corporate sustainability toward a theoretical integration of catholic social teaching and the natural resource based view of the firm even though management scholars have offered several views on the process of corporate sustainability these efforts have focused mainly on the technical aspects of sustainability while omitting the fundamental role played by individual moral competences therefore previous work offers an incomplete and somewhat reductionist view of corporate sustainability in this article we develop a holistic framework of corporate sustainability in which both the moral and technical aspects of sustainability are considered we do so by integrating the ethical normative perspective of the catholic social teaching cst with the competitive view of the natural resource based view this framework highlights the importance of cst principles and ideas in developing executive moral competences such as moral sensitivity and awareness and moral cognition and motivation moral competences in turn influence the organizational selection of environmental strategies giving leaders the intrinsic motivation to promote both a longer term stance on corporate sustainability efforts and a relentless search for greener business models such strategies move the firm closer towards achieving environmental sustainability hence by bridging the individual normative ethical with the organizational implementational levels of corporate sustainability our framework provides a more realistic coherent and complete perspective on the complex process of achieving corporate sustainability

optimal pricing and lot sizing under conditions of perishability finite production and partial backordering and lost sale abstract perishable products constitute a sizable component of inventories common questions in a production and selling situation involving a perishable or a non perishable product are what should be the price and what should be the size of the replenishment when demand for the product is price sensitive pricing and lot sizing decisions are interdependent similarly when a product is highly perishable the demand may need to be backlogged to avoid costs due to deterioration i e perishability and backlogging are complementary conditions in this paper we consider the pricing and lot sizing problem for a perishable good under finite production exponential decay and partial backordering and lost sale the backlogging phenomenon in the literature is often modeled using backordering and lost sale costs these cost parameters however are not easy to estimate in practice in this paper we use a new approach to model backlogging of demand in this approach customers are viewed to be impatient the backlogging option gets used only when it is economic to do so we extend the analysis presented for a perishable product to the case in which the product is non perishable

optimal joint pricing and lot sizing with fixed and variable capacity this paper examines previously unexplored fixed and variable capacity problems of jointly determining an item s price and lot size for a profit maximizing firm facing constant but price dependent demands over a planning horizon we apply geometric programming to these constrained nonlinear maximization problems with nonconcave objective functions and obtain global optimal solutions using kuhn tucker condition marginal and sensitivity analyses we investigate model interactions provide managerial implications on the optimal capacity decisions and explore the postoptimal behavior of the price lot size and capacity expansion and reduction size some findings cast interesting insights different from previous just in time management studies without pricing consideration

rational expectations in microeconomic models an overview abstract this paper is an expository introduction to several topics of current research in the general equilibrium theory of rational expectations more specifically we discuss the existence of exact and approximate rational expectations equilibria the implementation of equilibria the behavior of learning and smoothing processes by which traders construct expectations from repeated observations of the market and the lagged use of the information revealed by prices in an intertemporal sequence of markets the purpose of this discussion is to introduce papers on these topics appearing in the journal of economic theory symposium on rational expectations in microeconomic models

trading mechanisms and stock returns an empirical investigation this paper examines the effects of the mechanism by which securities are traded on their price behavior we compare the behavior of open to open and close to close returns on nyse stocks given the differences in execution methods applied in the opening and closing transactions opening returns are found to exhibit greater dispersion greater deviations from normality and a more negative and significant autocorrelation pattern than closing returns we study the effects of the bid ask spread and the price adjustment process on the estimated return variances and covariances and discuss the associated biases we conclude that the trading mechanism has a significant effect on stock price behavior

incorporating transport cost in the lot size and pricing decisions with downward sloping demand abstract there is an increased emphasis in supply chain management on making all costs transparent this has led to greater scrutiny of freight costs by the resellers who want to control their inbound logistics costs an astute reseller may opt for paying freight when he sees an opportunity for savings in some cases a supplier may only sell on conditions of fob origin in this paper we consider a reselling situation wherein the final demand is sensitive to the selling price and the reseller is responsible for paying for the freight given that transportation costs can be almost 50 of the logistics cost s r swenseth m r godfrey int j prod econ 77 2002 113 there is a need for coordination between the reseller s purchasing function and his pricing policy in this study we formulate a model for determining the optimal lot size and the selling price for the reseller existing models for the problem have treated freight breakpoints in the same way as price breakpoints in a quantity discount schedule in doing so they have ignored the option of over declaring the weight of the shipment which is routinely available to the buyer shipper in practice in this paper we assume that the reseller has such an option we also assume that in setting the size of the order shipment the reseller can choose between less than full truckload or full truckload shipment

