Multidivisional and decentralized firms often operate inefficiently. In most cases, central management's instruments to influence its branches' behavior are limited. Although relative performance evaluation has been argued to be of great use in defining incentive mechanisms, such approaches...

The characteristics book-to-market equity ratio, size and momentum are highly correlated with the average returns of common stocks. Fama and French (J Financ Econ 33(1):3-56, 1993), (J Finance 50(1):131-155, 1995) and (J Finance 51(1):55-84, 1996) argue (for size and the book-to-market equity...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the implications of the risk versus characteristic debate from the perspective of a mean-variance investor. Design/methodology/approach: Expected returns and the variance-covariance matrix are estimated based on various characteristic and risk...

Through an implementation of the 2-level-approach due to Vesanto & Alhoniemi (2000), this paper addresses a number of problems typically seen when visualized interpretation of Self Organizing Maps (SOM) are applied to derive a systematic classification system in the hedge fund literature....

The characteristics book-to-market equity ratio, size and momentum are highly correlated with the average returns of common stocks. Fama and French (J Financ Econ 33(1):3-56, 1993), (J Finance 50(1):131-155, 1995) and (J Finance 51(1):55-84, 1996) argue (for size and the book-to-market equity...