asymmetric bidding in second price common value auctions abstract two comparative static characterizations for common value auctions under second price rules are extended to heterogeneous bidders the willingness to pay of the two highest bidders is enhanced on average by the release of public information and best responses are less aggressive when facing more rival bidders

volume liquidity and liquidity risk abstract many classes of microstructure models as well as intuition suggest that it should be easier to trade when markets are more active in the data however volume and liquidity seem unrelated over time this paper offers an explanation for this fact based on a simple frictionless model in which liquidity reflects the average risk bearing capacity of the economy and volume reflects the changing contribution of individuals to that average volume and liquidity are unrelated in the model but volume is positively related to the variance of liquidity or liquidity risk empirical evidence from the u s government bond and stock markets supports this new prediction

information competition and markets one of the dominant characteristics of modern capitalist economies is the important role played by competition not the peculiar static form of pure price competition embodied in the arrow debreu model but rather a dynamic competition more akin to the kind of competition represented by sports contests and other races including patent races in recent years there have been several attempts to explain why firms often base the pay of their workers and managers on relative performance see for example edward lazear and sherwin rosen 1981 such compensation schemes become desirable when three conditions are satisfied a the input effort of workers managers must not be directly observable at least without cost thus firms must either expend resources to monitor inputs or devise reward structures in which compensation is a function of variables such as output or profits which are themselves functions of inputs but are less costly to observe b the relationship between input and output must be stochastic so that by observing output one cannot perfectly infer what the input was c finally the stochastic disturbances which affect the relationship between input and output of different firms must be correlated by looking at the performance of one worker relative to that of others one can make better inferences about his effort than one can make without using this information not only can competition provide a basis of comparison which enables the design of reward structures that can simultaneously provide a high level of incentives with relatively low level risk but compensation schemes based on relative performance have the further advantage of automatically adjusting incentives to changes in the economic environment we refer to this as built in flexibility in a first best world with perfect information concerning the nature of the technology but where it is still costly to monitor individuals activities the compensation scheme would vary from time to time as the environment changed such changes in the compensation scheme are costly to implement and the information required to do so is seldom available when a task is easier the individual s rewards for performing the task should be reduced if pay is based on relative performance although all individuals perform better when they exert the same level of effort their compensation is automatically adjusted thus teachers frequently grade on the curve and a significant fraction of the pay of successful salesmen often consists of bonuses based on relative performance

minimum price variations discrete bid ask spreads and quotation sizes exchange minimum price variation regulations create discrete bid ask spreads if the minimum quotable spread exceeds the spread that otherwise would be quoted spreads will be wide and the number of shares offered at the bid and ask may be large a cross sectional discrete spread model is estimated by using intraday stock quotation spread frequencies the results are used to project 1 16 spread usage frequencies given a 1 16 tick projected changes in quotation sizes and in trade volumes are obtained from regression models for stocks priced under 10 the models predict spreads would decrease 38 percent quotation sizes would decrease 16 percent and daily volume would increase 34 percent article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

buy in through goldplating the effect of defense profit policy on quality determination abstract bower and osband rand journal of economics 1991 22 107 119 recognized the role of the defense profit policy as a handicapping device that induces low cost firms to aggressively buy in for future profits when designs are variable and actively competed in the bidding stage this paper finds that this handicapping role of the profit policy is weakened by the fact that firms can dilute bidding competition by inflating quality

second sourcing and the experience curve price competition in defense procurement we examine a dynamic model ofprice competition in defense procurement that incorporates the experience curve asymmetric cost information and the availability of a higher cost alternative system we model acquisition as a two stage process in which initial production is governed by a contract between the government and the developer competition is then introduced by an auction in which a second source bids against the developer for remaining production we characterize the class of production contracts that are cost minimizing for the government and that induce the developer to reveal private cost information when high costs are revealed these contracts result in a credible cutoff of new system production in favor of the still higher cost alternative system

creative destruction and firm specific performance heterogeneity traditional u s industries with higher firm specific stock return and fundamentals performance heterogeneity use information technology it more intensively and post faster productivity growth in the late 20 th century we argue that this mechanically reflects a wave of schumpeter s 1912 creative destruction disrupting a wide swath of industries with successful it adopters unpredictably undermining established firms this validates endogenous growth theory models of creative destruction e g aghion and howitt 1992 and suggests intensified creative destruction as explaining findings associating greater firm specific performance variation with higher per capita gdps economy growth rates accounting standards financial system development and property right protection

target zones and exchange rate dynamics this paper develops a simple model of exchange rate behavior under a target zone regime it shows that the expectation that monetary policy will be adjusted to limit exchange rate variation affects exchange rate behavior even when the exchange rate lies inside the zone and is thus not being defended actively somewhat surprisingly the analysis of target zones turns out to have a strong formal similarity to problems in option pricing and investment under uncertainty

