Two complementary sources of information are studied in a multiperiod agency model. One is an accounting source which partially but credibly conveys the agent’s private information through accounting recognition. The other is an unverified communication by the agent (i.e., a self-report). In a...

The paper reviews issues related to the zero lower bound (ZLB) on interest rates and argues that all of the following propositions are invalid: (1) in a ZLB situation, "shaping interest rate expectations is essentially the only tool that central bankers have" (Bernanke, Reinhart, and Sack...

Operations of publicly traded firms differ from privately owned firms because public firms' managers make decisions based on their own interests. In this paper, we study how stock market pressure may influence a manager's inventory and operational management. Our model is a straightforward...

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...