The Value of Weather Information for E‐Commerce Operations

To be efficient, logistics operations in e‐commerce require warehousing and transportation resources to be aligned with sales. Customer orders must be fulfilled with short lead times to ensure high customer satisfaction, and the costly under‐utilization of workers must be avoided. To approach this ideal, forecasting order quantities with high accuracy is essential. Many drivers of online sales, including seasonality, special promotions and public holidays, are well known, and they have been frequently incorporated into forecasting approaches. However, the impact of weather on e‐commerce operations has not been rigorously analyzed. In this study, we integrate weather data into the sales forecasting of the largest European online fashion retailer. We find that sunshine, temperature, and rain have a significant impact on daily sales, particularly in the summer, on weekends, and on days with extreme weather. Using weather forecasts, we have significantly improved sales forecast accuracy. We find that including weather data in the sales forecast model can lead to fewer sales forecast errors, reducing them by, on average, 8.6% to 12.2% and up to 50.6% on summer weekends. In turn, the improvement in sales forecast accuracy has a measurable impact on logistics and warehousing operations. We quantify the value of incorporating weather forecasts in the planning process for the order fulfillment center workforce and show how their incorporation can be leveraged to reduce costs and increase performance. With a perfect information planning scenario, excess costs can be reduced by 11.6% compared with the cost reduction attainable with a baseline model that ignores weather information in workforce planning.     

Improving Revenue Management Decision Making for Airlines by Evaluating Analyst‐Adjusted Passenger Demand Forecasts*

To maximize revenue, airline revenue management analysts (RMAs) attempt to protect the right number of seats for late‐booking, high‐revenue‐generating passengers from low‐valued leisure passengers. Simulation results in the past showed that a major airline can generate approximately $500 million per year through efficient RM operations. Accurate passenger demand forecasts are required, because reduced forecast error significantly improves revenue. RMAs often adjust the system forecasts to improve revenue opportunity. Analysis of system forecast performance and analyst adjustment is complex, because one must account for all unseen demands throughout the life of a flight. This article proposes a method to account for unseen demand and evaluate forecast performance (adjusted or unadjusted) through a forecast monitoring system. Initial results from one major airline's origin‐destination market data justify the value of RMA forecasting adjustments.     

Customers’ Capital Market Information Quality and Suppliers’ Performance

We empirically examine the association between downstream firms’, i.e., customers’ capital market information quality, and the operating performance of upstream firms, i.e., suppliers. Customers’ capital market information quality is measured by the customers’ provision of earnings forecasts, the customers’ reported earnings quality, and the customers’ coverage by financial analysts and credit rating agencies. We hypothesize and find a positive association between customers’ capital market information quality and suppliers’ operating performance measured by the DuPont profitability ratios. The association is stronger for suppliers with higher sales volatility, no order backlogs, customers who are less dependent on their input, and shorter business relation with customers. Collectively, the results suggest that the quality of information provided by the customers to the capital market has a spillover effect in the input market, i.e., helps the suppliers improve their performance.     

Financial Health Economics

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the link between financial and real health care markets. This link is important as financial returns drive investment in medical research and development (R&D), which, in turn, affects real spending growth. We document a “medical innovation premium” of 4–6% annually for equity returns of firms in the health care sector. We interpret this premium as compensating investors for government‐induced profit risk, and we provide supportive evidence for this hypothesis through company filings and abnormal return patterns surrounding threats of government intervention. We quantify the implications of the premium for the growth in real health care spending by calibrating our model to match historical trends, predicting the share of gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to health care to be 32% in the long run. Policies that had removed government risk would have led to more than a doubling of medical R&D and would have increased the current share of health care spending by more than 3% of GDP.     

