consideration review of research and prospects for future insights the authors review the behavioral underpinnings of consideration set formation and revisit the theoretical and empirical evidence that led them to develop an individual level model of consideration

the returns and forecasting ability of large traders in the frozen pork bellies futures market using settlement prices and nine years of daily commitments for large reporting traders in the frozen pork bellies futures market the authors find that these traders generate significant profits and the distribution of trader returns over time is not random further analysis finds that a subset of large elite traders possesses significant forecasting ability indicating that they not only are able to consistently anticipate the direction of price changes but are also on the right side of the market when large price changes occur hence certain futures market traders accumulate trading experience and knowledge permitting them to accrue considerable wealth copyright 1994 by university of chicago press

commodity price forecasting with large scale econometric models and the futures market this paper compares the accuracy of major commercial price forecasts for corn wheat soybeans soybean oil soybean meal cotton live cattle and hogs the price forecasting information in futures prices is evaluated by comparison the results among commercial forecasters are mixed but futures prices perform relatively better on average although not universally so these results have important implications for operational risk management

discussing the role of fiscal policy in a demand led agent based growth model abstract the global financial crisis led to a crisis in mainstream macroeconomic theory and to questioning the economic policies implemented before and after the crisis one of the most relevant controversy concerns the role of fiscal policy in order to present a different theoretical approach and discuss the role of fiscal policy in this paper we present an agent based micro macro multisectoral model to analyze the fiscal policy in a complex evolutionary economy we evaluate the impact of a set of different fiscal rules in terms of short run fluctuations and long term growth the main motivations are both to influence the public debate and to present an important theoretical tool in terms of economic policy debate in particular we analyze the impact of the approval of a new fiscal rule that prevents any real growth of federal public expenditures for at least ten years in brazil based on the simulation model we compare 5 different combinations of fiscal policy on how they affect macro variables such as gdp growth rate gdp volatility and likelihood of crisis we also test how each fiscal policy combination reacts to an external crisis results show that all scenarios that impose a tighter constraint to government spending present signs of self defeating fiscal consolidation including effect on firms indebtedness on the other hand unconstrained countercyclical policy prevents contagious effect of external crisis leading to a better economic performance and reducing the likelihood of crisis

modeling the co evolution of national industries and institutions important contributions within the realms of industrial dynamics and evolutionary economic theory have shown the need to explore the sources of industrial leadership in high tech industries several of these studies suggest that the co evolution between national industries and certain supporting institutions could play a fundamental role as a source of competitive advantage although an analysis of these processes still poses significant formal and theoretical challenges in this article we draw on previous contributions to formal evolutionary theorizing in order to build up a co evolution model suitable for the dynamic analysis of industrial leadership this model involves national firms competing on a worldwide level in a science based industry and co evolving with their respective national university systems certain national firms may influence university funding by institutional shaping while national university systems crucially affect the competitive advantage of said firms in the global market the model highlights important mechanisms through which institutional technological and market interrelated factors determine the dynamics of industrial leadership and eventually the emergence of industrial leadership shifts some of the implications regarding policy and future research on economic development follow

a status based model of market competition this article explores the significance of status processes for generating and reproducing hierarchy among producers in a market it develops a conception of a market as a status order in which each

market watch information and availability cascades among the media and investors in the u s ipo market in this study we advance current research on social influence in markets by examining how the recency and availability of information about others actions within and between different communities influence their allocation of attention and their evaluations specifically we examine how the media and investors allocate attention to and evaluate newly public firms in the days following their initial public offerings ipos our findings have implications for understanding the fieldwide processes through which the value of new firms is established in markets

