europe and cis countries this divergence is attributed to fundamentally different political attitudes toward reform the need of cis governments to gain political support for reform and as a consequence of the desire of central european countries to join european union

distributed stochastic market clearing with high penetration wind power integrating renewable energy into the modern power grid requires risk cognizant dispatch of resources to account for the stochastic availability of renewables toward this goal day ahead stochastic market clearing with high penetration wind energy is pursued in this paper based on the dc optimal power flow opf the objective is to minimize the social cost which consists of conventional generation costs end user disutility as well as a risk measure of the system re dispatching cost capitalizing on the conditional value at risk cvar the novel model is able to mitigate the potentially high risk of the recourse actions to compensate wind forecast errors the resulting convex optimization task is tackled via a distribution free sample average based approximation to bypass the prohibitively complex high dimensional integration furthermore to cope with possibly large scale dispatchable loads a fast distributed solver is developed with guaranteed convergence using the alternating direction method of multipliers admm numerical results tested on a modified benchmark system are reported to corroborate the merits of the novel framework and proposed approaches

analyst forecasts and herding behavior the use of analyst forecasts as proxies for investors earnings expectations is commonplace in empirical research an implicit assumption behind their use is that they reflect analysts private information in an unbiased manner as demonstrated here this assumption is not necessarily valid there is shown to be a tendency for analysts to release forecasts closer to prior earnings expectations than is appropriate given their information further analysts exhibit herding behavior whereby they release forecasts similar to those previously announced by other analysts even when this is not justified by their information these results are shown to have interesting empirical implications article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

energy market design for renewable resources imbalance settlements and efficiency robustness tradeoffs this paper examines optimal energy market bidding behavior for stochastic resources when energy imbalance payments are determined endogenously from market clearing conditions some electricity markets require wind producers to settle day ahead offers based on their real time energy production this is usually justified by economic and cost causation principles without considering the effects of these policies on curtailment and system balancing costs under these real time settlement requirements demand and wind forecast errors impact the effective penalty price so strategic behavior affects the penalty price paid by producers this paper formulates a two stage game where producers place energy bids in the day ahead market and then choose a curtailment level in real time and it derives the symmetric subgame perfect equilibrium strategy for producers it details how supply curve convexity and resource correlation can lead wind producers to bid conservatively even when they are not risk averse the results show that market based pricing mechanisms improve tradeoffs between system efficiency and mean squared bid error as compared to the case where penalty levels are determined by alternative policies suggesting additional benefits of market based penalty prices beyond those previously studied

patent races and the persistence of monopoly patent races are important determinants of market structure for a new firm a patent can be an entry ticket into the market for an incumbent firm already in the market patents for related technologies can ensure that no new firm enters in this spirit recent work has explored the implications of patenting for the persistence of monopoly see for example dasgupta i982 gilbert i98i gilbert and newbery i982 much attention has been given to pre emptive patenting the strategic acquisition of patents by an incumbent firm solely to prevent potential rivals from entering the market in this context it is important to distinguish between two kinds of patent race a standard race is a competition in which a prize is awarded to the first player to reach the finishing line an asymmetrical race is a competition in which one player loses something of value if one of his rivals reaches the finishing line he is content if nobody wins but a prize is won by the first of the other players to reach the finishing line if any of them does so a patent race in which an incumbent firm s sole concern is to prevent potential rivals from entering his market is an asymmetrical race and not a standard race the distinction between the two kinds of race can be captured only in models with a sufficiently rich dynamic structure this and other advantages of a properly dynamic model are explained in section ii a model of an asymmetrical race with two firms is presented in section iii in this model the challenger wins a prize and the incumbent loses a prize if the challenger is first to reach the finishing line it is shown that the challenger is often automatically deterred from making any effort to win the race because the strategic interactions between the players are such that the incumbent would outdo any reasonable effort made by the challenger in order to stop the challenger being first to reach the finishing line then the incumbent has no need to make any effort in the race in order to maintain his existing monopoly the reason is that the incumbent unlike the challenger does not need to go all the way to the finishing line to achieve his objective on the other hand it may be truedepending on the parameters describing the firmsthat the challenger wins the patent proceeding to the finishing line just as if he were the only contender for the patent of particular interest is the case in which the firms are identical