Demand–Supply Mismatches and Stock Market Performance: A Retailing Perspective

We provide empirical evidence that the volatility of inventory productivity relative to the volatility of demand is a predictor of future stock returns in a sample of publicly listed U.S. retailers over the period 1985–2013. This key performance indicator, entitled demand–supply mismatch (DSM), captures the fact that low variation in inventory productivity relative to variation in demand is indicative of the superior synchronization of demand‐ and supply‐side operations. Applying the Fama and French (1993) three‐factor model augmented with a momentum factor (Carhart 1997), we find that zero‐cost portfolios formed by buying the two lowest and selling the two highest quintiles of DSM stocks yield abnormal stock returns of up to 1.13%. These strong market anomalies related to DSM are observed over the entire sample period and persist after controlling for alternative inventory productivity measures and firm characteristics that are known to predict future stock returns. Further, we reveal that DSM is indicative of lower future earnings and lower sales growth and provide evidence that the observed market inefficiency results from investors’ failure to incorporate all of the information that inventory contains into the pricing of stocks.     

A Sales Forecast Model for Short‐Life‐Cycle Products: New Releases at Blockbuster

We develop, in this article, a sales model for movie and game products at Blockbuster. The model assumes that there are three sales components: the first is from consumers who have already committed to purchasing (or renting) a product (e.g., based on promotion of, or exposure to, the product prior to its launch); the second comes from consumers who are potential buyers of the product; and the third comes from either a networking effect on closely tied (as in a social group) potential buyers from previous buyers (in the case of movie rental and all retail products) or re‐rents (in the case of game rental). In addition, we explicitly formulate into our model dynamic interactions between these sales components, both within and across sales periods. This important feature is motivated by realism, and it significantly contributes to the accuracy of our model. The model is thoroughly tested against sales data for rental and retail products from Blockbuster. Our empirical results show that the model offers excellent fit to actual sales activity. We also demonstrate that the model is capable of delivering reasonable sales forecasts based solely on environmental data (e.g., theatrical sales, studio, genre, MPAA ratings, etc.) and actual first‐period sales. Accurate sales forecasts can lead to significant cost savings. In particular, it can improve the retail operations at Blockbuster by determining appropriate order quantities of products, which is critical in effective inventory management (i.e., it can reduce the extent of over‐stocking and under‐stocking). While our model is developed specifically for product sales at Blockbuster, we believe that with context‐dependent modifications, our modeling approach could also provide a reasonable basis for the study of sales for other short‐Life‐Cycle products.     

Does a firm’s exposure to ethical failures matter to financial markets? A governance perspective

This paper investigates if a firm’s ethical reputation, in conjunction with its governance, affects its standing within financial markets. A firm`s ethical reputation, as measured by ethical failures, arises from its involvement in ethical violations and incidents while a comprehensive index proxies for governance. We assess a firm’s standing within financial markets through two complementary perspectives, i.e., the level of information asymmetry between managers and investors, as inferred from analyst forecast dispersion and analyst forecast error, and the relation between a firm’s earnings and its stock market valuation or return (value relevance). Our results suggest that a firm`s ethical reputation affects financial analysts’ forecasts as well as the stock market value assigned to its reported earnings. Moreover, it appears that corporate governance moderates such relations, with strong (weak) governance compensating for a weak (strong) ethical reputation. Overall, our evidence shows that ethical failures do not seem to pay.     

上证综指的股指波动:基于模糊FEGARCH模型及不同分布假设的预测研究

本文主要对2006年至2011年上证综指收益率序列的高频波动性进行预测研究。首先,针对金融数据的非线性和不确定等特性,借助模糊逻辑系统,提出一种新的金融市场波动率的预测方法-模糊FEGARCH模型,用来更好的针对具有非线性特性的收益率数据进行预测。其次,为了判断分布型模型和不对称型模型对预测精度的影响程度,分别采用分布型(GARCH-N,GARCH-t,GARCH-HT和GARCH-SGT)和不对称型(GJR-GARCH、EGARCH和模糊FEGARCH)的波动模型进行高级能力预测法(SPA)检测。实证结果表明,不对称模型对波动率预测的影响程度比分布假设的确定更为重要,而且模糊FEGARCH模型对于具有尖峰厚尾、高偏度和杠杆效应的非线性波动数据的预测能力更佳,说明了该模型的有效性与实用性。     