common persistence in conditional variances since the introduction of the autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic arch model in engle 1982 numerous applications of this modeling strategy have already appeared a common finding in many of these studies with high frequency financial or monetary data concerns the presence of an approximate unit root in the autoregressive polynomial in the univariate time series representation for the conditional second order moments of the process as in the so called integrated generalized arch igarch class of models proposed in engle and bollerslev 1986 in the igarch models shocks to the conditional variance are persistent in the sense that they remain important for forecasts of all horizons this idea is readily extended to a multivariate framework even though many time series may exhibit persistence in variance it is likely that several different variables share the same common long run component in that situation the variables are naturally defined to be co persistent in variance and the co persistent linear combination is interpretable as a long run relationship conditions for co persistence to occur in the multivariate linear garch model are presented these conditions parallel the conditions for linear co integration in the mean as developed by engle and granger 1987 the presence of co persistence has important implications for asset pricing relationships and in optimal portfolio allocation decisions an empirical example relating to the time series properties of nominal u s dollar exchange rates for the deutschemark and the british pound provides a simple illustration of the ideas

auctioning incentive contracts this paper draws a remarkably simple bridge between auction theory and incentive theory it considers the auctioning of an indivisible project among several fi rms the firms have private information about their future cost at th e bidding stage and the selected firm ex post invests in cost reduct ion the authors show that 1 the optimal auction can be implemented by a dominant strategy auction that uses information about both the first bid and the second bid 2 the winner faces a linear incenti ve contract 3 the fixed transfer to the winner decreases with his announced expected cost and increases with the second lowest announce d expected cost and 4 the share of cost overruns borne by the winn er decreases with the winner s announced expected cost copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

empirical of the taiwan stock index option price forecasting model applied artificial neural network this work presents a novel neural network model for forecasting option prices using past volatilities and other options market factors out of different approaches to estimating volatility in the option pricing model this study uses backpropagation neural network to forecast prices for taiwanese stock index options the ability to develop accurate forecasts of grey prediction volatility enables practitioners to establish an appropriate hedging strategy at in the money option

bargaining and regulation with asymmetric information about demand and supply abstract rate regulation is studied as a bargaining process in which consumers and the firm negotiate output and payments under asymmetric information the feasible set of transactions given incentive compatibility and individual rationality constraints is characterized the set of interim incentive efficient mechanisms for the direct revelation game is also characterized sufficient conditions are given for efficient mechanisms to be full information efficient efficient mechanisms are identified which correspond to nonlinear monopoly pricing monosony compensation schedules and the baron myerson regulation model

awarding monopoly franchises the authors analyze how to award a monopoly franchise when the objective is to maximize expected consumers surplus net of transfer payments to the producer potential producers initially possess independent private information about uncertain production costs only the chosen producer subsequently observes realized production costs after awarding the franchise to the producer with the lowest expected costs prices are optimally set above realized marginal cost these ex post distortions foster more competitive bidding ex ante the distortions for any bid cost pair are invariant to the number of bidders n though expected distortions and profits decline with n copyright 1987 by american economic association

design competition through multidimensional auctions this article studies design competition in government procurement by developing a model of two dimensional auctions wherefirms bid on both price and quality and bids are evaluated by a scoring rule designed by a buyer three auction schemes first score second score and second preferred offer are introduced and related to actual practices if the buyer can commit to a scoring rule in his best interest the resulting optimal scoring rule underrewards quality relative to the buyer s utility function and implements the optimal outcome for the buyer underfirst and second score auctions absent the commitment power the onlyfeasible scoring rule is the buyer s utility function under which 1 all three schemes yield the same expected utility to the buyer and 2 first and second score auctions induce the first best level of quality which turns out to be excessive from the buyer s point of view

using daily range data to calibrate volatility diffusions and extract the forward integrated variance a common model for security price dynamics is the continuous time stochastic volatility model for this model hull and white 1987 show that the price of a derivative claim is the conditional expectation of the black scholes price with the forward integrated variance replacing the black scholes variance implementing the hull and white characteriza tion requires both estimates of the price dynamics and the conditional distribution of the forward integrated variance given observed variables using daily data on close to close price movement and the daily range we find that standard models do not fit the data very well and that a more general three factor model does better as it mimics the long memory feature of financial volatility we develop techniques for estimating the conditional distribution of the forward integrated variance given observed variables i introduction

