investment spikes new facts and a general equilibrium exploration abstract using plant level data from chile and the u s we show that investment spikes are highly pro cyclical so much so that changes in the number of establishments undergoing investment spikes the extensive margin account for the bulk of variation in aggregate investment the number of establishments undergoing investment spikes also has independent predictive power for aggregate investment even controlling for past investment and sales we re calibrate the thomas 2002 is lumpy investment relevant for the business cycle journal of political economy cx 508 534 model that includes fixed costs of investing so that it assigns a prominent role to extensive adjustment the recalibrated model has different properties than the standard rbc model for some shocks

the effect of information streams on capital budgeting decisions in this paper a new decision rule for capital budgeting is considered a firm has the opportunity to invest in a project of uncertain profitability over time the firm receives additional information in the form of signals indicating the profitability of the project the belief that the firm needs to have in a profitable project for investment to be optimal is calculated and analyzed it is shown that the probability of investing in a project with low profitability is larger when the firm uses a conventional rule like the net present value rule as a counterintuitive result it is obtained that it can be optimal to undertake the investment at a later point in time in case the expected number of signals per time unit is higher also an error measure is discussed that indicates the accuracy of capital budgeting rules in this stochastic environment

effects of a hybrid price stock dependent demand on the optimal solutions of a deteriorating inventory system and trade credit policy on re manufactured product abstract this study contributes to formulate a deteriorating inventory model with a hybrid price stock dependent demand with credit for units in stock period in the presence of trade credit policy by using the discounted cash flow approach on re manufactured products in real life the demand function is not always constant or linear or nonlinear the demand rate of any items goes up and down in the real market due to the sum of two different types of demand this study observes that the demand is depending on price and stock of the product time value of money and trade credit policy the objective of this study is to find optimum cycle time optimum selling price and present profit of all future cash flows the model starts with mathematical formulating and thereafter studies the necessary and sufficient conditions for obtaining the unique optimal solution the theoretical solution procedure and case examples have studied for validation of this model moreover the sensitivity analysis is expressed out with respect to main parameters and managerial application is obtained this study uses the different demand functions of a simple pricing inventory system to find out the maximum profit on re manufactured products

the impact of sovereign rating changes on the activity of european banks abstract we verify the effects of sovereign rating revisions on the activity of european banks in terms of their regulatory capital ratio profitability liquidity and lending supply first we find that a sovereign downgrade has a significant impact primarily on capital ratios and lending supply in contrast upgrades do not have a significant impact indicating an asymmetric effect of sovereign rating changes second we find that three transmission channels assets channel funding channel and rating channel explain a relevant part of the impact of a sovereign downgrade finally we find strong evidence that the rating based regulation affects all measures of the activity of domestic banks causing negative externalities for financial institutions our results hold also controlling for sovereign risk estimating a gmm system and employing an instrumental variable approach

bank bailouts and bank sovereign risk contagion channels abstract bank bailouts generate risk spillovers between the default risks of banks and governments this paper quantifies the effects of bank bailouts and measures the interdependence risk between the banking sector and government for the us and six european countries the approach allows to distinguish two channels of contagion by identifying bailout and sovereign risk shocks and assessing their effects on the default risks of banks and governments in contrast to europe a bailout shock generates a persistent decrease in the default risk of the us banking sector the bank sovereign risk contagion is stronger in europe relative to the us

on r d timing under uncertainty abstract in this paper we analyze the problem of endogenous r d timing when technological breakthrough and innovation are random events in a dynamic framework which involves the substitution of an exhaustible resource oil for instance by an alternative technology the backstop that provides an everlasting source of energy under fairly general assumptions we characterize the pattern of exploitation of both energy sources and study the effect of uncertain technological breakthrough on the r d timing decision on resource prices and on the pattern of resource use in comparison to the certainty case it is shown that uncertainty consideration might delay the undertaking of r d and might lead to a more rapid resource depletion pattern for a considerable range of r d capital costs while the opposite result the conventional wisdom holds only for some other range

evaluating natural resource investments notwithstanding impressive advances in the theory of finance over the past 2 decades practical procedures for capital budgeting have evolved only slowly the standard technique which has remained unchanged in essentials since it was originally proposed see dean 1951 bierman and smidt 1960 derives from a simple adaptation of the fisher 1907 model of valuation under certainty under this technique expected cash flows from an investment project are discounted at a rate deemed appropriate to their risk and the resulting present value is compared with the cost of the project this standard textbook technique reflects modern theoretical developments only insofar as estimates of the discount rate may be obtained from crude application of single period asset pricing theory but see brennan 1973 bogue and roll 1974 turnbull 1977 constantinides 1978 the inadequacy of this approach to capital budgeting is widely acknowledged although not widely discussed its obvious deficiency is its the evaluation of mining and other natural resource projects is made particularly difficult by the high degree of uncertainty attaching to output prices it is shown that the techniques of continuous time arbitrage and stochastic control theory may be used not only to value such projects but also to determine the optimal policies for developing managing and abandoning them the approach may be adapted to a wide variety of contexts outside the natural resource sector where uncertainty about future project revenues is a paramount concern

