Bøger i World Scientific-Now Publishers Series in Business serien

This volume contains a selection of papers that were presented at the CRESSE Conferences held in Chania, Crete, from July 6th to 8th, 2012, and in Corfu from July 5th to 7th, 2013.

The field of real options is concerned with the management and financial valuation of operational flexibility in business endeavors. From the very outset, energy and commodity markets - which play fundamental roles in the worldwide economy - have provided a relevant context for real option analysis, both in theory and practice.This volume is a collection of six chapters covering recent research on real options in energy and commodity markets, reflecting the significance of these markets for real option analysis. The volume is divided into two parts - the first on theory and the second on methods and applications.The two chapters in the first part of the book respectively address commodity storage and the concept of convenience yield, and how the management of real options can be impacted by the trader's own market decisions in the context of commodity shipping.The four chapters in the second part of the book propose and apply real option models in various domains - modeling the evolution of futures prices of emission certificates; managing copper extraction illustrated with an application to a project at Codelco, Chile, the largest copper producer in the world; the core ideas behind real option analysis in the context of the merchant management of hydrocarbon cracking operations; and optimizing the portfolio of contracts that oil refineries use to market their gasoline production.

This book, Innovative Federal Policies During the Great Financial Crisis, contains discussions of unconventional monetary policies, policy changes to address systemic and payments systems risks, new macroprudential policies, the 'stretching' of the financial safety net, changes in the Fed's liquidity funding facility (the discount window), use of the Fed's balance sheet as a tool of monetary policy, and alternative means to deal with real-estate asset bubbles and potential financial instability.The 10 chapters in this book offer a unique analysis of several innovative approaches by the Federal Reserve that contributed to the stabilization of the US economy following the Great Recession. What unique policies were implemented? Toward what goal? Were they effective? Were there unintended consequences? Additionally, but less thoroughly, events in the Euro market are also discussed, and policies (and their impact) of the ECB are critiqued.Based on papers presented at the 91st Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association International Meetings in Portland, Oregon, 2016, Innovative Federal Policies During the Great Financial Crisis adds significantly to the debate over why innovative or unconventional policies were needed, how they were implemented and how effective they were.

Marketing Manipulation deals with the tactics and strategies used by marketers that prey on human cognitive, social and memory based biases ultimately influencing consumer behavior in their favor.Kamins focuses on examples from academic research where consumers have been found to be susceptible to bias and therefore have made less than optimal purchase decisions. Particularly, academic research in the area of Pricing, Product, Promotion, Sales and marketing research. Written in an accessible manner, this book puts the consumer (you!) in the center and aims to helps making all of us a better decision maker when confronted with a range of stimuli in a marketing environment.

Written by production economics and finance specialists Rolf Färe and Shawna Grosskopf of Oregon State University and Dimitris Margaritis of the University of Auckland, Pricing Non-marketed Goods Using Distance Functions, is an inspiring new contribution highlighting the importance of duality theory for valuation purposes, especially for hard to price inputs or resources, intended or unintended goods and assets. The theoretical pricing models are supplemented by self-standing empirical applications covering real estate pricing, environmental preservation, transfer pricing, shadow prices of university knowledge outputs and spillovers, and the pricing of bank equity capital and non-performing loans.

In order to manage inventory effectively from a cross-functional perspective, Cross-Functional Inventory Research demonstrates that it is necessary for the organization to use analytical, empirical, and behavioral methodologies.For about fifty years, inventory research was conducted with a silo mentality with assumptions of exogenous pricing, price-independent demand distribution, rational human decision making, and lack of information sharing. Over the past few years, there is increased realization that this kind of analysis and thinking will not be useful for the modern business world. This has motivated inventory researchers to reach across different business functional areas such as finance, marketing, human capital and information technology and identify research questions that are more appropriate for the modern, complex, data-driven business environments. Cross-Functional Inventory Research contains path-breaking research developments in cross-functional inventory research. The methodologies applied to answer these research questions cover the complete gamut of empirical, analytical, and behavioral approaches.

There are three stages to outsourcing: The first occurred at the dawn of industrial era in the 19th century, where mass production for consumption by many, became the norm and simple domestic means could not meet such demands. With the cost of labor soaring in developed countries, manufacturing of products started moving to countries like China to take advantage of labor arbitrage in the 1900s. This is the second stage of outsourcing. This book addresses issues and challenges in the third stage of outsourcing whose focus is on movement of services at electronic speed, utilizing the Internet platform.The book includes short essay questions, multiple choice questions, mini-cases at the end of most chapters and glossary of terms. It can also serve as a good reference book for practitioners.