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

shareholder protection compulsory acquisition and the efficiency of the takeover process this paper examines public good problems connected with takeovers two broad categories of exclusion device oppression of minority interests and compulsory acquisition of shares are evaluated it is argued that inability to control the level of oppression with any precision renders the first method unsatisfactory from the policy viewpoint but that strong protection of minorities coupled with compulsory acquisition rights for the acquiror can straightforwardly generate an efficient solution to the public good problems it is shown that in the u k company law and the city code on takeovers and mergers combine to produce an approximation to this efficient solution against managements which are performing poorly in the eyes of the capital market and since the work of marris 1964 this incentive mechanism has come to play a prominent role in the economic analysis of company behaviour the usual argument is that as the market value of a particular company falls relative to the level that it is generally believed could be obtained by other managers following different policies the firm becomes increasingly vulnerable to a takeover by a raider attracted by the prospect of the capital gains that would ensue following managerial changes in turn the threat to the incumbent managers acts as a deterrent to behaviour which runs counter to shareholders interests the effectiveness of the workings of the takeover mechanism is therefore of some importance for the efficient utilisation and allocation of resources potential obstacles to the smooth functioning of the takeover process have however been recognised for quite some time as long ago as 1926 the greene committee on company law reform identified cases where a takeover had been inhibited by the actions of small minorities of shareholders much more recently grossman and hart 1980 have formalised some of the earlier points in a way that clearly highlights one of the major difficulties that freeriding strategies on the part of shareholders in firms with dispersed share ownership can prevent successful bids the argument is that shareholders of the target company believing their own actions have a trivially small effect on

corporate social responsibility ownership structure and political interference evidence from china prior research suggests that ownership structure is associated to corporate social responsibility csr in developed countries this article examines whether and how ownership structure affects csr in emerging markets using chinese firms social responsibility ranking our empirical evidences show that for non state owned firms corporate ownership dispersion is positively associated to csr however for state owned firms whose controlling shareholder is the state this relation is reversed we attribute the reversed relationship to political interferences and further test this hypothesis by demonstrating that regional economic development is negatively related to csr for state owned firms due to decreased political interference in more developed areas this study is the first to directly examine the relationship between the dispersion of corporate ownership and csr in emerging markets and our results depict that it is important to consider ownership type in assessing csr in emerging market where state ownership is still prevalent such as china the results also reveal that firm size profitability employee power leverage and growth opportunity affect csr in china

a note on the normalization of spanish electricity spot prices merit order of renewable generation has produced an increasing relevant number of zero values in spanish electricity spot prices since 2010 in contrast with the rest of markets which rarely present zero values this letter shows that existing methodologies for normalizing the price distribution fail to yield a proper normalization this letter proposes a new algorithm based on nataf transformation which addresses this issue and ensures a correct normalization numerical results validate the proposed algorithm

does ownership always matter abstract the objective of this paper is to explain and illustrate the complex relationship between ownership arrangements and enterprise performance it is commonly argued that efficiency will be lower in the public sector than the private because enterprise objectives deviate from maximisation of profits and because monitoring arrangements are inadequate due to the absence of capital market discipline we argue that public ownership does make the owner manager relationship more complicated because the chain of principals and agents is expanded objectives are politically determined and these are conveyed by a policy making administrative structure to management but the relative efficiency of public as against private ownership actually depends on the efficacy of capital market monitoring on the political and constitutional system on the information and sanctions available to policy makers and on the nature of the management market variation in these factors can help to explain the different natures and roles of the public sector between countries

productive efficiency in public and private firms abstract this paper compares the degree of x inefficiency which emerges as a consequence of the imposition of the optimal incentive contracts in public and private firms using a straightforward principal agent model with two possible states of the world it establishes the rather surprising result that in the good state of the world public ownership always results in a higher degree of productive efficiency

privatization and efficiency in a differentiated industry we consider a market in which a public firm competes against private ones and ask what happens when the public firm is privatized in the short run privatization is harmful because prices rise the disciplinary role of the public firm is lost in the long run privatization leads to further entry the net effect is beneficial if consumer preference for variety is not too weak a sufficient statistic for the social surplus to be higher in the long run is that the public firm makes a loss this suggests that profitable firms should not necessarily be privatized

management and ownership effects evidence from five countries despite the growing recognition in the corporate governance literature that the relationship between ownership concentration and profitability is context dependent this issue has not yet been subjected to direct empirical investigation using a single cross national sample this study empirically examines the ownership concentration performance relationship across the nations of canada france germany the united kingdom and the united states essentially we argue that the correlation if any between ownership concentration and firm profitability differs across countries in a systematic way determined by the national system of corporate governance results indicate that important and statistically significant differences do in fact exist across the countries studied 1998 john wiley sons ltd