temporary versus permanent shocks explaining corporate financial policies we investigate corporate financial policies in the presence of both temporary and permanent shocks to firms cash flows in our framework cash flows can be negative and are imperfectly correlated with firm value and earnings volatility differs from asset volatility these results are consistent with empirical stylized facts they are also contrary to the implications of existing dynamic capital structure models that allow only for permanent shocks to cash flows temporary shocks increase the importance of financial flexibility and may provide an intuitively simple and realistic explanation of empirically observed financial conservatism and low leverage phenomena the theoretical framework developed in this article general enough to be used in various corporate finance applications jel g12 g32 g33

an eoq model for perishable products with fixed shelf life under stochastic demand conditions abstract the paper presents a mathematical stochastic model for perishable open dating foods including shortage and outdating costs the demand fluctuations have been taken into account modeling them through a normal distribution and their impact on the storage time has been studied considering the stochastic nature of such a parameter in turn the quantification of perished products has been also addressed determining the probability for a product of remaining in stock beyond the end of its shelf life on the basis of such premises the optimal set of parameters that minimize the total unit cost has been determined a numerical application and a sensitivity analysis show the practical applicability of the proposed model in the context of warehouse management underlining managerial insights

the impact of market structure and learning on the tradeoff between r d competition and cooperation this paper compares r d competition and cooperation when firms can devote resources to a safe investment or a risky r d investment when the discovery of a new product creates positive externalities on non discovering firms equilibrium investment flow ex ante investment and welfare under r d competition are less than or equal to what they are under research cooperation with negative externalities r d cooperation results in the same or lower ex ante investment than under r d competition and social welfare may also be less our results have relevance for empirical studies of the impact of r d cooperation on r d outcomes

investment under uncertainty and time inconsistent preferences abstract while standard real options models assume that agents possess a constant rate of time preference there is substantial evidence that agents are impatient about choices in the short term but are patient when choosing between long term alternatives we extend the real options framework to model the investment timing decisions of entrepreneurs with time inconsistent preferences the impact on investment timing depends on such factors as whether entrepreneurs are sophisticated or naive in their expectations regarding their future time inconsistent behavior and whether the payoff from investment occurs all at once or over time the model is extended to the case of a competitive equilibrium

a note on optimal replenishment policies for non instantaneous deteriorating items with price and stock sensitive demand under permissible delay in payment abstract soni 2013 int j prod econ 146 1 259 268 proposed optimal replenishment policies for non instantaneous deteriorating items i e the product starts deteriorating after a period of no deterioration with price and stock sensitive demand with a stock dependent demand it is desirable to have non zero ending inventory due to potential profit resulting from the increased demand however soni 2013 int j prod econ 146 1 259 268 treated those ending inventory as fresh stocks to go through another period of non deterioration again additionally he assumed for simplicity that the replenishment cycle time t must be longer than the period of non deterioration t d i e t t d in reality one should consider all possible replenishment cycle time to maximize the profit in this note we complement the shortcomings of his model by i selling those ending inventory as salvages and ii considering all possible replenishment cycle time which may be shorter than the period of non deterioration with these modifications the repeatability of the replenishment cycle is ensured and the applicability of soni s model is strengthened the numerical examples indicate that the global optimal solution is indeed possible in the case of t t d

investment timing with incomplete information and multiple means of learning we consider a firm that can use one of several costly learning modes to dynamically reduce uncertainty about the unknown value of a project each learning mode incurs cost at a particular rate and provides information of a particular quality in addition to dynamic decisions about its learning mode the firm must decide when to stop learning and either invest or abandon the project using a continuous time bayesian framework and assuming a binary prior distribution for the project s unknown value we solve both the discounted and undiscounted versions of this problem in the undiscounted case the optimal learning policy is to choose the mode that has the smallest cost per signal quality when the discount rate is strictly positive we prove that an optimal learning and investment policy can be summarized by a small number of critical values and the firm only uses learning modes that lie on a certain convex envelope in cost rate versus signal quality space we extend our analysis to consider a firm that

an equilibrium model of investment under uncertainty this paper analyzes the optimal investment decisions of heterogeneous rms in a competitive uncertain environment we characterize rms optimal investment strategy explicitly and derive a closed form solution for rm value we show that in the strategic equilibrium real option premia are signi cant as a result rms delay investment choosing optimally not to undertake some positive npv projects the model predicts that rm returns vary over the business cycle with returns negatively skewed during expansions but positively skewed in recessions

