World Scientific-Now Publishers Series in Business – serie

Understanding the key IT issues facing firms within their surrounding contexts is critical for the firm, government, and their international counterparts.In response to the dominant and pervasive bias in Information Systems (IS) research towards American and Western views, the World IT Project was launched and is the largest study of its kind in the field. This book captures the organizational, technological, and individual issues of IT employees across 37 countries.The book enables management and staff to formulate business and IT-related policies and strategies. Likewise, it allows policymakers, governments and vendors to address important issues at the national level as well as to respond to the needs of partners and stakeholders in other countries. It also offers current and future academic scholars a grounded understanding of the international IT environment and provides a sound foundation to launch many international IT studies.

The field of marketing science has evolved significantly in the last 70 years. Throughout its rich history, developments in this field have always been anchored on marketing phenomena that drew on economics, statistics, operations research, and related disciplines. This book reviews the accomplishments of notable marketing scientists in several research areas. It emphasizes both the role and the importance that pioneers in marketing science have had in the rapid development of this field and honors those contributions.This second edition of the book offers updates of the former chapters and six new chapters on emerging areas of marketing science including machine learning, field experimentation methods, and internet marketing. Combined with older areas of research like endogeneity, services, and market segmentation, this book provides a road map for the development of 22 areas of marketing science, which not only is useful from a historical perspective but also identifies important gaps in the literature which can provide an impetus for future research. As such, it provides an important resource for the main consumers of the academic marketing research literature: doctoral students, faculty, and marketing science practitioners in consulting firms and companies.

The book uses distance functions, a generalization of the more familiar production function, as the theoretical and empirical tools to construct Lerner indexes of market power in both the input and output markets. The use of distance functions enables us to explicitly account for the effects of firm inefficiency and price markups in the evaluation of market power. The book focusses on the theory and provides a menu of applications to construct measures of firm efficiency and market power in the financial and public sectors.

The field of marketing science has evolved significantly in the last 70 years. Throughout its rich history, developments in this field have always been anchored on marketing phenomena that drew on economics, statistics, operations research, and related disciplines. This book reviews the accomplishments of notable marketing scientists in several research areas. It emphasizes both the role and the importance that pioneers in marketing science have had in the rapid development of this field and honors those contributions.This second edition of the book offers updates of the former chapters and six new chapters on emerging areas of marketing science including machine learning, field experimentation methods, and internet marketing. Combined with older areas of research like endogeneity, services, and market segmentation, this book provides a road map for the development of 22 areas of marketing science, which not only is useful from a historical perspective but also identifies important gaps in the literature which can provide an impetus for future research. As such, it provides an important resource for the main consumers of the academic marketing research literature: doctoral students, faculty, and marketing science practitioners in consulting firms and companies.

There are three stages to outsourcing: The first occurred at the dawn of industrial era in the 19th century, where mass production for consumption by many, became the norm and simple domestic means could not meet such demands. With the cost of labor soaring in developed countries, manufacturing of products started moving to countries like China to take advantage of labor arbitrage in the 1900s. This is the second stage of outsourcing. This book addresses issues and challenges in the third stage of outsourcing whose focus is on movement of services at electronic speed, utilizing the Internet platform.The book includes short essay questions, multiple choice questions, mini-cases at the end of most chapters and glossary of terms. It can also serve as a good reference book for practitioners.