are exchange rates determined by macroeconomic factors in this study we consider 15 countries and examine the relationship between exchange rate volatility and macroeconomic volatility we show that in general empirical support for the existence of a link between exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals is very weak and that other factors are more important in casting light on the behaviour of exchange rates in particular we investigate the links between risk premia and exchange rates across our sample of countries using arch and garch techniques we illustrate that despite the targeting policies of the erm risk premia are evident for the majority of countries in our sample

behavior of the firm under regulatory constraint a recent article by akira takayama discusses an earlier paper by harvey averch and leland l johnson on fair rate of return regulation of public utilities although takayama p 255 agrees with averch and johnson s general conclusions that a firm will tend to increase its investment with the introduction of an active constraint on its rate of return he criticizes the a j argument as being confusing ambiguous and in error takayama then attempts a clarification and presents a new formulation which leads to the a j result quoted above this comment will discuss several of takayama s criticisms in addition to showing that the so called a j effect cannot be derived from the basic assumptions made by both averch and johnson and takayama 1 we will show that the very assumptions used to prove the a j effect by defining the region of x require an assumption that the a j effect exists in the first place

equilibria in open common value auctions abstract a sufficient condition for uniqueness of nash equilibrium in second price common value auctions is identified we establish that there exists a continuum of equilibria in irrevocable exit common value auctions for the case of two bidders we provide plausible sufficient conditions under which the expected seller revenue is maximized at the symmetric equilibrium an example in which the auctioneer s revenue at the symmetric equilibrium in a second price auction is strictly greater than the revenue at many asymmetric equilibria in the corresponding irrevocable exit auction is provided

new empirical evidence on the bid ask spread in this article we model the determinants of spread for 734 firms listed on the nyse over the period 1 january 1998 to 31 december 2008 we propose a panel data model of the determinants of spread there are four main messages emerging from our work we find a statistically significant effect of volume on spread inconsistent with the work of johnson 2008 on price we find mixed results consistent with the literature on the effect of price volatility on spread our results are completely the opposite of the cross sectional literature but sides with the relatively recent work of chordia et al 2001 we allow for persistence of spread as a determinant of spread and find significant evidence of spread persistence across all 16 sectors finally we examine size effects and find statistically strong evidence of size effects based on the relationship between price and spread persistence and spread and volatility and spread

optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents abstract a setting in which a single principal contracts with two agents who possess perfect private information about their own productivity is considered with correlated productivities each agent s private information also provides a signal about the other agent s productivity in contrast to the setting in which there is only one agent it is shown that such private information may be of no value to the agents it is only if the agents are risk averse that their private information may allow them to command rents moreover when the agents are constrained only to reveal their private information truthfully as a nash equilibrium the pareto optimal incentive scheme may induce the agents to adopt strategies other than truth telling this leads to the consideration of truth telling equilibria that are not pareto dominated in the subgame played by the agents among all such equilibria the one preferred by the principal restricts one agent to tell the truth as a dominant strategy and the other as a nash response to truth

do market capitalization and stocks traded converge new global evidence abstract in this paper we examine convergence of stock markets our empirical exercise is based on 11 different panels which together consist of 120 countries the richness of the dataset allows us to disaggregate countries into panels such as high income middle income low income oecd csi and developing country panels in addition we construct regional panels such as those representing the arab states east asia and the pacific south asia latin america and the caribbean and sub saharan africa our main finding is that based on the conditional convergence model convergence of stock market capitalization and stocks traded is found for four panels namely the high and low income panels the oecd panel and the sub saharan african panel the speed of convergence is high in most cases between 20 and 30

repeated auctions of incentive contracts investment and bidding parity with an application to takeovers this article considers a two period model of natural monopoly and second sourcing the incumbent supplier invests in the first period after observing the incumbent s first period performance the buyer may break out in the second period the investment may or may not be transferable to the second source and it may be monetary or take the form of human capital we determine whether the incumbent should be favored at the reprocurement stage and how the slope of his incentive scheme should evolve over time we find that the gains from second sourcing are not so large as one might hope finally we reinterpret the second source as a raider and the breakout as a takeover we discuss the desirability of defensive tactics and obtain a rich set of testable implications concerning the size of managerial stock options the extent of defensive tactics the firm s performance and the probability of a takeover

on delegating price authority to a regulated firm this article models a regulatory environment in which the regulated firm possesses better information about demand conditions than does the regulator the regulator would like to tie prices to the firm s private information in a socially optimal way to do so the regulator must induce the firm either truthfully to reveal private information or equivalently unilaterally to set socially optimal prices this is accomplished by assessing lump sum subsidies or taxes that depend in an appropriate way on the prices announced by the firm this mechanism can be reinterpreted as a two part tariff scheme whereby both the service fee and price per unit respond to shifting demand conditions