considering the investment decisions with real options games approach abstract the mix of games theory with the real options has been a dynamic range of exploration in the most recent decade the engaging quality of the specialists for displaying aggressive speculation choices by blending ideas from both hypotheses is on account of a venture choice in a focused business sector can be seen in its substance as a game between firms in this paper we expand a model to consider finite horizon real option games under incomplete information with various parameters in incomplete information games firms actions express significant information about profitability to contestants the encapsulation of this information proposed original blocks in models with strategic interactions this is because of circularity where best exercise decisions are based on previous decisions taken which at a given time are quiet to be mentioned because about the dynamic programming principle we expand an extended version of the least squares monte carlo algorithm to confront these results the model can aid in understanding the relation between strategic optionality and information besides how this influences the best decision policy and its value results we find the informational feature is of great significance for firms best decision policy and optimization of project values

the impact and the spillover effect of a sovereign rating announcement on the euro area cds market abstract this paper analyzes the impact and the spillover effect of a sovereign rating announcement on the euro area cds market through the event study technique we demonstrate that downgrades and upgrades considerably affect financial markets the relevance of the impact is due to the introduction of new information after a rating change announcement information discovery effect and to the role of rating in the current financial regulation certification effect conversely the cds market does not seem to react significantly to rating warning outlook and review announcements furthermore we find evidence of a spillover effect only after a downgrade announcement our results show that the size of the spillover effect is influenced by economic and financial conditions of analyzed countries and that international bank flows between emu members represent an important transmission channel of the spillover effect

a general model of r d competition and policy this article constructs a model of r d with heterogeneous firms each firm s probability of success is a function of its sunk and recurrent r d expenditures the social gains from an innovation are not fully captured by the successful firm the comparison of the social optimum and the market equilibrium involves balancing spillover and crowding effects pigovian corrective policies as well as strategic policies for a subset of colluding firms are discussed

learning while voting determinants of collective experimentation this paper combines dynamic social choice and strategic experimentation to study the following question how does a society a committee or more generally a group of individuals with potentially heterogeneous preferences experiment with new opportunities each voter recognizes that during experimentation other voters also learn about their preferences as a result pivotal voters today are biased against experimentation because it reduces their likelihood of remaining pivotal this phenomenon reduces equilibrium experimentation below the socially efficient level and may even result in a negative option value of experimentation however one can restore efficiency by designing a voting rule that depends deterministically on time another main result is that even when payoffs of a reform are independently distributed across the population good news about any individual s payoff increases other individuals incentives to experiment with that reform due to a positive voting externality

irreversible investment and knightian uncertainty when firms make a decision about irreversible investment they may not have complete confidence about their perceived probability measure describing future uncertainty they may think other probability measures perturbed from the original one are also possible such uncertainty characterized by not a single probability measure but a set of probability measures is called knightian uncertainty the effect of knightian uncertainty on the value of irreversible investment opportunity is shown to be drastically different from that of traditional uncertainty in the form of risk specifically an increase in knightian uncertainty decreases the value of investment opportunity while an increase in risk increases it

patents imitation and licensing in an asymmetric dynamic r d race abstract rd some may have an advantage in early stages of the r d process while others may have advantages in other stages of the process this paper uses a two firm asymmetric ability multistage r d race model to analyze the effect of patents imitations and licensing arrangements on the speed of innovation firm value and consumers surplus by using numerical analyses to study the mpe of the r d race the paper demonstrates the circumstances under which a weak patent protection regime that facilitates free imitation of any intermediate technology may yield a higher consumers surplus and total surplus than a regime that awards a patent for the final innovation the advantage of imitation may hold even when we allow for voluntary licensing of intermediate technologies

innovation and the persistence of monopoly abstract the auction framework enables us to highlight a crucial feature of many r d races the losing firm can recoup part but not the entirety of its r d investments this feature is shown to account for the marked differences in results obtained by gilbert and newbery and by reinganum when the firm investing the largest amount wins with certainty we establish the existence of a unique equilibrium neither firm employs a pure strategy and the incumbent wins more often than the challenger

irreversible decisions and record setting news principles in the now classical real options theory the price of an underlying asset is modeled as a geometric brownian motion and optimal exercise strategies are described by simple explicit formulas this paper extends the classical theory to allow any geometric levy process to model prices such processes may account for fat tails and skewness of probability distributions of commodity prices the optimal exercise strategies are specified in the paper in terms of statistics of record setting low or high prices the formulas derived extend those observed in the gaussian case but the form of the result is novel even for that case jel d81 g3

process innovation activity in a mixed oligopoly the role of cooperatives this article develops a sequential game theoretic model of heterogeneous producers to examine the market and welfare effects of cooperative involvement in process innovation activity in the agricultural sector the analysis examines an open membership input supplying cooperative co op that maximizes member welfare and finances its innovation activity through retained earnings analytical results show that the presence of the co op can increase the arrival rate of innovations while reducing the price of agricultural inputs cooperative involvement in innovation activity can thus be welfare enhancing and socially desirable with its effectiveness being determined by the degree of producer heterogeneity and the size of innovation costs