"Joe Thomas is a true renaissance academic who has integrated research, teaching, practice and leadership. He's advised numerous companies through board positions and consulting engagements. His research has identified and focused on real issues in operations management, like overcoming the dark side of worker flexibility and other aspects of the human component of operations. And he has then incorporated research findings into his teaching, including cases on issues like global operations that we can all benefit from. Joe is so admired by his colleagues that they chose him to lead the Johnson School as Dean. Joe is a model and an inspiration for all of us. This book, with its emphasis on cross-functional approaches to inventory management, is an excellent way to honor Joe on his retirement."Marshall L FisherUniversity of Pennsylvania"Joe Thomas is one of the Grand Masters in our field of operations management. I will always remember him fondly as someone who has accomplished so much, with such a high status in our profession, and yet at the same time, a humble, warm and gentle scholar. In my early student days, I read of Joe's work in multi-echelon inventory systems. He has made deep contributions in manufacturing and distribution network designs and operations management, before the term "supply chain management" became popular. He is also one of the early scholars in operations management who recognized and promoted the importance of looking at manufacturing and operations as a strategy for a firm. I have learned a great deal from both his writings and from interactions with him face to face. Of course, Joe has also been serving our community as an editor and through professional society leadership. I had first-hand experience from his editorship directly, since he processed some of the papers that I published. That experience also taught me how to have high standards, be encouraging, and be generous in giving advice and inputs in the editorial process. As a junior researcher at the time, such editorial support was both helpful and served as a great model. As a senior colleague, Joe has always treated me as a friend, making me feel comfortable and easy to exchange with him. Over the years, many of our colleagues have benefited tremendously from his mentorship and support. While he is a very serious researcher and holds very high standards in his work, Joe's personality radiates warmth and energy to those around him. And then he adds humor at the right time. I will never forget when Joe led all of us at a conference honoring the retirement of El Buffa to sing a song with lyrics that he composed himself, titled "Just-in-Time." The lyrics contained lessons in a very funny way. Joe is a pioneer in research (as well as in teaching and practice) that connected inventory management to other business functions such as human resources, marketing, finance and accounting. Thus, with its emphasis on cross-functional inventory research, this book is an excellent way to honor him on his retirement. It is a privilege for us to recognize and celebrate with him all he has done for our profession!"Hau L LeeStanford UniversityCross-Functional Inventory Research details path-breaking analytical, empirical and behavioral operations management research that interfaces inventory with the business functions of human resources, finance, accounting, information technology, and globalization.For about fifty years, inventory research was conducted with a silo mentality with assumptions of exogenous pricing, price-independent demand distribution, rational human decision making, and lack of information sharing. Over the past few years, there is increased realization that this kind of analysis and thinking will not be useful for the modern business world. This has motivated inventory researchers to reach across different business functional areas such as finance, marketing, human capital and information technology and identify research questions that are more appropriate for the modern, complex, data-driven business environments. Cross-Functional Inventory Research contains path-breaking research developments in cross-functional inventory research. The methodologies applied to answer these research questions cover the complete gamut of empirical, analytical, and behavioral approaches.

Marketing for Economists and Life Scientists presents a new perspective on marketing, i.e., viewing it as a mechanism to reduce pre-purchase risks. Since products are designed, produced and marketed to pre-selected target markets, there are consumers whose preferences differ from that design and may find ex post that the product does not fit their needs. This long assumed heterogeneity among producers and consumers is viewed as the ground for uncertainty. Spanning over 18 years of research, Heiman and Zilberman focuses on marketing tools designed to reduce uncertainty and incorporates marketing thinking and principles into an economic framework. The mathematical detailing has been reduced to a minimum and the theoretic principles will be presented in the text. The book has been written for economists and life scientists to understand what marketing is and how it can be used to create demand and profit and market innovations.

The field of real options is concerned with the management and financial valuation of operational flexibility in business endeavors. From the very outset, energy and commodity markets — which play fundamental roles in the worldwide economy — have provided a relevant context for real option analysis, both in theory and practice.This volume is a collection of six chapters covering recent research on real options in energy and commodity markets, reflecting the significance of these markets for real option analysis. The volume is divided into two parts — the first on theory and the second on methods and applications.The two chapters in the first part of the book respectively address commodity storage and the concept of convenience yield, and how the management of real options can be impacted by the trader's own market decisions in the context of commodity shipping.The four chapters in the second part of the book propose and apply real option models in various domains — modeling the evolution of futures prices of emission certificates; managing copper extraction illustrated with an application to a project at Codelco, Chile, the largest copper producer in the world; the core ideas behind real option analysis in the context of the merchant management of hydrocarbon cracking operations; and optimizing the portfolio of contracts that oil refineries use to market their gasoline production.