dynamic lotsizing with a finite production rate the dynamic lotsizing problem concerns the determination of optimally produced delivered batch quantities when demand which is to be satisfied is distributed over time in different amounts at di

integrated pricing and lot sizing decision in a two echelon supply chain with a finite production rate abstract in this paper we consider a supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer selling the product manufactured by the supplier in a market in which the demand for the product is decreasing in the price set by the retailer previous research on coordinating the supply chain with price sensitive demand often assumes that either the supplier purchases the product or the supplier has an infinitely large production rate we consider explicitly the supplier s finite production rate in the pricing and lot sizing decision which causes the problem much more challenging we first investigate the optimization problem in the decentralized scenario to find the optimal order quantity and selling price for the retailer as well as the optimal wholesale price and lot size multiplier for the supplier we then solve the joint optimization problem in the centralized supply chain to find the optimal order quantity the selling price and the optimal lot size multiplier we provide two sequential algorithms to solve the joint optimization problem computational experiments show that the algorithms are effective all 448 tested problems are solved optimally and efficient it only takes a few iterations to converge for each tested problem the supply chain coordination mechanism is then designed through an all unit quantity discount policy and a franchise fee

knowledge sources patent protection and commercialization of pharmaceutical innovations abstract this paper investigates different types of innovations from radical to incremental in the pharmaceutical industry by studying bibliometric data of drugs approved by the united states food and drug administration fda looking at time to market aspects knowledge sources of these innovations and protection strategies scientific knowledge stemming from the public sector is found to be important for all innovations nevertheless radical innovations build on a higher degree on basic research and they build on a significantly higher share of own prior scientific research than do incremental innovations furthermore each drug is shown to be accompanied by on average about 19 journal publications and 23 additional patents additional patent filings peak when the commercialization of the drug is in reach firms do not differ among the various types of innovations regarding the amount of additional patent filings but rather with the speed of filing these patents finally this work contributes to the improvement of future econometric analyses that aim to link bibliometric indicators such as patent or publication counts to firm success

intradaily price volume adjustments of nyse stocks to unexpected earnings the speed and path of adjustment in stocks to the degree of earnings surprise in their quarterly announcements are studied using price volume transactions data a differential price adjustment process was observed with stocks having large positive earnings surprises experiencing a faster adjustment compared with those stocks with negative earnings surprises volume transaction frequency and size were found to be directly related to the absolute degree of surprise but very favorable earnings surprise stocks experienced initially a large number of smaller trades while stocks with large unfavorable earnings surprises had relatively fewer transactions but higher volume per trade the stock market s microstructure has received increasing attention from researchers especially from an empirical perspective as transaction data on prices and volume have become more readily available 1 an important subset of this research has been the study of stock price adjustments to significant news events specifically publicly announced information with economic content should be quickly reflected in prices in an unbiased manner this paper contains a study of the intradaily adjustment in stocks to the informational content of earnings reports using price changes trading volume and transaction frequency and size we examine the transaction to transaction and time series stock behavior associated with different degrees of earnings surprise embedded in earnings announcements the degree of surprise is measured by a comparison of actual with forecasted earnings for 325 new york stock exchange nyse firms these firms are subdivided into five earnings surprise categories in order to determine whether the speed and path of their price volume adjustment processes are different one question of interest is whether the adjustment process for favorable versus unfavorable earnings surprises is similar or different another is whether any adjustment is distinguished by a few large trades or a large number of smaller