dynamic r d competition with learning to account for the possibility that firms are unsure about the ease of innovation we formulate a differential game of r d competition with an unknown hazard rate we show as time passes with success firms become more pessimistic about eventual innovation reducing their r d investment and possibly exiting the race an increase in the number of competing firms tends to increase firms r d intensities for given beliefs but because beliefs evolve at different rates depending on the number of firms in the race time paths of r d investment intensity are not unambiguously ordered with respect to the number of competing firms

an inventory system with demand dependent on both time and price assuming backlogged shortages abstract in this work we analyze an inventory model for items whose demand is a bivariate function of price and time it is supposed that the demand rate multiplicatively combines the effects of a time power function and a price logit function the aim is to maximize the profit per time unit assuming that the inventory cost per time unit is the sum of the holding shortage ordering and purchasing costs an algorithm is developed to find the optimal price the optimal lot size and the optimal replenishment cycle several numerical examples are introduced to illustrate the solution procedure

the relation between sovereign credit rating revisions and economic growth abstract a country s economic growth exhibits a significant response to sovereign rating changes a one notch upgrade downgrade causes an increase decline of about 0 6 0 3 in re rated countries five year average annual growth rates the results hold after accounting for other determinants of economic growth and potential endogeneity problems and are robust to the use of quarterly data changes in country rating affect economic growth via the interest rate and capital flow channels narrower sovereign bond yield spreads and increased capital inflows are associated with upgrades which stimulate re rated countries economic performance and the converse holds for downgrades

a bayesian approach to real options the case of distinguishing between temporary and permanent shocks traditional real options models demonstrate the importance of the option to wait due to uncertainty over future shocks to project cash flows however there is often another important source of uncertainty uncertainty over the permanence of past shocks adding bayesian uncertainty over the permanence of past shocks augments the traditional option to wait with an additional option to learn the implied investment behavior differs significantly from that in standard models for example investment may occur at a time of stable or decreasing cash flows respond sluggishly to cash flow shocks and depend on the timing of project cash flows during the past two decades the real options approach to valuation of irreversible investment opportunities has become part of the mainstream literature in financial economics the central idea is that the opportunity to invest is equivalent to an american call option on the underlying investment project as a consequence the problem of optimal investment timing is analogous to the optimal exercise decision for an american option applications of the real options approach are now numerous 1 one feature that is common to virtually all real options models is that the underlying uncertainty pertains only to future shocks since future cash flows are uncertain there is an important opportunity cost of investing today the value of the asset might go up so that tomorrow will be an even better time to invest this opportunity cost is often referred to in the literature as the option

innovation and cooperation implications for competition and antitrust n k robel laureate robert solow and his colleagues on mit s industrial productivity commission recently noted dertouzos lester and solow 1989 p 7 undeveloped cooperative relationships between individuals and between organizations stand out in our industry studies as obstacles to technological innovation and the improvement of industrial performance and later p 105 that interfirm cooperation in the u s has often though not always been inhibited by government antitrust regulation these striking conclusions warrant further exploration unfortunately industrial organization textbooks still discuss horizontal cooperation and competition almost exclusively in terms of standard cartel theory on the other hand vertical cooperation contracting is viewed differently and some textbooks provide treatments of supplier buyer relationships in which cooperation is viewed as enhancing efficiency both in the textbooks and in policy discussion among economists cooperation among competitors is highly suspect being perhaps the last bastion of what was once referred to as the inhospitality tradition in antitrust as a result very little literature addresses how cooperation among competitors can promote competition notwithstanding that cooperation among competitors may sometimes be essential if innovating firms are to compete in today s increasingly global markets imai and baba 1989 such cooperation is already important in japan and in europe 1

venture capital financing moral hazard and learning we consider the provision of venture capital in a dynamic agency model the value of the venture project is initially uncertain and more information arrives by developing the project the allocation of the funds and the learning process are subject to moral hazard the optimal contract is a time varying share contract which provides intertemporal risk sharing between venture capitalist and entrepreneur the share of the entrepreneur reflects the value of a real option the option itself is based on the control of the funds the dynamic agency costs may be high and lead to an inefficient early stopping of the project a positive liquidation value explains the adoption of strip financing or convertible securities finally relationship financing including monitoring and the occasional replacement of the management improves the efficiency of the financial contracting

option exercise games an application to the equilibrium investment strategies of firms under the standard real options approach to investment under uncertainty agents formulate optimal exercise strategies in isolation and ignore competitive interactions however in many real world asset markets exercise strategies cannot be determined separately but must be formed as part of a strategic equilibrium this article provides a tractable approach for deriving equilibrium investment strategies in a continuous time cournot nash framework the impact of competition on exercise strategies is dramatic for example while standard real options models emphasize that a valuable option to wait leads firms to invest only at large positive net present values the impact of competition drastically erodes the value of the option to wait and leads to investment at very near the zero net present value threshold copyright 2002 oxford university press

