a spatial mean variance mip model for energy market risk analysis the paper presents a short term market risk model based on the markowitz mean variance method for spatial electricity markets the spatial nature is captured using the correlation of geographically separated markets and the consideration of wheeling administration the model also includes transaction costs and other practical constraints resulting in a mixed integer programming mip model the incorporation of those practical constraints makes the model more attractive than the traditional markowitz portfolio model with continuity a case study is used to illustrate the practical application of the model the results show that the mip portfolio efficient frontier is neither smooth nor concave the paper also considers the possible extension of the model to other energy markets including natural gas and oil markets

mean variance utility functions and the demand for risky assets an empirical analysis using flexible functional forms in a recent study levy and markowitz 15 demonstrate that at least for some utility functions expected utility can be approximated by a judiciously chosen function defined over mean and variance in addition to resurrecting mean variance analysis from the limbo into which it was placed by the criticisms of borch 10 and others the analysis by levy and markowitz yields a more direct approach to portfolio analysis than that provided by the current empirical literature the current portfolio literature is concerned with notions of efficient sets and systematic risk rather than with utility functions and mean variance while much has been gained from a utility free methodology it is ultimately predicated upon a separation theorem and hence an environment with zero transactions costs but security markets are not costless and the separation theorem may not hold in that event a utility dependent approach to portfolio analysis could potentially lead to more powerful results especially if such an approach could be empirically implemented

cost reduction competition and industry performance in many markets firms compete over time by expending resources with the purpose of reducing their costs sometimes the cost reducing investments operate directly on costs in many instances they take the form of developing new products that deliver what customers need more cheaply therefore product development can have the same ultimate effect as direct cost reduction in fact if one thinks of the product as the services it delivers to the customer in the way that lancaster pioneered then product development often is just cost reduction

mergers acquisitions and innovation performance in the telecommunications equipment industry the worldwide telecommunications equipment industry has experienced an enormous number of mergers and acquisitions m a this article examines the innovation determinants of m a activity a

complementarity and external linkages the strategies of the large firms in biotechnology in biotechnology large firms enter into different kinds of linkages with universities and small medium sized research intensive firms we test the hypothesis that the strategies of external linkage of the large firms with other parties are complementary to one another we show that if any two strategies are complementary i e undertaking more of one strategy raises the marginal value of the other then they are positively correlated using data for a sample large us european and japanese chemical and pharmaceutical producers we find that the strategies above are positively correlated even after controlling for firm specific characteristics

networks of innovators a synthesis of research issues abstract this paper will first summarise some key findings of empirical research in the 1960s on the role of external sources of scientific technical and market information in successful innovation by business firms this work demonstrated unambiguously the vital importance of external information networks and of collaboration with users during the development of new products and processes moreover the dilemmas of cooperative research in competitive industries were recognised and studied long ago 35 62 76 what then is new about the present wave of interest in networks of innovators are there new forms of organisation or new technologies or new policies which justify renewed research efforts since they go beyond those developments already analysed in earlier empirical and theoretical work section 2 reviews the evidence of new developments in the 1980s in industrial networks regional networks and government sponsored innovative activities it shows that there has indeed been a major upsurge of formal and semi formal flexible networks in the 1980s including some new types of network it also shows that some older forms of research cooperation have been modified and transformed the papers at montreal largely concentrated on the role of regional supplier networks which are a good example of such new wine in old bottles this paper attempts to locate the regional network discussion within a wider context of new developments in networking section 3 discusses the causes of these new developments and whether they are likely to remain a characteristic of national and international innovation systems for a long time to come or prove to be a temporary upsurge to be overtaken later by a wave of take overs and vertical integration finally section 4 sums up some of the other key issues which require further research and debate and the implications for social science theory

university industry collaboration and firms r d effort abstract this paper investigates the impact of publicly funded university industry collaboration on uk firms r d effort we test the hypotheses that project participation has a positive effect on firms r d expenditure per employee and on their share of r d employment the paper exploits a novel source of data made up of a set of u i projects funded by the uk engineering and physical sciences research council between 1997 and 2007 and firm level data available through the uk office for national statistics we employ propensity score matching to select an appropriate control group of untreated firms on the basis of the probability that they participate to u i partnerships we then estimate the impact of participation on firms r d effort in two points in time via ordinary least squares regression the results show a positive and significant impact on the share of r d employment two years after the end of projects this is also confirmed by a robustness check a positive effect on r d expenditure per employee is found both at the end of the project and two years later these findings are highly relevant for policy given that u i collaboration is among the most frequent policy instruments put in place by local and national policy makers to foster pre competitive research and firms r d activities

downside versus symmetric measures of uncertainty in natural resource portfolio design to manage climate change uncertainty recent work uses markowitz s mean variance framework to identify efficient allocations of conservation activity across subregions of a planning landscape to minimize climate change induced uncertainty in future conservation benefits we replace variance with a downside measure of uncertainty and compare the resulting portfolios of conservation activity and uncertainty expected value results against those generated by the mean variance approach results illustrate that conservation agents can manage climate changed induced uncertainty in future conservation outcomes more efficiently using our framework when they are particularly averse to downside uncertainty and when predicted future conservation outcomes within subregions across their planning horizon exhibit skewed distributions

