Strategy

Recent papers have developed analytical models to explain and quantify the benefits of delayed differentiation and quick response programs. These models assume that while demands in each period are random, they are independent across time and their distribution is perfectly known, i.e., sales forecasts do not need to be updated as time progresses. In this paper, we characterize these benefits in more general settings, where parameters of the demand distributions fail to be known with accuracy or where consecutive demands are correlated.

This paper integrates pricing and replenishment decisions for the following prototypical two-echelon distribution system with deterministic demands. A supplier distributes a single product to multiple retailers, who in turn sell it to consumers. The retailers serve geographically dispersed, heterogeneous markets. The demand in each retail market arrives continuously at a constant rate, which is a general decreasing function of the retail price in the market. The supplier replenishes its inventory through orders (purchases, production runs) from a source with ample capacity.

Two marketing and communications experts present a cutting-edge model for managing group creativity, expanding on the ideas introduced in Bernd Schmitt's revolutionary Experiential Marketing. Bernd Schmitt, a leader in experiential thinking, introduced the concept of the "experience organisation" a business that thrives on innovation, buzzes with ideas, rejects bureaucracy, questions convention and allows the spirit of its employees to soar. Now he teams up with Laura Brown to show not only that these companies exist, but how any company can become one.

Several online firms, including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and Movie Critic, recommend documents and products to consumers. Typically, the recommendations are based on content and/or collaborative filtering methods.

I survey and assess the development of continuous-time methods in finance during the last 30 years. The subperiod 1969 to 1980 saw a dizzying pace of development with seminal ideas in derivatives securities pricing, term structure theory, asset pricing, and optimal consumption and portfolio choices. During the period 1981 to 1999 the theory has been extended and modified to better explain empirical regularities in various subfields of finance.

This paper empirically compares a variety of firm-value-based models of contingent claims. We formulate a general model which nests versions of the models introduced by Merton, 1974; Leland, 1994 and Anderson and Sundaresan, 1996, and Mella-Barral and Perraudin (1997). We estimate these using aggregate time series data for the US corporate bond market, monthly, from August 1970 through December 1996. We find that models fit reasonably well, indicating that variations of leverage and asset volatility account for much of the time-series variations of observed corporate yields.

This paper compares the performance of standard-cost with negotiated transfer pricing under asymmetric information. Negotiated transfer pricing generally achieves higher expected contribution margins, as this method tends to be more efficient in aggregating private information into a single transfer price. Standard-cost transfer pricing confers more bargaining power to the supplier and therefore generates better incentives for this division to undertake specific investments. The opposite holds for buyer investments.

At the turn of the century, the author examined changes in thinking about effective strategies for development.

This century has been marked by two great economic experiments. The outcome of the first set, the socialist experiment that began, in its more extreme form, in the Soviet Union in 1917, is now clear. The second experiment is the movement back from a socialist economy to a market economy. Ten years after the beginning of the transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: How do we assess what has happened? What are the lessons to be learned?