structural analysis of manufacturer pricing in the presence of a strategic retailer consumer goods manufacturers usually sell their brands to consumers through common independent retailers theoretical research on such channel structures has analyzed the optimal behavior of channel members under alternative assumptions of manufacturer retailer interaction vertical strategic interaction research in empirical industrial organization has focused on analyzing the competitive interactions between manufacturers horizontal strategic interaction decision support systems have made various assumptions about retailer pricing rules e g constant markup category profit maximization the appropriateness of such assumptions about strategic behavior for any specific market however is an empirical question this paper therefore empirically infers 1 the vertical strategic interaction vsi between manufacturers and retailer 2 the horizontal strategic interaction hsi between manufacturers simultaneously with the vsi and 3 the pricing rule used by a retailer the approach is particularly appealing because it can be used with widely available scanner data where there is no information on wholesale prices researchers usually have no access to wholesale prices even manufacturers who have access to their own wholesale prices usually have limited information on competitors wholesale prices in the absence of wholesale prices we derive formulae for wholesale prices using game theoretic solution techniques under the specific assumptions of vertical and horizontal strategic interaction and retailer pricing rules we then embed the formulae for wholesale prices into the estimation equations while our empirical illustration is using scanner data without wholesale prices the model itself can be applied when wholesale prices are available early research on the inference of hsi among manufacturers in setting wholesale prices using scanner data e g kadiyali et al 1996 1999 made the simplifying assumption that retailers charge a constant margin this assumption enabled them to infer wholesale prices and analyze competitive interactions between manufacturers in this paper we show that this model is econometrically identical to a model that measures retail price coordination across brands hence the inferred cooperation among manufacturers could be exaggerated by the coordinated pricing category management done by the retailer we find empirical support for this argument this highlights the need to properly model and infer vsi simultaneously to accurately estimate the hsi when using data at the retail level functional forms of demand have been evaluated in terms of the fit of the model to sales data but recent theoretical research on channels lee and staelin 1997 tyagi 1999 has shown that the functional form has serious implications for strategic behavior such as retail passthrough while the logit and linear model implies equilibrium passthrough of less than 100 lee and staelin call this vertical strategic substitute vss the multiplicative model implies optimal passthrough of greater than 100 vertical strategic complement vsc because passthrough rates on promotions have been found to be below or above 100 chevalier and curhan 1976 armstrong 1991 we empirically test the appropriateness of the logit vss and the multiplicative vsc functional form for the data we perform our analysis in the yogurt and peanut butter categories for the two biggest stores in a local market we found that the vss implications of the logit fit the data better than the multiplicative model we also find that for both categories the best fitting model is one in which 1 the retailer maximizes category profits 2 the vsi is manufacturer stackelberg and 3 manufacturer pricing hsi is tacitly collusive the fact that the retailer maximizes category profits is consistent with theoretical expectations the inference that the vsi is manufacturer stackelberg reflects the institutional reality of the timing of the game retailers set their retail prices after manufacturers set their wholesale prices note that in the stores and product categories that we analyze the two manufacturers own the dominant brands with combined market shares of about 82 in the yogurt market and 65 in the peanut butter market the result is also consistent with a balance of power argument in the literature the finding that manufacturer pricing is tacitly collusive is consistent with the argument that firms involved in long term competition in concentrated markets can achieve tacit collusion managers use decision support systems for promotion planning that routinely make assumptions about vsi hsi and the functional form the results from our analysis are of substantive import in judging the appropriateness of assumptions made in such decision support systems

is lumpy investment relevant for the business cycle the lumpiness of investment activity at the plant level is a well established fact previous research has suggested that such discrete and occasional adjustments have significant aggregate implications in particular it has been argued that changes in plants willingness to invest in response to aggregate shocks can at times generate large movements in total investment demand in this study i reassess these predictions in a general equilibrium environment specifically assuming nonconvex costs of capital adjustment i derive generalized s s adjustment rules yielding lumpy plant level investment within an otherwise standard equilibrium business cycle model in contrast to previous partial equilibrium analyses model results reveal that the aggregate effects of lumpy investment are negligible in general equilibrium households preference for relatively smooth consumption profiles offsets changes in aggregate investment demand implied by the introduction of lumpy plant level investment as a result

the economics of formal business networks abstract this paper analyzes the under researched issue of formal business networks comprising voluntary groupings of entrepreneurs who share knowledge and experiences between themselves economic analysis is used to show how formal business networks which enable entrepreneurs to share good and bad practice can improve efficiency and social welfare the paper also derives conditions for the existence and equilibrium size of formal business networks two principles of network design are proposed to promote their stability and to avoid their collapse