note comments on a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits monahan monahan j p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits management sci june 720 726 adapted the quantity discount model of inventory theory to the problem of determining an optimal quantity discount schedule from a vendor s point of view and opened up an important direction of research however his one item one customer one vendor model is based on several implicit assumptions that must be judged unreasonable monahan must account for the vendor s inventory carrying charges and redefine his variable s2 it is shown that a rational vendor s manufacturing frequency would not be identical to the buyer s ordering frequency if the vendor s manufacturing setup costs are substantially larger than the buyer s ordering costs a numerical example presented in this note also questions the practical usefulness of monahan s model even after its theoretical inaccuracies axe corrected monahan s model may explain discounts that are a fraction of 1 of the price of an item but it fails to explain commonly observed magnitudes of quantity discounts such as 10 of the unit price

discount pricing decisions in distribution channels with price sensitive demand abstract in this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of quantity discounts and volume discounts as coordination mechanisms in distribution channels with demand that is price sensitive we consider a single vendor single retailer distribution channel demand for the product arises only at the retailer the demand faced by the retailer is assumed to be deterministic but price elastic the retailer in turn buys the product from the vendor the vendor and the retailer act independently and rationally each maximizing their own respective profit the equilibrium point that specifies the vendor s and buyer s inventory and pricing policy is determined by the solution to a stackelberg game we consider the cases when quantity discount and volume discount respectively are offered we develop methods to determine the optimal discount policy for these cases we then consider the case where both volume and quantity discounts are offered simultaneously and develop a method to determine the optimal simultaneous discount offer the relative performance of the alternative discount schemes is then evaluated through a numerical study the results of the study demonstrate that the effectiveness of volume discount as a coordination mechanism is higher when the sensitivity of demand to price changes is higher the effectiveness of quantity discount on the other hand is higher with lower price sensitivity of demand finally the results also demonstrate that perfect coordination is achieved when volume and quantity discounts are offered simultaneously

a joint optimal pricing rebate value and lot sizing model delayed incentives in the form of mail in cash rebates are very popular among manufacturers and more recently among retailers one of the main advantages of rebates is that while they increase demand a small proportion of consumers redeem them in this paper we formulate and solve models for jointly determining the optimal price rebate face value and the optimal order quantity for a price and rebate sensitive deterministic demand the models show that under realistic conditions offering rebates can have significant pricing and inventory policy implications and can lead to a significant increase in profit

optimal price and order size under partial backordering incorporating shortage backorder and lost sale costs abstract in this paper we consider the pricing and lot sizing problem for a product subject to general rate of deterioration and partial backordering we use impatience functions to model backlogging of demand we show that even when lost sale and backorder costs are present the problem is well posed in the reduced space we provide an iterative procedure for solving the overall problem we describe structural properties of the solution for the new model and comment on the recent work incorporating backorder cost we illustrate the solution procedure for the new model with examples

stock market structure and volatility the procedure for opening stocks on the nyse appears to affect price volatility an analytical framework for assessing the magnitude of the structurally induced volatility is presented the ratio of variance of open to open returns to closeto close returns is shown to be consistently greater than one for nyse common stocks during the period 1982 through 1986 tbe greater volatility at the open is not attributable to the way in which public information is released since both the opento open return and the close to close return span the same period of time instead the greater volatility appears to be attributable to private information revealed in trading and to temporaryprice deviations induced by specialist and other traders the implied cost of immediacy at the open is significantly higher than at the close other empirical evidence in this article documents the volume of trading at the open the time delays between the exchange opening and the first transaction in a stock the difference in daytime volatility versus overnight volatility and the extent to which volatility is related to trading volume

new findings regarding day of the week returns over trading and non trading periods a note this paper decomposes daily close to close returns into trading day and non trading day returns we discover that all of the average negative returns from friday close to monday close documented in the literature for stock market indexes occurs during the non trading period from friday close to monday open in addition average trading day returns open to close are identical for all days of the week january firm size turn of the year anomalies are shown to be interrelated with day of the week returns

profit and more catholic social teaching and the purpose of the firm the empirical findings in collins and porras study of visionary companies built to last and the normative claims about the purpose of the business firm in centesimus annus are found to be complementary in understanding the purpose of the business firm a summary of the methodology and findings of built to lastand a short overview of catholic social teaching are provided it is shown that centesimus annus claim that the purpose of the firm is broader than just profit is consistent with collins and porras empirical finding that firms which set a broader objective tend to be more successful than those which pursue only the maximization of profits it is noted however that a related finding in collins and porras namely that the content of the firm s objective is not as important as internalizing some objective beyond just profit maximization can lead to ethical myopia two examples are provided of this the walt disney company and philip morris centesimus annus offers a way to expose such myopia by providing guidance as to what the purpose of the firm is and therefore as to what kinds of objectives are appropriate to the firm

