Many of the North American railroads have introduced differentiated services for grain shipments in the past decade. Most interesting have been innovations in guaranteed railcar service which have evolved since their inception. In most cases, pricing and allocation of these services have used...

In this paper we attempt to address, in a non‐technical way, the basic assumptions underlying option pricing theory and point out some of the inherent weaknesses they imply in the reliability of the resulting valuations. We present several concrete examples to illustrate the impact of the...

We examine the returns to investors in publicly traded stock in new industries. We examine data from the United States on sellers of own-brand personal computers, airlines and airplane manufacturers, automobile manufacturers, railroads, and telegraphs. We find that a relatively small number of...