real options and preemption under incomplete information abstract this paper introduces incomplete information and preemption into an equilibrium model of firms facing real investment decisions the optimal investment strategy may lie anywhere between the zero npv trigger level and the optimal strategy of a monopolist depending on the distribution of competitors costs and the implied fear of preemption our model implies that the equity returns of firms which hold real options and are subject to preemption will contain jumps and positive skewness

optimal ordering and pricing policy for demand functions that are separable into price and inventory age abstract we formulate and analyze two models for determining the optimal pricing order quantity and replenishment period for items whose demand function is separable into components of price and inventory age the first model assumes a multiplicative demand function we provide conditions which are satisfied by most common price dependent demand functions to reduce the three variable profit maximization problem into a single variable problem which can be solved using an efficient line search method next we show that a genuine additive model cannot exist and instead suggest and analyze a pseudo additive model however this model is more limited than the multiplicative model in its ability to incorporate various combinations of price and inventory age effects and reduction of the maximization problem into a single variable problem is more complicated except in the case of a linear price effect which is further analyzed for both models we show that the optimal solution satisfies the first order condition for equilibrium under a monopoly with a modification that includes inventory holding costs we solve numerical examples to illustrate the solution procedures

carbon prices for the next hundred years this paper examines the socially optimal pricing of carbon emissions over time when climate change impacts are unknown potentially high consequence events the carbon price tends to increase with income but learning about impacts or their absence decouples the carbon price from income growth the price should grow faster than the economy if the past warming is not substantial enough for learning the true long run social cost it grows slower than the economy as soon as the warming generates information about events that could have arrived but have not done so a quantitative assessment shows that the price grows roughly at the rate of the economy for the next 100 years

keeping your options open in standard models of experimentation the costs of project development consist of i the direct cost of running trials as well as ii the implicit opportunity cost of leaving alternative projects idle another natural type of experimentation cost the cost of holding on to the option of developing a currently inactive project has not been studied in a multi armed bandit model of experimentation in which inactive projects have explicit maintenance costs and can be irreversibly discarded i fully characterise the optimal experimentation policy and show that the decision maker s incentive to actively manage its options has important implications for the order of project development in the model an experimenter searches for a success among a number of projects by choosing both those to develop now and those to maintain for potential future development in the absence of maintenance costs the optimal experimentation policy has a stay with the winner property the projects that are more likely to succeed are developed rst maintenance costs provide incentives to bring the option value of less promising projects forward and under the optimal experimentation policy projects that are less likely to succeed are sometimes developed

an elasticity approach to the newsvendor with price sensitive demand we introduce a measure of elasticity of stochastic demand called the elasticity of the lost sales rate which offers a unifying perspective on the well known newsvendor with pricing problem this new concept provides a framework to characterize structural results for coordinated and uncoordinated pricing and inventory strategies concavity and submodularity of the profit function as well as sensitivity properties of the optimal inventory and price policies are characterized by monotonicity conditions or bounds on the elasticity of the lost sales rate these elasticity conditions are satisfied by most relevant demand models in the marketing and operations literature our results unify and complement previous work on price setting newsvendor models and provide a new tool for researchers modeling stochastic price sensitive demand in other contexts

optimal experimentation in a changing environment this paper studies optimal experimentation by a monopolist who faces an unknown demand curve subject to random changes and who maximizes profits over an infinite horizon in continuous time we show that there are two qualitatively very different regimes determined by the discount rate and the intensities of demand curve switching and the dependence of the optimal policy on these parameters is discontinuous one regime is characterized by extreme experimentation and good tracking of the prevailing demand curve the other by moderate experimentation and poor tracking moreover in the latter regime the agent eventually becomes trapped into taking actions in a strict subset of the feasible set

product market competition and r d rivalry abstract this paper analyzes the impact of a future r d race on current firm behavior in the product market it is shown that in order to soften rivals in the future r d race firms behave less aggressively in the pre innovation product market than in the standard duopoly models as a result the r d rates are lower than what firms would choose if standard duopoly outcomes are assumed r d cooperation is shown to be capable of restoring the duopoly outcome

profit driven corporate social responsibility as a bayesian real option in green computing the idea that socially responsible investments can be viewed in terms of real options is relatively new we expand on this notion by demonstrating how real option theory within a bayesian decision making framework can be used by managers to help when making green technology investment decisions the bayesian decision framework provides a more flexible approach to investment decision making because it adjusts for new information responding to a call for multidisciplinary and multifaceted research in environmental sustainability this paper integrates ethics finance and information technology by viewing investments in environmentally friendly technology as a profit driven csr real option our model provides managers with the analytic tool needed to make the business case for csr initiatives providing an opportunity for firms to create economic social and ecological solutions that benefit all stakeholders the practical applicability of our model is demonstrated in an illustrative case scenario based on real data

