The assessment of strategic opportunities and threats has been a key element of corporate ratings to assess companiesfor their current and in particular future creditworthiness since the enforcement of the new capital regulations for issuingloans in Europe (Basel II). The existing, often...

A new model, rejecting solutions optimal only for a single preciselydefined future, generates answers representing the best compromisebetween risks and opportunities in all likely futures.

We begin with the hypothesis that shareholder-wealth effects of corporate transactions differdepending on (a) the specific industry, (b) whether they are horizontal or vertical, and (c) whetherthey are integrations (takeovers) or disintegrations (partial sell-offs). A standard event study...

The worldwide airline industry is currently facing one of the most severe crises in its history. Particularly affected are the networkcarriers, which need to develop more distinct products to adapt to the changed market environment. Since structure needs to fitstrategy, the question of how the...

The extent of stock option remuneration for executives has been strongly criticized due tonumerous cases of balance sheet manipulation in the USA. The (complete) incentive compatibilityof executive remuneration using stock options to the market value of the company is still a controversy.This...

Failed mergers are often attributed to „corporate culture problems“ – this statement is now almost regarded as commonplace. However, because these difficulties can rarely be differentiated between, this reference is unsatisfactory and in the worst case could even be used as an excuse. This...

This paper extends D’Aveni’s hypercompetition concept based on the core competencies’ approachby means of the addition of an institutional economic explanation. In this process it is demonstratedthat the hypercompetitive conduct of economic protagonists in addition to the core...

The technological developments in the areas of information and communicationtechnology have generated worldwide business opportunities for firms which carry out coordinationtasks as a service for other enterprises. To begin with, several implications of this development for the fundamental...

This paper presents a model for investigating group decisions of managers who are imperfectlyinformed and averse to taking risks. Of primary interest is financial success for risk neutral shareholderswho have no other aim than maximizing expected profit and can therefore be treatedhomogeneously...

Sometimes we believe that others receive harmful information.However, Marschak’s value of information framework alwaysassigns non-negative value under expected utility: it starts from the decisionmaker’s beliefs – and one can never anticipate information’s harmfulnessfor oneself. The...