opportunities incentives and the collective patterns of technological change in a few pages in the introductory article for this debate vernon ruttan succeeds in the unlikely task of flagging many issues at the core of the economic interpretation of technological change and by doing so he implicitly addresses also a few sensitive spots for the economic discipline at large here i will not attempt to provide any thorough view of what i consider the achievements and limitations of the current state of the art see however freeman i 994 for a critical survey which i largely share rather i shall put forward a series of remarks which hopefully could be seen as part of a much wider and still largely unexplored research programme as a premise just note that some form of attention to technology related phenomena has spread over the last 20 30 years from small enclaves of heterodox economists and economic historians to become an important concern even for quite mainstream theories of e g the firm industrial organisation macroeconomics trade growth etc from patent races all the way to new trade and new growth theories and even real business cycle macro models technical change has drawn a consideration which is less by default than it was say in robert solow s original growth models orjoe bain s barriers to entry views on industrial structures and in parallel empirical studies at the levels of specific technologies firms sectors and countries have boomed for overviews cf dosi i988 nelson i993 freeman i982 i 994 cohen i 995 and granstrand i 994 among others so at least in this sense those decreasing returns to the economics of technical change suggested by ruttan do not seem to have set in however ruttan s paper raises also substantive questions about the relative success of three interpretative perspectives which he calls induced evolutionary and path dependent in the following i shall argue that an evolutionary perspective broadly defined can easily accommodate both inducement effects and path dependent patterns of technical change let me start from what i consider the major building blocks of an

media legitimation effects in the market for initial public offerings in this study we argue that media provided information affects investors impressions of newly public firms in 225 initial public offerings ipos the volume of mediaprovided information had a negative diminishing relationship with underpricing and a positive diminishing relationship with stock turnover on the first day of trading the relationship between the tenor of media provided information and underpricing increases at a nonlinear rate and decreases similarly for turnover findings provide important evidence that publicly available information not only reflects ipos legitimacy but also adds to their legitimacy and influences investor behavior in the last 20 years an increasing amount of research on markets has been conducted from a social constructionist perspective emphasizing how social structures enhance the flow of useful and credible information that market participants use to reduce the uncertainty of market exchanges e g aldrich fiol 1994 zuckerman 1999 further recent organizational research has begun to stress the influence of information intermediaries such as financial analysts and the media on mar

information diversity and market behavior the paper addresses two major issues raised by information diversity in a speculative market first we analyze what property of an investor s information leads to an expected speculative profit and show that independence is more important than accuracy second we consider whether the market price must become fully efficient in the sense that every investor s information is accurately discounted when traders use it rationally as an information source we prove that for any information structure there is a unique equilibrium weighting of investor beliefs at which the price is fully efficient and also every trader s expected profit is zero except for special structures however this equilibrium need not be attained in finite time much of modern capital market theory depends heavily on the assumption that investors know the expected values variances and covariances of asset returns although the assumption of homogeneous expectations is a conventional one and necessary for many theoretical results it is not one which can be offered with much confidence real world investors have access to differing information and may also disagree on the correct interpretation of widely held information when asset returns are assumed to be governed by a known probability distribution many features of trading in real world markets are eliminated from consideration there is no role for information gathering and no way for an investor to profit from having superior information indeed this term has no real meaning since all relevant information is contained in the known returns distribution speculative trading is also hard to explain without divergence of opinion a speculator who thought the market price impounded all available information would never trade against it with heterogeneous information we lose some of the neat results of standard capital market theory but new questions can be addressed about how information diversity among investors affects the markets in which they participate one issue concerns the impact of informational differences on investor profits investors who are better informed than others or are better able to evaluate widely held information should be able to earn higher returns all effort devoted to security analysis and market research depends on the belief that this is so but what makes one investor s information superior to another s beyond the circular observation that those investors with consistent profits must be better informed than those with losses do investors with inferior information however measured continually lose money until they are squeezed out of the market or can an

on the nature of technologies knowledge procedures artifacts and production inputs in the most general terms a technology can be seen as a human constructed means for achieving a particular end such as the movement of goods and people the transmission of information or the cure of a disease these means most often entail procedures regarding how to achieve the ends concerned particular bits of knowledge artifacts and of course specific physical inputs necessary to yield the desired outcomes in fact the procedures and the underlying knowledge they draw upon the physical and intangible inputs implicated and the performance characteristics of outputs are different but complementary aspects of what technology is these things are the object of this short essay copyright the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

