The accounts of medical trials provide very detailed information about the patients’ health conditions. On the contrary, almost no vital data such as marital status or age distribution are usually given. Yet, some of these factors can have a notable impact on the overall death rate, thereby...

We describe and document three mechanisms by which corporations can influence or even control stock prices. (i) Parent and holding companies wield control over other publicly traded companies. (ii) Through clever management of treasury stock based on buyback programs and stock issuance, stock...

It is usually assumed that stock prices reflect a balance between large numbers of small individual sellers and buyers. However, over the past fifty years mutual funds and other institutional shareholders have assumed an ever increasing part of stock transactions: their assets, as a percentage...

Transportation costs still play an important role in the economics of commodity markets. In this paper I present a theoretical framework aimed at describing spatial arbitrage under uncertainty; I analyze the effect of changing transport costs on different, yet related, variables: volume of...

It is a common belief that the behavior of shareholders depends upon the direction of price fluctuations: if prices increase they buy, if prices decrease they sell. That belief, however, is more based on ``common sense'' than on facts. In this paper we present evidence for a specific class of...

One distinctive and pervasive aspect of social systems is the fact that they involve several kinds of agents. Thus, in order to draw parallels with physical systems one is led to consider binary (or multi-component) compounds. Recent views about the mixing of liquids in solutions gained from...