innovation expenditures and the role of government in belgium abstract unlike suggestions from earlier research on the schumpeterian hypothesis it is argued and shown that sales and employment are not simply substitute size measures to test the r d behaviour of foreign and domestic companies operating in belgium further suggests that government sponsored r d has not substituted for privately funded r d foreign companies are found to behave differently and to do less r d the more they pay for externally supplied technology

cooperation between rivals informal know how trading it has long been recognized that it is difficult for an innovating firm to fully appropriate the benefits arising from its innovations and that desired research might therefore not be performed nelson 1959 pp 297 306 one sometimes possible solution to this dilemma is cooperative r d conducted by firms who share the costs and benefits of particular r d projects johnson 1973

risk forecasting models and optimal portfolio selection this study analyses from an investor s perspective the performance of several risk forecasting models in obtaining optimal portfolios the plausibility of the homoscedastic hypothesis implied in the classical markowitz model is dicussed and more general models which take into account assymetry and time varying risk are analysed specifically it studies whether arch type based models obtain portfolios whose risk adjusted returns exceed those of the classical markowitz model the same analysis is performed with models based on the lower partial moment lpm which take into account the assymetry in the distribution of returns the results suggest that none of the models achieve a clearly superior average performance it is also found that models based on semivariance perform as well as those based on the variance but not better than even if the evaluation criterion is based on the reward to semivariance ratio when attention turns to the analysis of worst case performance the results are clearly differ

semiparametric analysis to estimate the deal effect curve abstract the marketing literature suggests several phenomena that may contribute to the nature of the relationship between sales and price discounts these phenomena can produce complex nonlinearities and interactions in the deal effect curve that are best captured with a flexible approach because a fully nonparametric regression model suffers from the curse of dimensionality the authors propose a semiparametric regression model store level sales over time are modeled as a nonparametric function of own and cross item price discounts and a parametric function of other predictors the authors compare the predictive validity of the semiparametric model with that of two parametric benchmark models and obtain superior performance the results for three product categories indicate threshold and saturation effects for both ownand cross item temporary price cuts the authors also find that the nature of the own item curve depends on other items price discounts comparisons with restricted model specification

an investigation of individual responses to tensile price claims this article describes the results of two studies investigating the effects of tensile price claims e g save up to 50 on consumers perceptions of offer value information value and price reduction the findings suggest that the use of tensile claims in conjunction with large advertised price reductions may result in decreased perceived offer value and substantial discounting of expected price reductions by the consumer

reference prices and deception in newspaper advertising consumers were exposed to newspaper advertisements for four products and one of five different price representations regular price alone sale price alone regular price with manufacturer s suggested list price mslp sale price with regular price or sale price with mslp perceptions of the ordinary prices of the products were not affected by the presence or type of reference price but the subjects did have lower estimates of ordinary prices in the sale context the accuracy of consumer perceptions of ordinary prices was not related to the recency of subject shopping experience for the products as measured in the study

the effects of r d tax credits and allowances in canada abstract in canada as in many other countries that have adopted r d tax credits and allowances there has been considerable controversy over their effectiveness in increasing company financed research and development this study seems to be one of the first systematic attempts to estimate the effects of canada s r d tax credits and allowances the results present a very consistent picture the survey results the econometric results and some simple calculations based on rough measures of the price elasticity of demand for r d all suggest that the special research allowance increased r d expenditures by about 1 percent and that the investment tax credit increased them by about 2 percent these increases seem to be appreciably less than the revenue losses to the government

r d outsourcing and contractual governance an empirical study of commercial r d projects abstract three complementary models derived from transaction cost economics and property rights theory are constructed to explore the boundary between internal and external r d projects and the governance mechanisms of external r d projects contracted out by private business firms whereas the boundary between external and internal projects is explained with sunk cost potentials the uses of governance mechanisms for external projects in terms of control and property rights are explained with reference to both potential sunk costs technical novelty in the r d work and expected resale value of the final r d outputs the models are empirically tested on 80 projects from the norwegian information technology industry half of which are contracted out to non profit research institutes and half of which are made in house by private manufacturing firms the results support both the boundary hypotheses and three of four control incentive hypotheses the theoretical implications involved in choosing between internal and external r d projects and in designing control and property rights for external projects are discussed

skewness preference and portfolio choice one of the virtues of parameter preference models presented in general form in rubinstein 23 is their empirical content applied models of financial theory rely heavily on the mean variance mv version of parameter preference as spelled out in samuelson 25 mv models are adequate with compact distributions of returns and when portfolio decisions are made frequently so that the risk parameter becomes sufficiently small