the power of beaver s u against a variance increase in market model residuals to detect variance effects researchers have primarily relied on the square of the standardized market model residual i e beaver s u 1 a similar statistic the absolute value of the standardized residual has also been used for this purpose we call this statistic may s u 2 the rationale for using either beaver s u or may s u is that in a portfolio a variance increase will be reflected in unusually large negative and positive residuals these will tend to cancel out in a test based on ordinary residuals but squared residuals or their absolute values will yield a cumulative effect if the residuals are normally distributed as assumed by the linear model then beaver s u is the best statistic being most likely to detect a variance effect weekly and daily residuals are not normally distributed they are leptokurtic heavy tailed and skewed marais 1984 notes that the normal approximation to beaver s u is unreliable for significantly leptokurtic residuals and attempts to correct this unreliability through bootstrapping marais does not however consider the impact of leptokurtosis on the optimality of beaver s u we show that beaver s u is no longer optimal for leptokurtic residuals and that it is dominated by may s u

joint pricing and inventory policies for make to stock products with deterministic price sensitive demand abstract in this paper we focus on a firm selling a single make to stock product to price sensitive end customers we develop an integrated operations marketing model that can help determine the relevant profit maximizing decision variable values for two pricing policies that the firm might follow price as a decision variable which is advocated by academicians and mark up pricing used by most practitioners we first consider an eoq based model with price and order quantity as independent decision variables we then develop an analogous model where price is a mark up over operating costs per unit and order quantity becomes the sole decision variable we are able to ascertain the optimal decision variable values for each model for log linear and linear demand functions we prove that for such profit maximizing models the optimal batch size is not necessarily monotone increasing in set up cost interestingly our numerical analytical evidence suggests that from a profit perspective it is better for managers to be aggressive on price rather than reducing price too much especially for highly price sensitive and non linear demand moreover we establish that in general the profit penalty for not including inventory costs in determining the optimal batch size or ignoring the batch size optimization issue in a mark up price model is not significant only when the set up cost is quite high and or the firm faces non linear demand from highly price sensitive end consumers does it become crucial for managers to determine the exact optimal batch size and base the mark up price on the entire unit operating cost not only the unit variable production cost

the joint economic lot size problem a review abstract this article reviews lot size models which focus on coordinated inventory replenishment decisions between buyer and vendor and their impact on the performance of the supply chain these so called joint economic lot size jels models determine order production and shipment quantities from the perspective of the supply chain with the objective of minimizing total system costs this paper first describes the problem studied introduces the methodology of the review and presents a descriptive analysis of the selected papers subsequently papers are categorized and analyzed with respect to their contribution to the coordination of different echelons in the supply chain finally the review highlights gaps in the existing literature and suggests interesting areas for future research

information content and the speed of stock price adjustment the process by which security prices adjust to the release of new information is an area of study which has received much attention in accounting and finance in finance the main interest has been whether prices adjust in a rapid and unbiased manner to new information in accounting the focus has been more on whether different accounting disclosures have information content the study reported here combined both interests in that we investigated the speed of adjustment of releases of information which had different degrees of information content as illustrations dann mayers and rabb 1977 tested the sensitivity of a block trade trading rule to the speed of price adjustments this rule first suggested by grier and albin 1973 is based on the assumption that abnormal returns can be earned by purchasing shares at the block price and selling at that day s closing price dann mayers and rabb hereafter dmr found that unless one could purchase the stock within five minutes of the block trade the profitability of the grier and albin rule was seriously impaired they also found the market price to be an unbiased estimate of the closing price within 15 minutes of the block trade similarly hillmer and yu 1979 devised an alternative test for the speed of price adjustment based on a cumulative sum technique they illustrated the technique by testing for shifts in the parameters of the distributions of price changes and of transaction frequencies around five information events two earnings announcements and three defense