understanding the relation between accruals and volatility a real options based investment approach abstract accruals are fundamental to financial reporting and are the underlying innovation of accounting despite this accounting research has provided little understanding of how economic forces affect a firm s level of accruals and limited guidance for forming expectations of accruals based on ex ante firm characteristics we consider accruals as a form of investment and examine whether theoretical predictions from a real options based investment framework provide insight into the relation between accruals and the ex ante expected volatility faced by the firm specifically the theory predicts that higher volatility dampens investment because firms prefer to wait and see instead of investing immediately consistent with this theory we document a robust negative relation between year ahead net working capital accruals and expected volatility we also predict and find that the negative association between year ahead net working capital accruals and expected volatility is less pronounced for distressed firms and more pronounced for firms with a longer operating cycle and that current asset accruals are more sensitive to volatility than current liability accruals finally we find that the residuals from an investment based expected accrual model outperform those from the widely used performance adjusted modified jones model in identifying companies that just meet or beat analysts earnings forecasts collectively our findings suggest that the investment perspective of accruals and in particular the real options based investment framework provide useful insights for forming expectations of accruals

production experiences and market structure in r d competition abstract in the rd and ii the likelihood of persistent leadership increases with the value of being the winner and the value of being a loser but decreases with expected waiting time of r d innovation and the flow of monopoly profits however destructive innovations may still occur even when production experiences are allowed to play an important role in the r d competition

optimal policy for an inventory system with backlogging and all units discounts application to the composite lot size model this paper examines an inventory model with full backlogging and all units quantity discounts the practical scenario of a salesperson offering compensation to a client so as not to lose the sale is considered the cost of a backorder thus includes both a fixed cost and a further cost which is proportional to the length of time the said backorder exists a first algorithm is developed to determine the optimal policy while some extensions to this algorithm are obtained that include additional conditions on the model in particular the well known composite lot size model developed by tersine is solved incorporating a new stockout cost and a new all units discount numerical examples are provided to illustrate the application of the algorithms

optimal replenishment policies for non instantaneous deteriorating items with price and stock sensitive demand under permissible delay in payment abstract this study is motivated by the paper of chang et al international journal of production economics 123 2010 62 68 we extend their inventory model from two aspects 1 the demand rate as multivariate function of price and level of inventory 2 delay in payment is permissible under these assumptions we first formulated a mathematical model and then some useful theoretical results have been derived to characterize the optimal solutions for non zero and zero ending inventory system numerical examples are presented to illustrate the theoretical results the sensitivity analysis of a suitable example is performed and some managerial insights are proposed our analysis revels that it is more beneficial to keep higher inventory level hoping to stimulate more demand even if it results in non zero ending inventory

corporate policies with permanent and transitory shocks we model the financing cash holdings and hedging policies of a firm facing financing frictions and subject to permanent and transitory cash flow shocks the permanent and transitory shocks generate distinct sometimes opposite effects on corporate policies we use the model to develop a rich set of empirical predictions in our model correlated permanent and transitory shocks imply less risk lower cash savings and a drop in the value of credit lines the composition of cash flow shocks affects the cash flow sensitivity of cash which can be positive or negative optimal hedging of permanent and transitory shocks may involve opposite positions

persistent and transitory shocks learning and investment dynamics this paper introduces a new approach to understanding investment the distinctive feature of our approach is that shocks to the economic fundamentals have both persistent and transitory components and that firms must disentangle the persistent from the transitory shocks the model generates interesting dynamics simulations of the model show that the response of investment to changes in the interest rate can vary widely over time that the current response of investment depends on the sequence of past shocks that investment will respond less when the firm is confident about its beliefs and more when a change in economic fundamentals challenges the firm s beliefs and that investment booms and crashes may occur without any change in the true state of the economy simulations of the model also show that it captures many stylized facts of investment dynamics documented in previous empirical studies

bank sovereign risk spillovers in the european debt crisis this paper investigates contagion between bank risk and sovereign risk in europe over the period 2006 2011 since this period covers various stages of the banking and sovereign crisis it oers a fertile ground to analyze bank sovereign risk spillovers we de ne contagion as excess correlation i e correlation between banks and sovereigns over and above what is explained by common factors using cds spreads at the bank and at the sovereign level moreover we investigate the determinants of contagion by analyzing bank speci c as well as country speci c variables and their interaction we provide empirical evidence that various contagion channels are at work including a strong home bias in bank bond portfolios using the eba s disclosure of sovereign exposures of banks we nd that banks with a weak capital and or funding position are particularly vulnerable to risk spillovers at the country level the debt ratio is the most important driver of contagion

dynamic r d competition the authors study a simple two stage stochastic patent race involving two firms they examine the behavior of the participants as they gain the lead or fall behind in the race the authors find that the leader engages in rd 2 a policy of issuing patents for intermediate research results and 3 the effects of research joint ventures whereby the firms coordinate their initial research efforts and share their results copyright 1987 by royal economic society