Although there have been numerous studies of the causes and consequences of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2010 in the US and abroad,

How do you gauge the accomplishments of policy and its failures? While a number of nations are successful in optimizing a socio-economic welfare function, others are woefully falling short of the optimal frontier.

Understanding the key IT issues facing firms within their surrounding contexts is critical for the firm, government, and their international counterparts.In response to the dominant and pervasive bias in Information Systems (IS) research towards American and Western views, the World IT Project was launched and is the largest study of its kind in the field. This book captures the organizational, technological, and individual issues of IT employees across 37 countries.The book enables management and staff to formulate business and IT-related policies and strategies. Likewise, it allows policymakers, governments and vendors to address important issues at the national level as well as to respond to the needs of partners and stakeholders in other countries. It also offers current and future academic scholars a grounded understanding of the international IT environment and provides a sound foundation to launch many international IT studies.

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is often overlooked in empirical work such as diagnostic tests to determine whether the data conform with technology which, in turn, is important in identifying technical change, or finding which types of DEA models allow data transformations, including dealing with ordinal data.

The aim of the book is to provide a practical overview of the project risk management process that covers both theory and practice and would serve as a useful guide to a wide range of readers from students to project risk experts.

Contingent Convertibles (CoCos) represent debt that is subject to being converted automatically into common equity under pre-specified terms of conversion if the chosen regulatory capital ratio falls to a level triggering conversion. CoCos are that subspecies of contingent capital that references regulatory (Basel III) concepts in its triggers. From 2014, trigger points are set by common equity (Common Equity Tier 1 [CET1]) in percent of risk-weighted assets [RWA] or of more complicated measures of total exposure to a variety of risks, particularly credit risk. This is the first comprehensive book on CoCos, an innovative instrument that has attracted growing attention since it was first issued in 2009.The book is mostly concerned with going-concern 'recovery-' rather than 'resolution-' CoCos, because avoiding failure and costly disruption of financial networks without government financing is the first order of business. CoCos hold a high promise of providing fully loss-absorbing equity capital when it is most needed and least available to financial institutions. Yet, having grown out of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, they are still an 'infant' reform instrument in many respects. Few of the instrument's design features (or even the rating, regulatory, and tax treatments) are entirely settled. This book seeks to move the discussion toward, and then past, the main decision points so that CoCos can prove their value for contingency planning and self-insurance all over the world. It is intended to increase the ability of issuers and investors to analyze and understand the different kinds of CoCos.

In this volume, what are thought to be some of the more important aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act are discussed from a number of perspectives, including that of industry scholars who have been actively involved in evaluating financial regulation, regulators who are responsible for implementing the reform, financial policy experts representing think tanks and banking trade associations, congressmen and congressional staff involved with developing the legislation, and legal scholars. The volume summarizes the act, evaluates how the new regulations are being implemented and how the implementation process is progressing, and discusses modifications that, in the views of the authors, might be needed to more effectively achieve the stated goals of the legislation.

The field of marketing science has a rich history of modeling marketing phenomena using the disciplines of economics, statistics, operations research, and other related fields. Since it is roughly 50 years from its origins, The History of Marketing Science is a timely review of the accomplishments of marketing scientists in a number of research areas. Different research areas of marketing science, such as Pricing, Internet Marketing, Diffusion Models, and Advertising, are treated to a highly readable and easy-to-digest historical analysis by the contributing authors. Each chapter provides a chronological timeline of key historical developments in the area of marketing science covered. Readers of other disciplinary backgrounds outside of economics, statistics, and operations research will be more than able to appreciate the development of marketing science as a field of research and its pioneers through the book.

Provides a uniform approach to game theory and illustrates it with the applications to economics and management, including environmental, with the emphasis on dynamic games. This title helps readers to understand how problems of high social priority, such as environmental negotiations, can be modeled as games and how solutions can be engineered.

The field of marketing science has a rich history of modeling marketing phenomena using the disciplines of economics, statistics, operations research, and other related fields. Since it is roughly 50 years from its origins, The History of Marketing Science is a timely review of the accomplishments of marketing scientists in a number of research areas.Different research areas of marketing science, such as Pricing, Internet Marketing, Diffusion Models, and Advertising, are treated to a highly readable and easy-to-digest historical analysis by the contributing authors. Each chapter provides a chronological timeline of key historical developments in the area of marketing science covered. Readers of other disciplinary backgrounds outside of economics, statistics, and operations research will be more than able to appreciate the development of marketing science as a field of research and its pioneers through the book.