We examine how financial theory and economic principles offer guidance and predictions about the organization of investments and asset allocation decisions given the structure of taxes in estate--planning situations. We provide insight about many of the conventional approaches to estate planning...

Over the past few years, firms in the travel and entertainment industries have begun using novel sales strategies for revenue management. In this chapter, we study a selling strategy called opaque selling, in which firms guarantee one of several fully specified products, but hide the identity of...

This study examines how accounting conservatism may affect the information environment of analysts’ earnings forecasts, taking into account the interaction between unconditional and conditional conservatism. Unconditional conservatism preempts conditional conservatism in the later period and...

NetBill is a business model set of protocols, and software implementation for commerce in information goods and other network-delivered services. It has very low transaction costs for micropayments (around 1 cent for a 10 cent item), protects the privacy of the transaction, and is highly...

Integrating multiple services into a single network is becoming increasingly common in today’s telecommunications industry. Driven by the emergence of new applications, many of these services will be offered with guaranteed quality of service. While there are extensive studies of the...

The empirical saddlepoint distribution provides an approximation to the sampling distributions for the GMM parameter estimates and the statistics that test the overidentifying restrictions. The empirical saddlepoint distribution permits asymmetry, non-normal tails, and multiple modes. If...

Commodities, ranging from natural gas to memory chips, can be procured both by trading on the date in spot markets and in advance in forward markets. Transaction costs, such as brokerage fees, are typically higher in spot markets than in forward markets. Moreover, the forecast of a ¯rm's...

A fundamental issue in the management of technology innovation, both in manufacturing and service industries, is the comparative evaluation of emerging and incumbent technologies. This evaluation entails the juxtaposition of multiple aspects including process configuration and operational and...

This paper uses a principal-agent model to study the interaction between hedging and earnings management. Hedging makes earnings management more difficult and they appear to be strategic substitutes in this model, which is both consistent with existing empirical evidence and provides a new...

A fundamental marketing problem faced by auctioneers is the promotion of their auction in order to recruit bidders. Merchants would like to attract as many bidders as possible to an auction, since the higher the number of bidders, the higher the expected winning price and profitability. This...