This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2012 (Power TAC 2012). Power TAC is a competitive simulation that models a “liberalized” retail electrical energy market, where competing business entities or “brokers” offer energy services to customers through tariff...

This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2011 (Power TAC 2011). Agents are simulations of electrical power brokers, who must compete with each other for both power production and consumption, and manage their portfolios

This study demonstrates how investment managers can identify and resolve suboptimal operational workflows that diminish an investment strategy’s attainable alpha on the order of 24-242 basis points (annualized, gross of fees). A portfolio’s potential alpha can be best realized by addressing...

Developing the "right" new products is critical to firm success and is often cited as a key competitive dimension. This paper explores new product development (NPD) portfolio strategy and the balance between incremental and radical innovation. We characterize innovative effort through a...

The allocation of research and development (R&D) funds across a portfolio of programs must simultaneously consider uncertainty from research outcomes and from market acceptance of the resulting technologies. We introduce a stochastic R&D portfolio management framework for addressing both sources...

The first step in transforming strategy from a hopeful statement about the future to an operational reality is to allocate resources to innovation and new product development (NPD) programs. We explore how funding authority affects a manager's allocation of resources between multiple programs in...

Many commentators have argued that securitization – where investment banks pool receivables, such as mortgages, and then resell them as a collection of securities – creates investments so complex that even sophisticated investors cannot determine asset quality. Securitization’s critics...

We propose a worldwide-based loan portfolio to measure banks’ sectoral concentration that features prominently in episodes of bank specialization. We use the banks’ real loan allocation worldwide instead of the in-sample data to compute a bank specialization. We find that firms borrowing...

A key metric for the assessment of innovative activity at the firm level is R&D intensity. R&D intensity is the ratio of a firm's R&D investment to its revenue (the percentage of revenue that is reinvested in R&D). Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that R&D intensity within an industry...

This paper analyses whether strategic motives for patenting influence the characteristics of companies' patent portfolios. We use the number of citations and oppositions to represent these characteristics. The investigation is based on survey and patent data from German companies. We find clear...