Economics Insights @ CBS

The paper analyzes the use of information in companies planning strategically versus those which are not. This contrast is used to build the case for developing strategic forecasting capability which focuses on a variety of environments, is proactive and interactive, and creates a need for different kinds of data bases and forecasting techniques.

This paper establishes a simple existence proof for a solution to the optimality equations arising in finite undiscounted Markov Renewal Programs, by applying Brouwer's fixed point theorem to the so-called reduced value-iteration operator. Because of its simplicity, our approach lends itself to new existence results for more general models.

This paper adds to recent evidence on market inefficiency in processing information in earnings reports. It documents that short positions taken in sample stocks which did not report earnings by the date expected during the sample period, 1971–1976, would have been abnormally profitable, before transaction costs. This is because late reports, on average, revealed bad news which was not anticipated in market prices prior to the report date.

We examine a queueing system with multiple primary servers and a fewer number of auxiliary servers. There are two classes of customers—those who require service from a primary server working alone and those who require service from a primary server who is assisted by an auxiliary server. Though the apparent Markovian state space is five-dimensional, we show that an aggregation results in an exact two-dimensional representation which is Markovian. Matrix geometric theory is used to obtain approximations for the mean delay and blocking probability of each customer type.