Despite a vast literature on the capital structure of the firm there still is a big gap between theory and practice. Starting with the seminal work by Modigliani & Miller, much attention has been paid to the optimality of capital structure from the shareholders’ point of view. Over the...

International standards setting organizations have different language selection policies. These policies have, besides their financial aspects, also an important cultural/ political dimension. The standards setting organizations are either bilingual (English/ French), or unilingual (English), or...

Large institutional investors allocate their funds over a number of classes (e.g. equity, fixed income and real estate), various geographical regions and different industries. In practice, these allocation decisions are usually made in a hierarchical (top-down), consecutive way. At the higher...

The universality of design perception and response is tested using data collected from ten countries: Argentina, Australia, China, Germany, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, and the United States. A Bayesian, finite-mixture, structural-equation model is developed that...

We present an analysis of the performance of the DAX, German's major stock market index, over the last two years. Our analysis is broader than conventional benchmark approaches because we study the properties of all feasible portfolios, i.e. portfolios composed given the same investment...

In this paper we present and illustrate using real-life data a framework for managing an investment portfolio in which the investment opportunities are described in terms of a set of attributes and part of this set is intended to capture the effects on society. Here we link with the emerging...

Many content-based recommendation approaches are based on a dissimilarity measure based on the product attributes. In this paper, we evaluate four dissimilarity measures for product recommendation using an online survey. In this survey, we asked users to specify which products they considered to...

Literature suggests that in battles between competing designs, ultimately one design will emerge as dominant to the detriment of the others. Various factors and forces have been identified to explain this phenomenon. Yet, sometimes no dominant design emerges at all and multiple competing designs...

Why does one person actually succeed in starting a business, while a second gives up, and a third is still trying? To answer this question, a longitudinal study was set up in which 330 nascent entrepreneurs (people setting up a business) were followed over a one-year period. After one year, 47%...

Blue ocean strategy seeks to turn strategic management on its head by replacing ‘competitive advantage’ with ‘value innovation’ as the primary goal where firms must create consumer demand and exploit untapped markets. Empirical analysis has been focused on case study...