Marketing Manipulation deals with the tactics and strategies used by marketers that prey on human cognitive, social and memory based biases ultimately influencing consumer behavior in their favor.Kamins focuses on examples from academic research where consumers have been found to be susceptible to bias and therefore have made less than optimal purchase decisions. Particularly, academic research in the area of Pricing, Product, Promotion, Sales and marketing research. Written in an accessible manner, this book puts the consumer (you!) in the center and aims to helps making all of us a better decision maker when confronted with a range of stimuli in a marketing environment.

This book, Innovative Federal Policies During the Great Financial Crisis, contains discussions of unconventional monetary policies, policy changes to address systemic and payments systems risks, new macroprudential policies, the 'stretching' of the financial safety net, changes in the Fed's liquidity funding facility (the discount window), use of the Fed's balance sheet as a tool of monetary policy, and alternative means to deal with real-estate asset bubbles and potential financial instability.The 10 chapters in this book offer a unique analysis of several innovative approaches by the Federal Reserve that contributed to the stabilization of the US economy following the Great Recession. What unique policies were implemented? Toward what goal? Were they effective? Were there unintended consequences? Additionally, but less thoroughly, events in the Euro market are also discussed, and policies (and their impact) of the ECB are critiqued.Based on papers presented at the 91st Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association International Meetings in Portland, Oregon, 2016, Innovative Federal Policies During the Great Financial Crisis adds significantly to the debate over why innovative or unconventional policies were needed, how they were implemented and how effective they were.

Written by production economics and finance specialists Rolf Färe and Shawna Grosskopf of Oregon State University and Dimitris Margaritis of the University of Auckland, Pricing Non-marketed Goods Using Distance Functions, is an inspiring new contribution highlighting the importance of duality theory for valuation purposes, especially for hard to price inputs or resources, intended or unintended goods and assets. The theoretical pricing models are supplemented by self-standing empirical applications covering real estate pricing, environmental preservation, transfer pricing, shadow prices of university knowledge outputs and spillovers, and the pricing of bank equity capital and non-performing loans.

Dynamic games arise between players (individuals, firms, countries, animals, etc.) when the strategic interactions among them recur over time and decisions made during one period affect both current and future payoffs. Dynamic games provide conceptually rich paradigms and tools to deal with these situations.This volume provides a uniform approach to game theory and illustrates it with present-day applications to economics and management, including environmental, with the emphasis on dynamic games.At the end of each chapter a case study called game engineering (GE) is provided, to help readers understand how problems of high social priority, such as environmental negotiations, exploitation of common resources, can be modeled as games and how solutions can be engineered.

In this volume, what are thought to be some of the more important aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act are discussed from a number of perspectives, including that of industry scholars who have been actively involved in evaluating financial regulation, regulators who are responsible for implementing the reform, financial policy experts representing think tanks and banking trade associations, congressmen and congressional staff involved with developing the legislation, and legal scholars. The volume summarizes the act, evaluates how the new regulations are being implemented and how the implementation process is progressing, and discusses modifications that, in the views of the authors, might be needed to more effectively achieve the stated goals of the legislation.

The field of marketing science has a rich history of modeling marketing phenomena using the disciplines of economics, statistics, operations research, and other related fields. Since it is roughly 50 years from its origins, The History of Marketing Science is a timely review of the accomplishments of marketing scientists in a number of research areas.Different research areas of marketing science, such as Pricing, Internet Marketing, Diffusion Models, and Advertising, are treated to a highly readable and easy-to-digest historical analysis by the contributing authors. Each chapter provides a chronological timeline of key historical developments in the area of marketing science covered. Readers of other disciplinary backgrounds outside of economics, statistics, and operations research will be more than able to appreciate the development of marketing science as a field of research and its pioneers through the book.

This volume contains a selection of papers that were presented at the CRESSE Conferences held in Chania, Crete, from July 6th to 8th, 2012, and in Corfu from July 5th to 7th, 2013. The chapters address current policy issues in competition and regulation. The book contains contributions at the frontier of competition economics and regulation and provides perspectives on recent research findings in the field. Written by experts in their respective fields, the book brings together current thinking on market forces at play in imperfectly competitive industries, how firms use anti-competitive practices to their advantage and how competition policy and regulation can address market failures. It provides an in-depth analysis of various ongoing debates and offers fresh insights in terms of conceptual understanding, empirical findings and policy implications. The book contributes to our understanding of imperfectly competitive markets, anti-competitive practices and competition policy and regulation.