coordinating inventory control and pricing strategies under batch ordering in this paper we investigate joint pricing and inventory control problems in a finite horizon single product periodic review setting with certain uncertain supply capacities the demands in different periods are random variables whose distributions depend on the posted price exhibiting the additive form the order quantity in each period is required to be of integral multiples of a given specific batch size denoted by q inventory replenishment incurs a linear ordering cost referred to as the cost rate function the sum of holding and backorder costs can either be convex or quasi convex the objective is to determine a joint ordering and pricing decision that can maximize the total expected profit over the planning horizon we first consider the case in which the cost rate function is convex and show that the modifiedr q list price policy is optimal for the system with certain and limited capacities a special case of which is the r q list price policy when capacities become unlimited as supply capacities become random the optimal policy follows a new structure wherein the optimal order up to level and posted price must be coordinated to make the optimal safety stock level follow the r q policy we further consider the case of a quasi convex cost rate function which may arise when a service level constraint is used as a surrogate for the shortage cost we demonstrate that the r q list price policy is optimal for the system without supply capacity constraints in addition extensions to several other models are discussed the enabling technique is based on the notion of q jump convexity and its variants

economy of mutuality merging financial and social sustainability the article posits the concept of economy of mutuality as an intellectual mediation space for shifts in emphasis between market and social structures within economic theory and practice economy of mutuality it is contended provides an alternative frame of reference to the dichotomy of market economy and social economy for inquiry about what business is for and what values it presupposes and creates the article centers around the objective of gaining a broadened understanding of business so as to include not just market economy but social enterprise and social economy in pursuit of this objective a range of various archetypes of business enterprise are considered in light of higher ends of economic life the highest telos of business encompassing all such archetypes it is argued is founded on reciprocity and integral human development the article concludes that compared to market economy per se economy of mutuality provides a better conceptual framework for business in undertaking the challenges of sustainability

coordinating inventory control and pricing strategies for perishable products we analyze a joint pricing and inventory control problem for a perishable product with a fixed lifetime over a finite horizon in each period demand depends on the price of the current period plus an additive random term inventories can be intentionally disposed of and those that reach their lifetime have to be disposed of the objective is to find a joint pricing ordering and disposal policy to maximize the total expected discounted profit over the planning horizon taking into account linear ordering cost inventory holding and backlogging or lost sales penalty cost and disposal cost employing the concept of l concavity we show some monotonicity properties of the optimal policies our results shed new light on perishable inventory management and our approach provides a significantly simpler proof of a classical structural result in the literature moreover we identify bounds on the optimal order up to levels and develop an effective heuristic policy numerical results show that our heuristic policy performs well in both stationary and nonstationary settings finally we show that our approach also applies to models with random lifetimes and inventory rationing models with multiple demand classes

supplier pricing and lot sizing when demand is price sensitive abstract the problem of co ordination between a vendor and a buyer is formulated as a two person fixed threat bargaining game the vendor decides on his lot size and the price schedule he is to offer to the buyer the buyer decides upon his lot size and the selling price in the market we have characterized pareto efficient solutions and the nash bargaining solution for the problem we have also proposed two pricing schedules for the vendor who is supplying to a large population of buyers the first one is based upon profit sharing the second one resembles the classical all unit quantity discount schedule we have thus provided for the supplier a procedure for setting all unit quantity discount schedule

channel coordination and quantity discounts this paper presents a model for analyzing the impact of joint decision policies on channel coordination in a system consisting of a supplier and a group of homogeneous buyers the joint decision policy characterized by the unit selling price and the order quantity is coordinated through quantity discounts and franchise fees both the annual demand rate and the operating cost including the purchase ordering and inventory holding costs depend on the joint decision policy employed this paper contributes by integrating work addressing quantity discounts on inventory and ordering policies and work focusing on the control mechanism provided by quantity discounts in channel coordination it is shown that the optimal all unit quantity discount policy is equivalent to the optimal incremental quantity discount policy in achieving channel coordination furthermore it is shown that quantity discounts alone are not sufficient to guarantee joint profit maximization the analyses of the general models are illustrated by specific analytical results obtained for a given demand function