Modeling and Forecasting Realized Volatility

We provide a framework for integration of high–frequency intraday data into the measurement, modeling, and forecasting of daily and lower frequency return volatilities and return distributions. Building on the theory of continuous–time arbitrage–free price processes and the theory of quadratic variation, we develop formal links between realized volatility and the conditional covariance matrix. Next, using continuously recorded observations for the Deutschemark/Dollar and Yen/Dollar spot exchange rates, we find that forecasts from a simple long–memory Gaussian vector autoregression for the logarithmic daily realized volatilities perform admirably. Moreover, the vector autoregressive volatility forecast, coupled with a parametric lognormal–normal mixture distribution produces well–calibrated density forecasts of future returns, and correspondingly accurate quantile predictions. Our results hold promise for practical modeling and forecasting of the large covariance matrices relevant in asset pricing, asset allocation, and financial risk management applications.     

会计稳健性是否会影响分析师盈余预测行为——来自中国证券市场的证据

已有研究显示分析师通常在公司盈余发布之前做出乐观预测而导致预测偏差。运用中国A股市场的数据,检验分析师进行盈余预测时是否考虑到会计稳健性的相关信息。以不对称时间及时性(AT)和资产负债表准备金(BSR)作为会计稳健性代理变量,采用最小二乘法和最小绝对值偏差法等方法,在控制了一些被认为是影响分析师预测误差的因素后,发现分析师预测并未考虑到不对称时间及时性("好消息"和"坏消息")影响,且预测误差与资产负债表准备金额呈负关联。研究表明没有考虑到会计稳健性是中国证券分析师盈余预测偏差的一个原因。     

Tests of Conditional Predictive Ability

We propose a framework for out‐of‐sample predictive ability testing and forecast selection designed for use in the realistic situation in which the forecasting model is possibly misspecified, due to unmodeled dynamics, unmodeled heterogeneity, incorrect functional form, or any combination of these. Relative to the existing literature (Diebold and Mariano (1995) and West (1996)), we introduce two main innovations: (i) We derive our tests in an environment where the finite sample properties of the estimators on which the forecasts may depend are preserved asymptotically. (ii) We accommodate conditional evaluation objectives (can we predict which forecast will be more accurate at a future date?), which nest unconditional objectives (which forecast was more accurate on average?), that have been the sole focus of previous literature. As a result of (i), our tests have several advantages: they capture the effect of estimation uncertainty on relative forecast performance, they can handle forecasts based on both nested and nonnested models, they allow the forecasts to be produced by general estimation methods, and they are easy to compute. Although both unconditional and conditional approaches are informative, conditioning can help fine‐tune the forecast selection to current economic conditions. To this end, we propose a two‐step decision rule that uses current information to select the best forecast for the future date of interest. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach by comparing forecasts from leading parameter‐reduction methods for macroeconomic forecasting using a large number of predictors.     

基于贝叶斯因子模型金融高频波动率预测研究

构建了包含时变系数和动态方差的贝叶斯HAR潜在因子模型(DMA(DMS)-FAHAR),并对我国金融期货(主要是股指期货和国债期货)的高频已实现波动率进行预测.通过构建贝叶斯动态潜在因子模型提取包含波动率变量、跳跃变量和考虑杠杆效应的符号跳跃变量等预测变量的重要信息.同时,在模型中加入了投机活动变量,以考察市场投机活动对中国金融期货市场波动率预测的影响.预测结果表明,时变贝叶斯潜在因子模型在所有参与比较的预测模型当中具有最优的短期、中期和长期预测效果.同时,具有时变参数和时变预测变量的贝叶斯HAR族模型在很大程度上提高了固定参数HAR族模型的预测能力.在股指期货和国债期货的预测模型中加入投机活动变量可以获得更好的预测效果.     