how to grow a bubble a model of myopic adapting agents abstract we present a simple agent based model to study the development of a bubble and the consequential crash and investigate how their proximate triggering factor might relate to their fundamental mechanism and vice versa our agents invest according to their opinion on future price movements which is based on three sources of information i public information i e news ii information from their friendship network and iii private information our bounded rational agents continuously adapt their trading strategy to the current market regime by weighting each of these sources of information in their trading decision according to its recent predicting performance we find that bubbles originate from a random lucky streak of positive news which due to a feedback mechanism of these news on the agents strategies develop into a transient collective herding regime after this self amplified exuberance the price has reached an unsustainable high value being corrected by a crash which brings the price even below its fundamental value these ingredients provide a simple mechanism for the excess volatility documented in financial markets paradoxically it is the attempt for investors to adapt to the current market regime which leads to a dramatic amplification of the price volatility a positive feedback loop is created by the two dominating mechanisms adaptation and imitation which by reinforcing each other result in bubbles and crashes the model offers a simple reconciliation of the two opposite herding versus fundamental proposals for the origin of crashes within a single framework and justifies the existence of two populations in the distribution of returns exemplifying the concept that crashes are qualitatively different from the rest of the price moves

privatization in theory and practice privatization george yarrow this paper examines the theoretical and empirical case for private versus public ownership privatization usually leads managers to place greater emphasis on the pursuit of profits however whether this is beneficial to society depends on the trade off between possible market failures due to a lack of competition and deficiencies in government control of public firms the competitive and regulatory environment is more important than the question of ownership per se in competitive markets there is a presumption in favour of private ownership where there is a natural monopoly vigorous regulatory action is required the evidence suggests that privatization has led to improved performance by firms such as the national freight corporation and cable and wireless which operate in a relatively competitive environment the benefits are less clear in the case of firms like bp britoil and british aerospace however the most worrying case is that of british telecom and the projected privatization of british gas where little thought has been given to limiting the abuse of monopoly power rather the regulatory environment has been tailored to the needs of the existing management and to ensuring a successful share flotation privatization is also advanced as a weapon for reducing trade union power encouraging wider share ownership redistributing wealth and improving the public finances however there are other policy instruments better suited to achieving these objectives the existing privatization programme has not led to a marked widening of share ownership and has resulted in windfall gains to a small group of investors at the expense of taxpayers in general

welfare maximisation with endogenous average costs abstract in contrast to the earlier literature about industries mixing public and private ownership costs are not exogenous because firms choose capacity if capacity is increased the fixed costs increase but more can be produced at constant marginal costs it turns out that mixing private and public firms improves welfare if the deadweight loss of imperfect competition is significant all firms break even but welfare maximisation implies higher unit costs and lower profitability

mixed oligopoly and spatial agglomeration a comment this paper extends matsushima and matsumura 2003 by incorporating a large production cost difference between public and private firms in a quantity setting spatial mixed oligopoly the public and private firms first choose their locations in a linear market and then compete in quantities it is shown that for a significant inefficiency of the public firm all firms including both public and private firms agglomerate at the market centre ce texte developpe les resultats de matsushima et matsumura 2003 en incorporant la possibilite d une grande difference de couts de production entre l entreprise publique et les entreprises privees dans un oligopole spatial mixte de concurrence par les quantites les entreprises publiques et privees choisissent leur localisation dans un marche lineaire et se concurrencent par les quantites on montre que s il existe une inefficacite significative de l entreprise publique toutes les entreprises publiques et privees tendent a s agglomerer au centre du marche

institutional interest ownership type and environmental capital expenditures evidence from the most polluting chinese listed firms this study empirically examines whether firms environmental capital expenditures impact institutional investors investment decisions in the chinese market we particularly examine the impact of ownership type on the relationship of environmental capital expenditures and the behavior of different types of institutional investors by classifying institutional investors into two categories short term and long term investors in addition this study further investigates whether environmental capital expenditures related to ownership type increase firm value we find that long term institutional investors tend to invest in state owned firms soes making environmental capital expenditures results also indicate that with governmental backing and encouragement the market value of soes making more environmental capital expenditures is likely to increase however no similar results are found for non soes