counterparty risk and the pricing of defaultable securities motivated by recent financial crises in east asia and the united states where the downfall of a small number of firms had an economy wide impact this paper generalizes existing reduced form models to include default intensities dependent on the default of a counterparty in this model firms have correlated defaults due not only to an exposure to common risk factors but also to firm specific risks that are termed counterparty risks numerical examples illustrate the effect of counterparty risk on the pricing of defaultable bonds and credit derivatives such as default swaps it has been well documented in moody s reports on historical default rates of corporate bond issuers that the number of defaults the number of credit rating downgrades and credit spreads are all strongly correlated with the business cycle this has motivated reduced form models such as duffie and singleton 1999 and lando 1994 1998 which assume that the intensity of default is a stochastic process that derives its randomness from a set of state variables such as the short term interest rate this approach has the convenient features that conditioning on the state variables defaults become independent events and default correlation arises due to the common inf luence of these state variables on the other hand a default intensity that depends linearly on a set of smoothly varying macroeconomic variables is unlikely to account for the clustering of defaults around an economic recession this is evident from a casual inspection of the exhibits in the latest moody s report see keenan 2000 within the usual affine framework one can model the state variables as jump diffusions see duffie pan and single

time to build option value and investment decisions abstract investment decisions and outlays are often made sequentially for example the rate at which construction proceeds is usually flexible and can be adjusted with the arrival of new information traditional discounted cash flow methods which treat the pattern of investment as fixed ignore this flexibility and understate the value of the project this paper uses contingent claims analysis to derive optimal decision rules and to value such investments we determine the effects of time to build opportunity cost and uncertainty on the investment decision for reasonable parameter values we show how a simple npv rule can lead to gross errors

value of disruption information in an eoq environment abstract we consider an infinite horizon continuous review inventory model with deterministic stationary demand where supply is subject to disruption the supply process alternates between two states randomly one in which it functions normally on period and one in which it is disrupted off period in this setting we seek the value of disruption information which enables the buyer to place disruption orders at the beginning of off periods utilizing renewal theory we derive the total expected cost and characterize the optimal regular order up to level together with the order up to level for disruption orders we also conduct an extensive numerical analysis and compare the results with the model with no opportunity of disruption orders we observe that if the shortage cost is relatively high and the disruption risk is significant in terms of duration and or frequency placing a disruption order reduces the expected total cost significantly

a dynamic game of r and d patent protection and competitive behavior a theory of dynamic optimal resource allocation to r and d in an n firm industry is developed using differential games this technique represents a synthesis of the analytic methods previously applied to the problem static game theory and optimal control the use of particular functional forms allows the computation and detailed discussion of the nash equilibrium in investment rules this paper addresses the problem of resource allocation to research and development among the important issues that a firm engaging in r and d must evaluate are uncertainty regarding the feasibility and profitability of a particular innovation the possibility of a protracted development period the possibility that a rival firm may innovate first capturing either a patent or a significant share of the new market the possibility that a rival firm may imitate the innovation and appropriate some of the profits in the new market in what follows we will develop a theory of optimal resource allocation to research and development which incorporates the aspects of r and d enumerated above we will use a dynamic game theoretic analysis determining the nash equilibrium strategies for n identical firms the availability of perfect patent protection is shown to accelerate development of the innovation and the effect of increasing rivalry is addressed the impact of increasing rivalry on nash equilibrium investment in r and d depends upon the degree of appropriability of rewards if patent protection is perfect then increasing the number of nash rivals results in increased r and d effort however when imitation is rewarded the opposite may be true finally some notions of competitive and perfectly competitive equilibrium are examined in the context of the model developed below

competitive experimentation with private information the survivor s curse we study a winner take all r d race between two firms that are privately informed about the arrival rate of an invention over time each firm only observes whether the opponent left the race or not the equilibrium displays a strong herding effect that we call a survivor s curse unlike in the case of symmetric information the two firms may quit the race nearly simultaneously even when their costs and benefits for research differ significantly

the dynamics of spillover effects during the european sovereign debt turmoil abstract in this paper we modify and extend the framework of diebold and yilmaz 2011 to quantify spillovers between sovereign credit markets and banks in the euro area spillovers are estimated recursively from a vector autoregressive model of daily changes in credit default swap cds spreads with exogenous common factors we account for interdependencies between sovereign and bank cds spreads and derive generalized impulse response functions specifically we assess the systemic effect of an unexpected shock to the creditworthiness of a sovereign or country specific bank index on other sovereigns and bank cdss between october 2009 and july 2012 channels of shock transmission from or to sovereigns and banks are summarized in a contagion index and its four components i among sovereigns ii among banks iii from sovereigns to banks and iv from banks to sovereigns we also highlight the impact of policy related events on the contagion index