The field of marketing science has a rich history of modeling marketing phenomena using the disciplines of economics, statistics, operations research, and other related fields. Since it is roughly 50 years from its origins, The History of Marketing Science is a timely review of the accomplishments of marketing scientists in a number of research areas.Different research areas of marketing science, such as Pricing, Internet Marketing, Diffusion Models, and Advertising, are treated to a highly readable and easy-to-digest historical analysis by the contributing authors. Each chapter provides a chronological timeline of key historical developments in the area of marketing science covered. Readers of other disciplinary backgrounds outside of economics, statistics, and operations research will be more than able to appreciate the development of marketing science as a field of research and its pioneers through the book.

Contingent Convertibles (CoCos) represent debt that is subject to being converted automatically into common equity under pre-specified terms of conversion if the chosen regulatory capital ratio falls to a level triggering conversion. CoCos are that subspecies of contingent capital that references regulatory (Basel III) concepts in its triggers. From 2014, trigger points are set by common equity (Common Equity Tier 1 [CET1]) in percent of risk-weighted assets [RWA] or of more complicated measures of total exposure to a variety of risks, particularly credit risk. This is the first comprehensive book on CoCos, an innovative instrument that has attracted growing attention since it was first issued in 2009.The book is mostly concerned with going-concern ‘recovery-’ rather than ‘resolution-’ CoCos, because avoiding failure and costly disruption of financial networks without government financing is the first order of business. CoCos hold a high promise of providing fully loss-absorbing equity capital when it is most needed and least available to financial institutions. Yet, having grown out of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, they are still an ‘infant’ reform instrument in many respects. Few of the instrument's design features (or even the rating, regulatory, and tax treatments) are entirely settled. This book seeks to move the discussion toward, and then past, the main decision points so that CoCos can prove their value for contingency planning and self-insurance all over the world. It is intended to increase the ability of issuers and investors to analyze and understand the different kinds of CoCos.

How do you gauge the accomplishments of policy and its failures? While a number of nations are successful in optimizing a socio-economic welfare function, others are woefully falling short of the optimal frontier. Diagnostics for a Globalized World proposes a reformulation of the inherited theory of economic and social policy (codified in the 1950s by Jan Tinbergen) to find a diagnostic tool in measuring the effectiveness of economic and social policy. Using a logarithmic adaptation of data envelopment analysis, the authors explain how to rank the attainment of nations of multidimensional goals such as those expressed by the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and upcoming Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is often overlooked in empirical work such as diagnostic tests to determine whether the data conform with technology which, in turn, is important in identifying technical change, or finding which types of DEA models allow data transformations, including dealing with ordinal data.Advances in Data Envelopment Analysis focuses on both theoretical developments and their applications into the measurement of productive efficiency and productivity growth, such as its application to the modelling of time substitution, i.e. the problem of how to allocate resources over time, and estimating the "value" of a Decision Making Unit (DMU).

Although there have been numerous studies of the causes and consequences of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2010 in the US and abroad, many of these were undertaken only for a small number of countries and before the financial and economic effects were fully realized and before various governmental policy responses were decided upon and actually implemented. This book aims to fill these voids by providing a more thorough assessment now that the worst events and the regulatory reforms are sufficiently behind us and much more information about these developments is available. It reviews and analyzes the causes and consequences of and the regulatory responses to the Great Financial Crisis, particularly from a public policy viewpoint. In the process, it explores such intriguing questions as: What caused the crisis? How did the crisis differ across countries? What is the outlook for another crisis, and when? This is a must read for those who are trying to find answers to these questions.

Project management is the art of analyzing and managing risks. Without risk, there is little need for project management. Project Risk Analysis Made Ridiculously Simple offers a step-by-step guide on how to perform project risk analysis and risk management for a wide range of readers: students, project schedulers not exposed to project risk analysis before, and to project risk experts. With this book, you will learn how to:Easily recognizable real-life stories and projects provide a compelling narrative while imparting valuable information on both the theory and practice of project risk management. You will not only understand why project risk management is important to the success of their projects, but you will also know how it can be implemented in your organization and the appropriate tools to use.