privatization and efficiency differentiating ownership effects from political organizational and dynamic effects this paper argues that the private public ownership factor should be differentiated from other factors that also influence the effect of privatization on efficiency this is empirically confirmed in a longitudinal study of 24 spanish firms for which several political and organizational factors are found to influence the estimated effects of privatization on efficiency the analysis of the timing of the effects reveals a strong significance for post privatization years 5 6 negative and 7 8 positive this suggests that the negative effect of these factors is transitional being eventually offset by the positive effects of the change to private ownership 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification l33

redefining the merit order of stochastic generation in forward markets this letter proposes a new merit order for the dispatch of stochastic production in forward markets e g day ahead markets the proposed merit order considers not only the marginal cost of the stochastic generating unit which is often very low or zero but also the projected cost of balancing its energy deviations during the real time operation of the power system we show through an illustrative example that the proposed merit order leads to increased market efficiency as the penetration of stochastic generation in the electricity market grows

corporate philanthropy and stock price crash risk evidence from china how to mitigate stock price crash risk has become a focus in the theoretical and practical fields building on the work of kim et al j bank finance 43 1 13 2014b this paper investigates the relation between corporate philanthropy and crash risk under the unique chinese institutional background the results show that both state ownership and the 2005 split share reform attenuate the mitigating effect of corporate philanthropy on crash risk specifically the negative relation between corporate philanthropy and crash risk is less pronounced for state owned enterprises than for non state owned enterprises and it is also less pronounced after firms accomplish the split share reform further this effect is more pronounced for firms with greater financial risks and poorer performance our paper contributes to the growing literature on the determinants of stock price crash risk and the economic consequences of corporate philanthropy it also offers useful guidance to firms that are seeking to reduce stock price crash risk in emerging markets

a chance constrained stochastic electricity market efficiently accommodating uncertain renewable resources in wholesale electricity markets is among the foremost priorities of market regulators in the us uk and eu nations however existing deterministic market designs fail to internalize the uncertainty and their scenario based stochastic extensions are limited in their ability to simultaneously maximize social welfare and guarantee non confiscatory market outcomes in expectation and per each scenario this article proposes a chance constrained stochastic market design which is capable of producing a robust competitive equilibrium and internalizing uncertainty of the renewable resources in the price formation process the equilibrium and resulting prices are obtained for different uncertainty assumptions which requires using either linear restrictive assumptions or second order conic more general assumptions duality in the price formation process the usefulness of the proposed stochastic market design is demonstrated via the case study carried out on the 8 zone iso new england testbed

self referential behaviour overreaction and conventions in financial markets abstract we study a generic model for self referential behaviour in financial markets where agents build strategies using correlations estimated using the past history itself between certain quantitative information and the price the impact of these strategies on the price modify the observed correlations and create a feedback loop that can destabilize the market from efficient behaviour for large enough feedbacks non trivial correlations spontaneously set in and the market switches between two long lived states that we call conventions this mechanism leads to overreaction and excess volatility we provide empirical evidence for the existence of such long lasting anomalous correlations in real markets

policy objectives and performance in a mixed market with bargaining abstract we analyse a mixed duopoly in which wages and salaries are determined by nash bargaining and where the public firm s unit costs depend on its objectives because of constant returns to scale welfare maximisation without restriction would eliminate or significantly weaken the private firm therefore we focus on constrained welfare maximisation in which case unit costs are normally higher in the public firm on the other hand the private firm may even earn more than in a monopoly if the public firm maximises profits or if the constraint offers too much protection

mixed oligopoly and spatial agglomeration abstract we investigate a mixed market where a state owned welfare maximizing public firm competes against profit maximizing private firms we use a circular city model with quantity setting competition in contrast to a pure market case discussed by pal 1998a spatial agglomeration of private firms always appears in equilibrium all private firms locate at the same point and the public firm locates at the opposite side we also find that this equilibrium pattern of the location is second best provided that output of each private firm cannot be controlled by the social planner jel classification h42 l13 oligopole mixte et agglomeration spatiale les auteurs examinent un marche mixte ou une entreprise publique possedee par l etat et cherchant a maximiser le niveau de bien etre est en concurrence avec des entreprises privees qui cherchent a maximiser leurs profits on utilise un modele de cite circulaire ou la concurrence se fait en choisissant la quantite produite en contraste avec le cas du marche parfait discute par pal 1998a l agglomeration spatiale des entreprises privees parait etre en equilibre toutes les entreprises privees se localisent au meme point et l entreprise publique se localise du cote oppose il appert que ce pattern d equilibre de localisation est un equilibre de second ordre compte tenu du fait que la production de chaque entreprise privee ne peut etre controlee par le planificateur social