Dale Carnegie once said that the sound of one’s name is the sweetest for any person. Much internet personalization acts on this mantra by trying to create an online environment where customers are greeted by name and are recommended products based on their preferences. However, no clear...

The empirical saddlepoint likelihood (ESPL) estimator is introduced. The ESPL provides improvement over one-step GMM estimators by including additional terms to automatically reduce higher order bias. The first order sampling properties are shown to be equivalent to efficient two-step GMM. New...

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...