technological cooperative agreements and firm s r d intensity a note on causality relations abstract in this paper we apply a recently proposed model of vector autoregression for panel data to analyse the granger causality relationship between a firm s intramural r d intensity and technological cooperative agreements the analysis relies on a sample composed of 95 major us european and japanese firms in the semiconductor data processing and telecommunications industries observed during the period 1980 1986 decisions on interfirm technological collaborations are shown to cause a la granger decisions on internal r d investments and vice versa we thus suggest that in contrast with the methodological approaches followed by previous empirical works firms decisions concerning both intramural innovative effort and technological cooperation are endogenous and have to be jointly studied through a simultaneous two equation structural model

internal r d expenditures and external technology sourcing abstract the paper examines the two way relationship between external r d activities and internal r d expenditures on a cross section of flemish r d active companies the analysis extends the classical explanatory variables like size diversification ownership structure and technological opportunities to include the impact of various external sourcing strategies r d cooperation and to a lesser extent r d contracted out are found to have a significant positive effect on internal r d but only if the companies have absorptive capacity in the form of a full time staffed r d department at the same time firms are found to be more frequently engaged in r d cooperation the more they spend on internal r d

variance vs downside risk is there really that much difference abstract the popularity of downside risk among investors is growing and mean return downside risk portfolio selection models seem to oppress the familiar mean variance approach the reason for the success of the former models is that they separate return fluctuations into downside risk and upside potential this is especially relevant for asymmetrical return distributions for which mean variance models punish the upside potential in the same fashion as the downside risk the paper focuses on the differences and similarities between using variance or a downside risk measure both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view we first discuss the theoretical properties of different downside risk measures and the corresponding mean downside risk models against common beliefs we show that from the large family of downside risk measures only a few possess better theoretical properties within a return risk framework than the variance on the empirical side we analyze the differences between some us asset allocation portfolios based on variances and downside risk measures among other things we find that the downside risk approach tends to produce on average slightly higher bond allocations than the mean variance approach furthermore we take a closer look at estimation risk viz the effect of sampling error in expected returns and risk measures on portfolio composition on the basis of simulation analyses we find that there are marked differences in the degree of estimation accuracy which calls for further research

portfolio analysis with a large universe of assets covariance matrix optimization algorithms are applied to a large number of assets a previous paper by burgess and bey 1988 suggests that attempting to optimize a large number of securities with the traditional covariance matrix model is not practical an alternative approach ranks the securities with the reward to volatility reward to beta ratio and then optimizes a smaller subset of securities with the covariance matrix model this study proposes additional screening methods such as stochastic dominance reward to variability r v ratios reward to lower partial moment r lpm ratios and the optimization of subgroups and provides an empirical test of the various screening methodologies the results indicate that the full covariance critical line optimization algorithm is surprisingly robust compared to the other techniques

the effects of an undisclosed regular price and a positive leadtime in a presale mechanism abstract a presale program is popular with manufacturers who wish to reduce the risk posed by uncertain demands we introduce a new price mechanism in which the manufacturer during the presale period does not disclose the exact regular price in the sale period although it is guaranteed to customers to be higher than the presale price as positive leadtime is much overlooked in presale models we analyze the rationality of including one the numerical results in this paper show that both the specific price mechanism and the positive leadtime have significant effects on the manufacturer s policy production quantity presale price regular price the expected profit and customer behaviors the optimal discount rate should be greater than 50 percent this conclusion is consistent with existing results of surveys on saturation points the manufacturer can take advantage of the latest information on demand gathered in the presale period to update their policy and increase their expected profit

downside risk measures and equity returns in the nyse although investors are concerned foremost with mean and variance they are also sensitive to downside risk in this article we employ several risk variables of traditional and downside risk measures to evaluate the equity returns in the new york stock exchange nyse market in order to test their explaining power the test results show that variance or sd is better than beta in the performance however those traditional risk measures have almost less explanatory power than total downside risk measures whether the downside risk measures are relative to zero the mean return or the market index return when they are used to predict the future risk premium the results also show that the significance of the downside risk measures in the nyse market is different between different industry sectors different periods of time and in different individual equities

cost reducing and demand creating r d with spillovers this article analyzes r d policies when the returns to cost reducing and demand creating r d are imperfectly appropriable and market structure is endogenous we generalize previous characterizations of appropriability to permit the possibility that own and rival r d are imperfect substitutes we also describe how equilibrium expenditures on process and product r d as well as equilibrium market structure depend on technological opportunities and spillovers in contrast to previous work diminished appropriability does not necessarily reduce r d expenditures for example under some conditions an increase in the extent of process product spillovers will lead to an increase in product process r d we estimate several variants of the model by using manufacturing line of business data and data from a survey of r d executives

optimal algorithms and lower partial moment ex post results portofolio management in the finance literature has typically used optimization algorithms to determine security allocations within a portfolio in order to obtain the best trade off between risk and return these algorithms despite some improvements are restrictive in terms of an investor s risk aversion utility function since individual investors have different levels of risk aversion this paper proposes two portfolio optimization algorithms that can be tailored to the specific level of risk aversion of the individual investor and performs ex postevaluation tests of the algorithm performance