基于误差校正的灰色神经网络股票收益率预测

在股票市场中,准确的股票收益率预测是市场交易各方共同关心的重要问题。由于影响股票市场的因素十分复杂,仅靠建立单一的股票收益率预测模型来提高预测精度是非常困难的。本文对当前股票收益率预测方法存在的不足进行了阐述,并提出了以误差校正来提高股票收益率预测精度的新思路。首先,利用训练样本构建灰色神经网络模型,然后对股票收益率进行初步预测;其次,引入EGRACH模型来挖掘和分析预测误差序列的内部信息,并对该序列后续点进行预测;最后,利用误差预测结果对股票收益率的初始预测值进行校正。文章以上证综合指数数据为例进行分析,结果显示,与校正前的预测精度相比,校正后的预测精度提高了9.3%,表明EGRACH的误差校正过程是有效的,也验证了该方法的可行性。     

基于多分形理论的动态VaR预测模型研究

经济物理学(econophysics)的大量研究表明,金融市场的波动具有复杂的多分形(multifractal)特征,因此准确地测度和预测市场波动,对金融风险管理工作的意义重大。在已有多分形波动率(multifractal volatility)测度及其模型应用基础上,以上证综指10年的高频数据为对象,提出了基于多分形波动率的样本外动态风险价值(out-of-sample dynamic VaR)预测法。通过两种规范的后验分析(backtesting)结果表明,与8种主流的线性和非线性GARCH族模型相比,在高风险水平上,基于多分形波动率测度的VaR模型明显具有更高的样本外动态风险预测精度。     

Neural Network Earnings per Share Forecasting Models: A Comparative Analysis of Alternative Methods

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of the forecasting accuracy of univariate and multivariate linear models that incorporate fundamental accounting variables (i.e., inventory, accounts receivable, and so on) with the forecast accuracy of neural network models. Unique to this study is the focus of our comparison on the multivariate models to examine whether the neural network models incorporating the fundamental accounting variables can generate more accurate forecasts of future earnings than the models assuming a linear combination of these same variables. We investigate four types of models: univariate‐linear, multivariate‐linear, univariate‐neural network, and multivariate‐neural network using a sample of 283 firms spanning 41 industries. This study shows that the application of the neural network approach incorporating fundamental accounting variables results in forecasts that are more accurate than linear forecasting models. The results also reveal limitations of the forecasting capacity of investors in the security market when compared to neural network models.     

Aligning supply chain collaboration using Analytic Hierarchy Process

The significance of collaboration among supply chain members has been sufficiently stressed in the recent literature as a powerful tool for increasing accuracy of demand forecasts and for consequent cost reductions. Since it has been recognized that naïve forecasting is no longer cost efficient, Supply Chain (SC) members have found it very important to exchange relevant information that will help improve accuracy of demand forecasting. This information differs widely in terms of their characteristics. For example, some information (e.g. historic sales data) that is cheap to exchange may not contribute to a great increase in forecast accuracy. Similarly, some information may not be very reliable (e.g. demand forecast by individual SC members). In general, there is a trade-off in the kind of information required and the kind of information exchanged. This study analyses these trade-offs using an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model. The model is then implemented based on case studies conducted in two manufacturing firms. The AHP model ranks available information in terms of their contributions to improve forecast accuracy, and can provide vital clues to SC partners for preparing exchangeable data. From the case studies using AHP model, it was proved that using the preferred SC data, the firms could enhance forecasts accuracy. This in turn can help the firms to make decisions on SC collaborative arrangements for information exchange.     