futures market efficiency in the soybean complex 13 1 rev division of agricultural sciences university of ifornla working paper no 139 r i j futures market efficiency in the soybean complex gordon c rausser and colin carter giannini foundation of agricultural economics l ibraili v im california agric u l tural elqieriment station giannini foundation of agricultural economics march 1982

pricing efficiency in the live cattle futures market further interpretation and measurement the pricing efficiency of the live cattle futures market is evaluated using out of sample forecasts from an econometric model an arima model and composite forecasting procedures in terms of the mean squared error criterion a necessary condition for market efficiency at least one of the models and frequently more forecasted more accurately than did the futures market however market simulation results based on the most accurate forecasts generated large risk return ratios these results do not show strong evidence of inefficiency and call into question the use of only mean squared errors to examine a market s pricing efficiency

outlook vs futures three decades of evidence in hog and cattle markets the accuracy of hog and cattle price forecasts from four outlook programs is compared with forecasts derived from futures markets most of the series begin in the mid to late 1970s and end in 2007 root mean squared error rmse comparisons indicate the difference between outlook and futures rmse is relatively small in most cases in directional terms outlook forecasts beat futures prices only 2 out of 11 times in hogs and 1 out of 7 times in cattle however the null hypothesis that futures encompasses outlook is rejected in 5 of 11 cases for hogs and 4 of 7 cases for cattle

speculative price economic welfare and the idiot of chance p aul cootner stimulated significant research on the subject of speculative markets in both commodities and equities his papers 1960 1964 1967 were original and provocative one paper began with the statement the subject matter of this paper is bound to be considered heresy i can say that without equivocation because whatever views anyone expresses on this subject are sure to conflict with someone else s deeply held beliefs 1964 p 231 most of the papers concerned with the operation of futures markets in commodities test the efficiency of the market by examining the stochastic nature of futures prices which samuelson refers to as the idiot of chance in particular it is asked whether the price of a futures contract is a martingale cootner s contention which runs counter to the tide of academic writings is that speculative prices are not random walks but are constrained by economically determined barriers 1964 ch 11 the present paper is in the spirit of cootner s thinking about the economic and welfare implications of speculative markets my main conclusions are as follows 1 the optimality of resource allocation defined as the sum of consumer and producer surplus depends upon the accuracy of the forward price at the time production decisions are made as a forecast of the subsequent spot price when consumption occurs the existence or nonexistence of the martingale property of futures prices between these two dates is irrelevant for welfare purposes 2 social loss is a multiple of the square of the forecast error between the forward price and the subsequent spot price expected social loss is irreducible when the forward price is equal to the mathematical expectation of the subsequent spot price 3 the longer the period between the production decisions and the subsequent consumption decisions the greater the bias between the forward price and subsequent spot price 4 it has been claimed that in an efficient market the spot price at time t should just depend upon the price at t 1 and not upon earlier prices it is proved that this situation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for rational expectations 5 therefore there is a tenuous connection between the stochastic nature of speculative price and measures of economic welfare but there is a direct connection between the forecast errors and economic welfare

evolutionary modelling of the macro economic impacts of catastrophic flood events this paper examines the possible contribution of evolutionary economics to macro economic modelling of flood impacts to provide guidance for future economic risk modelling most macro economic models start from a neoclassical economic perspective and focus on equilibrium outcomes either in a static or dynamic way and describe economic processes at a high level of aggregation as a consequence they typically fail to account for the complexity of social interactions and other behavioural responses of consumers and producers to disasters which may affect the macroeconomic impacts of floods employing evolutionary principles and methods such as agent based modelling may help to address some of the shortcomings of current macro economic models we explore and discuss the implications of applying consumer and producer heterogeneity bounded rationality network effects social and technological learning co evolution and adaptive policy making concepts into existing economic frameworks for the assessment of macro economic impacts of floods authors abstract

what drives markups evolutionary pricing in an agent based stock flow consistent macroeconomic model this paper studies coordination between firms in a multi sectoral macroeconomic model with endogenous business cycles firms are both in competition and interdependent and set their prices with a markup over unit costs markups are heterogeneous and evolve under market pressure we observe a systematic coordination within firms in each sector and between each sector the resulting pattern of relative prices are consistent with the labor theory of value those emerging features are robust to technology shocks

