Strategy

This paper examines inventory management from an incentive perspective. We show that when a manager has private information about future attainable revenues, the residual income performance measure based on historical cost can achieve optimal (second-best) incentives with regard to managerial effort as well as production and sales decisions. The LIFO (last-in—first-out) inventory flow rule is shown to be preferable to the FIFO (first-in—first-out) rule for the purpose of aligning incentives.

We present an equilibrium production economy in which default occurs in equilibrium. The borrower chooses optimal default and consumption policies, taking into account that default is costly and the lender gains access to the technology upon default. We derive asset prices and default premia in this economy. The borrower's relative risk aversion in wealth increases with decreases in wealth due to the increased possibility of default at low wealth levels. This produces a time-varying pricing kernel and a countercyclical equity premium.

We develop a general equilibrium model of a production economy which has a risky production technology as well as a growth option to expand the scale of the productive sector of the economy. We show that when confronted with growth options, the representative consumer may sharply alter consumption rates to improve the likelihood of investment. This reduction in consumption is accompanied by an erosion of the option value of waiting to invest, leading to investment near the zero NPV threshold.

In a year without vaccine shortages, no fewer than 36,000 deaths - twelve times the number of September 11 victims - and 200,000 hospitalizations are attributed to influenza and its complications. In terms of productivity, between $11 and $20 billion is lost. The sudden elimination of one of only two manufacturers and half the national supply was hardly an unforeseeable or rare event, as numerous Senate testimonies and General Accounting Office reports have documented recurring supply problems with this and other critical vaccines.

The author discusses his work with the Conference Board's Council on Corporate Brand Management to develop a brand scorecard for monitoring the health of a brand.

Bayesian learning implies decreasing weights on prior beliefs and increasing weights on the accuracy of the analyst?s past forecast record, as the number of forecast errors comprising her forecast record (its length) increases. Consistent with this model of investor learning, empirical tests show that investors? reactions to forecast news are increasing in the product of the accuracy and length of analysts? forecast records. Moreover, the Bayesian learning predicted by our model is more descriptive of investor reactions than is a static model which predicts that investors?

Combining survey responses and trading records of clients of a German retail broker, this paper examines some of the causes for the apparent failure to buy and hold a well-diversified portfolio. The subjective investor attributes gleaned from the survey help explain the variation in actual portfolio and trading choices. Self-reported risk aversion is the single most important determinant of both portfolio diversification and turnover; other things equal, investors who report being more risk tolerant hold less diversified portfolios and trade more aggressively.