Using Fairness Models to Improve Equity in Health Delivery Fleet Management

Inefficiency and inequity are two challenges that plague humanitarian operations and health delivery in resource‐limited regions. Increasing capacity in humanitarian and health delivery supply chains is one option that has the potential to improve equity while maintaining efficiency. For example, the nonprofit organization Riders for Health has worked to increase capacity by providing reliable transportation to health workers in rural parts of sub‐Saharan Africa; with more motorcycle hours at their disposal, health workers can perform more outreach to outlying communities. We develop a model using a family of fairness function to quantify the efficiency and equity of health delivery as capacity is increased via development programs. We present optimal resource allocations under utilitarian, proportionally fair, and egalitarian objectives and extend the model to include dual modes of transport and diminishing returns of subsequent outreach visits. Finally, we demonstrate how to apply our model at a regional level to provide support for humanitarian decision makers such as Riders for Health. We use data from the baseline phase of our evaluation trial of Riders for Health in Zambia to quantify efficiency and equity for one real‐world scenario.     

Evidence on the Superiority of Analysts Quarterly Earnings Forecasts for Small Capitalization Firms*

Financial analysts provide information to support investment analysis and decisions for an ever increasing number of firms. As part of their services they also produce earnings forecasts for covered firms. While there has been much research investigating the determinants of financial analyst earnings forecast superiority for large, widely-followed firms, little research has focused on smaller firms. Until recently, these smaller firms have been largely ignored. This study focuses exclusively on small firms and provides evidence of differing behavior for such firms compared to results previously reported for large firms. Errors in quarterly earnings per share forecasts of small firms obtained from a univariate time-series model are also examined. Regression results indicate that time-series model parameters possess information content with respect to forecast accuracy for analyst-covered firms only. These results are obtained after controlling for firm size, model adequacy, and industry, quarter, and year effects. This suggests that analysts are more likely to cover small firms for which they are able to decipher information correlated with that impounded in the “shocks” in the quarterly earnings time series as captured by the time-series model parameters.     

Managing Functional Biases in Organizational Forecasts: A Case Study of Consensus Forecasting in Supply Chain Planning

To date, little research has been done on managing the organizational and political dimensions of generating and improving forecasts in corporate settings. We examine the implementation of a supply chain planning process at a consumer electronics company, concentrating on the forecasting approach around which the process revolves. Our analysis focuses on the forecasting process and how it mediates and accommodates the functional biases that can impair the forecast accuracy. We categorize the sources of functional bias into intentional, driven by misalignment of incentives and the disposition of power within the organization, and unintentional, resulting from informational and procedural blind spots. We show that the forecasting process, together with the supporting mechanisms of information exchange and elicitation of assumptions, is capable of managing the potential political conflict and the informational and procedural shortcomings. We also show that the creation of an independent group responsible for managing the forecasting process, an approach that we distinguish from generating forecasts directly, can stabilize the political dimension sufficiently to enable process improvement to be steered. Finally, we find that while a coordination system—the relevant processes, roles and responsibilities, and structure—can be designed to address existing individual and functional biases in the organization, the new coordination system will in turn generate new individual and functional biases. The introduced framework of functional biases (whether those biases are intentional or not), the analysis of the political dimension of the forecasting process, and the idea of a coordination system are new constructs to better understand the interface between operations management and other functions.     

Measuring the Behavioural Component of the S&P 500 and its Relationship to Financial Stress and Aggregated Earnings Surprises

Scholars in management and economics have shown increasing interest in isolating the behavioural dimension of market evolution. Indeed, by improving forecast accuracy and precision, this exercise would certainly help firms to anticipate economic fluctuations, thus leading to more profitable business and investment strategies. Yet, how to extract the behavioural component from real market data remains an open question. By using monthly data on the returns of the constituents of the S&P 500 index, we propose a Bayesian methodology to measure the extent to which market data conform to what is predicted by prospect theory (the behavioural perspective), relative to the (standard) subjective expected utility theory baseline. We document a significant behavioural component that reaches its peaks during recession periods and is correlated to measures of financial volatility, market sentiment and financial stress with expected sign. Moreover, the behavioural component decreases around macroeconomic corporate earnings news, while it reacts positively to the number of surprising announcements.