forecast performance of wasde price projections for u s corn we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the season average price projections for u s corn as published by the u s department of agriculture s world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde an important issue given reduced resources and increased program scrutiny within the federal government this study is the first in the literature to evaluate the wasde corn projections relative to futures adjusted forecasts throughout the forecasting cycle using a lengthy evaluation period 1980 81 2012 13 we find that wasde projections provide lower rmses relative to futures adjusted forecasts for 9 of the 16 forecast periods 4 of which are statistically different encompassing tests show that wasde projections often provide incremental information not present in the futures adjusted forecasts composite forecasts based on futures adjusted forecasts and wasde projections reduced the rmses over all forecast periods by an average 12 16 favorable average trading profits may be generated for some forecast months using wasde projections overall our results suggest that wasde projections of the u s corn season average price provide useful information to the market and could enhance the efficiency of the agricultural sector

which ties matter when the contingent effects of interorganizational partnerships on ipo success this paper investigates the contingent value of interorganizational relationships at the time of a young firm s initial public offering ipo we compare the signaling value to young firms of having ties with two types of interorganizational partnerships endorsement relationships such as those with venture capital firms and investment banks and strategic alliance partnerships we propose that under different equity market conditions potential investors in an issuing firm attend to different types of uncertainty attention to these different types of uncertainty affects investors perceptions of the relative value of a young firm s different kinds of endorsements and partnerships and hence ipo success results from a sample of young biotechnology firms show that ties to prominent venture capital firms are particularly beneficial to ipo success during cold markets while ties to prominent investment banks are particularly beneficial to ipo success during hot markets a firm s strategic alliances with major pharmaceutical health care firms did not have such contingent effects implications for understanding the contingent value of interorganizational ties are discussed copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

the impact of price risk on sow farrowings 1967 78 several studies have attempted with varying degrees of success to quantify price risk variables for crops at various levels of aggregation just behrman traill and lin price risk in particular market situations is an empirical issue and difficult to predict ex ante several factors suggest the potential for a risk response in sow farrowings the limited ability of hog futures market prices to forecast subsequent cash prices leuthold and hartman martin and garcia indicates that the level of uncertainty about future price is high this coupled with livestock producers reticence to use the futures market as a hedging mechanism leuthold suggests that producers exposure to existing price risk may be prevalent this analysis quantitatively examines the importance of input and output price risk on aggregate sow farrowings first the price risk model is reviewed briefly then a conventional adaptive expectations model is used to develop price and risk variables alternative definitions of risk are assessed finally futures prices are used to generate expected price and risk variables

forecast encompassing as the necessary condition to reject futures market efficiency fluid milk futures the traditional necessary condition for futures market inefficiency is the existence of alternative forecasting methods that produce mean squared forecast errors smaller than the futures market here a more exacting requirement for futures market efficiency is proposed forecast encompassing using the procedure of harvey and newbold multiple forecast encompassing is tested using chicago mercantile exchange fluid milk futures time series models and usda experts provide competing forecasts results suggest milk futures do not encompass the information contained in the usda forecasts at a two quarter horizon while the competing forecasts generate positive revenues it is unlikely that returns exceed transaction costs in this relatively new market

the red queen effect competitive actions and firm performance we investigate the red queen effect as a contest of competitive moves or actions among rivalrous firms the results from a multi industry study of over 4 700 actions confirms the existence of red q

time varying risk premium further evidence in agricultural futures markets research has provided mixed results regarding the presence of a time varying risk premium in agricultural futures markets in this article we test for the presence of a time varying risk premium focusing on the properties of the underlying data our results show that accounting for the structural break in the 1970s plays a key role in the findings in contrast to recent research we find only limited evidence of time varying risk premium for a two month horizon the corn soybean meal and hog markets show no signs of a risk premium while very weak support for a time varying premium emerges in live cattle for the four month horizon no evidence of a time varying risk premium appears for any of the markets