Strategy

Demandable-debt finance by banks warrants explanation because it entails costs of bank suspension, liquidation, and idle reserve holdings. An explanation is developed in which demandable debt provides incentive-compatible intermediation where the banker has comparative advantage in allocating investment funds but may act against the interests of uninformed depositors. Demandable debt attracts funds by giving depositors an option to force liquidation. Its usefulness in transacting follows from information-sharing between monitors and nonmonitors.

This article examines the use of share repurchase as a takeover deterrent. The main result is that in the presence of an upward-sloping supply curve for shares, the takeover cost to the acquirer can be greater if the target firm distributes cash through share repurchase than if it chooses either to pay a cash dividend or to do nothing. Because shareholders willing to tender the distribution of remaining shareholders toward a more expensive pool. Examining the equilibrium behavior of all players in a stylized takeover game, conditions exist under which repurchase deters takeover.

Customer orientation is a fine ideal. Making it a reality is difficult for many organizations. Provides a framework to guide management through the process of building a customer-driven philosophy. It is hoped that by means of such a framework it will be possible to evaluate an organization's customer orientation profile, and to provide the basis for a comparison of interorganizational approaches.

A conceptual model is developed that describes the relationships among consumer values, utility, and ownership of durables. These relationships are tested empirically using data on a variety of discretionary durables collected from a sample of 735 adults. Results support the model structure and suggest that augmenting the List of Values (Kahle 1983) with a measure of materialism improves prediction of value-related consumer behavior.

In this paper we propose a model for describing consumer decision making among assortments or menus of options from which a single option will be chosen at a later time. Central to the derivation of the model is an assumption that consumers are uncertain about their future preferences. The model captures both the utility of the items within the assortments as well as the flexibility the items offer as a group. We support our model empirically with two laboratory experiments. In the first experiment we test the underlying assumptions.

Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn provide an in-depth analysis of public-private partnerships that have resulted in several large downtown retail redevelopment projects. These projects were dependent in part on an improvement in underlying factors such as the revitalization of the downtown office market. But, more important, these projects owe their existence to innovative entrepreneurial urban policy. This essay shows how current city policies evolved from the experience gained from redevelopment efforts launched under federal auspices.

Japan's capital markets have played a crucial role in the recent increase in the globalization of international capital markets. As a result it has become important to understand the similarities and differences in the way Japanese markets operate in comparison to the more familiar Anglo-American environment. One of the major differences that has attracted a great deal of attention is the relatively high average price/earnings [PE] ratio (Viner [1988]) for the stocks listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

In this paper, a new algorithm for computing optimal (s, S) policies is derived based upon a number of new properties of the infinite horizon cost function c(s, S) as well as a new upper bound for optimal order-up-to levels S* and a new lower bound for optimal reorder levels s*. The algorithm is simple and easy to understand. Its computational complexity is only 2.4 times that required to evaluate a (specific) single (s, S) policy. The algorithm applies to both periodic review and continuous review inventory systems.

We analyze a continuous-time, two-stage production/inventory system. In the first stage, a common intermediate product is produced in batches, and possibly stored. In the second phase, the intermediate product is fabricated into n distinct finished products. Several finished products may be included in a single production batch of limited capacity to exploit economies of scale. We propose a planning methodology to address the combined problem of joint setup costs and capacity limits (per setup).