Strategy

Focus groups are the most used and abused qualitative marketing research method. Refocusing Focus Groups by Robert J. Morais lays out, in simple terms, the best practices for planning, designing, conducting, and interpreting focus groups. The book draws upon perspectives and techniques from psychology and anthropology, along with decades of the author's and other experts' experience.

Particle learning (PL) provides state filtering, sequential parameter learning and smoothing in a general class of state space models. Our approach extends existing particle methods by incorporating the estimation of static parameters via a fully-adapted filter that utilizes conditional sufficient statistics for parameters and/or states as particles. State smoothing in the presence of parameter uncertainty is also solved as a by-product of PL. In a number of examples, we show that PL outperforms existing particle filtering alternatives and proves to be a competitor to MCMC.

Using data on repurchase agreements by primary securities dealers, we show that three classes of securities (Treasury securities, securities issued by government-sponsored agencies, and mortgage-backed securities) can be formally ranked in terms of their collateral values in the general collateral (GC) market.