when more is less defense profit policy in a competitive environment prices on some department of defense dod procurement contracts are determined by competitive bids while on others prices are negotiated on the basis of so called dod profit policy whereby price is equated to expected cost plus a percentage markup this article focuses on the interaction between these two contractual arrangements specifically it is assumed that an initial contract is let competitively with common knowledge that the winner will later become a monopolist regulated according to profit policy under these conditions it is shown that expected contractor profit and government expenditure can often be reduced by raising the profit policy markup the intuition is not only that firms buy in to the initial contracts but also that the differential subsidization induced by profit policy higher cost producers receive larger absolute markups encourages more aggressive competition mathematically this seemingly restrictive regulatory setup is shown to generalize the mcafee and mcmillan 1986 procurement bidding model

macroeconomic determinants of exchange rates a frequency specific analysis this paper applies a new methodology rolling spectral regression to investigate currency movements at various frequencies this technique generates efficient and frequency band estimates of the regression coefficients between three major exchange rates and their determinants from a generic monetary model empirical results reported in this study suggest that the variations of the yen dollar and pound dollar exchange rates can be explained by changes in monetary policy in the long run and fluctuations in economic growth and long term interest rates in the medium run

full extraction of the surplus in bayesian and dominant strategy auctions we consider auctions for a single indivisible object in the case where the bidders have information about each other which is not available to the seller we show that the seller can use this information to his own benefit and we completely characterize the environ ments in which a well chosen auction gives him the same expected payoff as that obtainable were he able to sell the object with full information about each bidder s willingness to pay we provide this characterization for auctions in which the bidders have dominant strate gies and for those where the relevant equilibrium concept is bayesian nash in both set ups the existence of these auctions hinges on the possibility of constructing lotteries with the correct properties we consider the situation in which an agent the seller possesses one indivisible unit of a good to which he attaches no value but the good has value to a number of potential buyers and its transfer to one of them would increase social welfare in particular the transfer to the buyer with the highest valuation maximizes social welfare in this paper we completely characterize environments in which the seller can design an auction that will enable him to capture for himself the full increase in social welfare induced by the transfer of the good to the bidder with the highest willingness to pay if the seller had full information about the reservation prices of potential buyers his optimal selling strategy would be very simple he would announce a price equal or very close to the highest reservation value the optimal strategy for the bidder with the highest evaluation would be to accept the offer note that we are treating a situation in which the seller can commit himself to a price as a result of the exchange the utility of the seller increases by the full amount of the increase in social welfare and he has been able to fully extract the surplus in many circumstances however a seller has only imperfect knowledge of the buyers willingnesses to pay in this case he must find some mechanism or auction which will enable him to maximize his benefit from the sale of the object the auction literature starts with this observation and shows how the seller can by an astute choice of auction extract the largest possible fraction of the surplus in general the literature has shown that this proportion is strictly less than one in some circumstances the bidders will have information about each other which is not available to the seller for instance in auctions for petroleum drilling rights bidders know the results of geological tests which they have

portfolio selection and skewness evidence from international stock markets abstract this paper finds that the returns of the world s 14 major stock markets are not normally distributed and that the correlation matrix of these stock markets was stable during the january 1988 december 1993 time period polynomial goal programming in which investor preferences for skewness can be incorporated is utilized to determine the optimal portfolio consisting of the choices of 14 international stock indexes the empirical findings suggest that the incorporation of skewness into an investor s portfolio decision causes a major change in the construction of the optimal portfolio the evidence also indicate that investors trade expected return of the portfolio for skewness

intra day and inter market volatility in foreign exchange rates four foreign exchange spot rate series recorded on an hourly basis for a six month period in 1986 are examined a seasonal garch model is developed to describe the time dependent volatility apparent in the percentage nominal return of each currency hourly patterns in volatility are found to be remarkably similar across currencies and appear to be related to the opening and closing of the worlds major markets robust lm tests designed to deal with the extreme leptokurtosis in the data fails to uncover any evidence of misspecification or the presence of volatility spillover effects between the currencies or across markets

optimal departures from marginal cost pricing focuses on departures from marginal cost pricing optimal allocation or resources level of tax revenue that will be collected by the government theorems developed for resource allocation ebsco

the foreign exchange risk premium in a target zone with devaluation risk abstract the foreign exchange risk premium in an exchange rate target zone is derived when the exchange rate is heteroskedastic within the band and there is a separate devaluation risk the risk premium is then the sum of two separate risk premia arising from uncertainty about exchange rate movements within the band and from uncertainty about devaluations both real and nominal risk premia are considered real and nominal risk premia from movements within the band are very small real and nominal risk premia from devaluations are larger but still relatively small proportions of the interest rate differential