An interactive three-stage model for mutual funds portfolio selection

The aim of this work is to be a useful instrument for helping finance practitioners on the selection of suitable mutual fund portfolios. The portfolio selection problem is characterized by imprecision and/or vagueness inherent in the required data and more generally, in the context where investors have to make decisions. In order to mitigate these problems, a three stage model has been proposed based on a multi-index model and considering several market scenarios described in an imprecise way by an expert. The proposed fuzzy model allows the Decision Maker to select, by means of an outranking method, a suitable portfolio taking into account the uncertainty related to the market scenarios and the imprecision and/or vagueness associated with the model data.     

Incentives,Contracts, and Markets: A General Equilibrium Theory of Firms1

This paper takes steps toward integrating firm theory in the spirit of Alchian and Demsetz (1972) and Grossman and Hart (1986), contract theory in the spirit of Holmstrom (1979), and general equilibrium theory in the spirit of Arrow and Debreu (1954) and McKenzie (1959). In the model presented here, the set of firms that form and the contractual arrangements that appear, the assignments of agents to firms, the prices faced by firms for inputs and outputs, and the incentives to agents are all determined endogenously at equilibrium. Agents choose consumption—but they also choose which firms to join, which roles to occupy in those firms, and which actions to take in those roles. Agents interact anonymously with the (large) market, but strategically within the (small) firms they join. The model accommodates moral hazard, adverse selection, signaling, and insurance. Equilibria may be Pareto ranked.     

Public Enterprise Reform in Fiji Islands

Reforming the public sector has been on the agenda of nations throughout the world since the late 1970s. Fiji is no exception. It has embarked on reforming its commercial and industrial enterprises since the late 1980s. The government of Fiji has reformed most of its enterprises with an avowed objective of enhancing profitability, productivity, efficiency and accountability. This paper makes an attempt to share some of the experiences of public enterprise reform process in Fiji. It aims to analyze the background, process, contents and impact of the reform and examine the factors impeding the reform program. It highlights that (a) both internal and external factors were responsible for introducing reforms; (b) the reform efforts have not been able to produce desired results; (c) the structural inadequacies in institutions and organizations have created bottlenecks in the reform process; and (d) uncertainty in the political sphere has contributed further to policy shifts.     

Risk Modeling, Assessment, and Management of Lahar Flow Threat

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines is considered one of the most violent and destructive volcanic activities in the 20th century. Lahar is the Indonesian term for volcanic ash, and lahar flows resulting from the massive amount of volcanic materials deposited on the mountain's slope posed continued post-eruption threats to the surrounding areas, destroying lives, homes, agricultural products, and infrastructures. Risks of lahar flows were identified immediately after the eruption, with scientific data provided by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other research institutions. However, competing political, economic, and social agendas subordinated the importance of scientific information to policy making. Using systemic risk analysis and management, this article addresses the issues of multiple objectives and the effective integration of scientific techniques into the decision-making process. It provides a modeling framework for identifying, prioritizing, and evaluating policies for managing risk. The major considerations are: (1) applying a holistic approach to risk analysis through hierarchical holographic modeling, (2) applying statistical methods to gain insight into the problem of uncertainty in risk assessment, (3) using multiobjective trade-off analysis to address the issue of multiple decisionmakers and stakeholders in the decision-making process, (4) using the conditional expected value of extreme events to complement and supplement the expected value in quantifying risk, and (5) assessing the impacts of multistage decisions. Numerical examples based on ex post data are formulated to illustrate applications to various problems. The resulting framework from this study can serve as a general baseline model for assessing and managing risks of natural disasters, which the Philippines' lead agency-the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC)-and other related organizations can use for their decision-making processes.     

Bridging Scholarship in Management: Epistemological Reflections

If the relevance gap in management research is to be narrowed, management scholars must identify and adopt processes of inquiry that simultaneously achieve high rigour and high relevance. Research approaches that strive for relevance emphasize the particular at the expense of the general and approaches that strive for rigour emphasize the general over the particular. Inquiry that attains both rigour and relevance can be found in approaches to knowledge that involve a reasoned relationship between the particular and the general. Prominent among these are the works of Ikujiro Nonaka and John Dewey. Their epistemological foundations indicate the potential for a philosophy of science and a process of inquiry that crosses epistemological lines by synthesizing the particular and the general and by utilizing experience and theory, the implicit and the explicit, and induction and deduction. These epistemologies point to characteristics of a bridging scholarship that is problem-initiated and rests on expanded standards of validity. The present epistemological reflections are in search of new communities of knowing toward the production of relevant and rigorous management knowledge.     

Managing from the Inside Out: Drawing on 'Receptivity' to Explain Variation in Strategy Implementation

With the rise of 'New Public Management' (NPM), government policy has encouraged public-sector organizations to downsize and outsource their services. There is, however, local variation in the use of outsourcing – this is 'managing from the inside out'. This paper draws on the notion of receptivity for organizational change to explain variation in strategy implementation. Four receptivity factors are identified which seem to explain the success of two contrasting English local government outsourcing strategies: ideological vision, leading change, institutional politics and implementation capacity. The organization level of change is interconnected with two other levels of change (the public service and environment levels) to illustrate the dynamic nature of change.     

The efficacy of using judgmental versus quantitative forecasting methods in practice

In an era where forecasts drive entire supply chains forecasting is seen as an increasingly critical organizational capability. However, business forecasting continues to rely on judgmental methods despite large advancements in information technology and quantitative method capability, prompting calls for research to help understand the reasons behind this practice. Our study is designed to contribute to this knowledge by profiling differences between firms identified as primary users of either judgmental or quantitative forecasting methods. Relying on survey data from 240 firms we statistically analyzed differences between these categories of users based on a range of organizational and forecasting issues. Our study finds large differences in forecast error rates between the two groups, with users of quantitative methods significantly outperforming users of judgmental methods. The former are found to be equally prevalent regardless of industry, firm size, and product positioning strategy, documenting the benefits of quantitative method use in a variety of settings. By contrast, the latter are found to have significantly lower access to quantifiable data and to use information and technology to a lesser degree.     

Communicating uncertainty in national security intelligence: Expert and nonexpert interpretations of and preferences for verbal and numeric formats

Organizations in several domains including national security intelligence communicate judgments under uncertainty using verbal probabilities (e.g., likely) instead of numeric probabilities (e.g., 75% chance), despite research indicating that the former have variable meanings across individuals. In the intelligence domain, uncertainty is also communicated using terms such as low, moderate, or high to describe the analyst's confidence level. However, little research has examined how intelligence professionals interpret these terms and whether they prefer them to numeric uncertainty quantifiers. In two experiments (N = 481 and 624, respectively), uncertainty communication preferences of expert (n = 41 intelligence analysts in Experiment 1) and nonexpert intelligence consumers were elicited. We examined which format participants judged to be more informative and simpler to process. We further tested whether participants treated verbal probability and confidence terms as independent constructs and whether participants provided coherent numeric probability translations of verbal probabilities. Results showed that although most nonexperts favored the numeric format, experts were about equally split, and most participants in both samples regarded the numeric format as more informative. Experts and nonexperts consistently conflated probability and confidence. For instance, confidence intervals inferred from verbal confidence terms had a greater effect on the location of the estimate than the width of the estimate, contrary to normative expectation. Approximately one-fourth of experts and over one-half of nonexperts provided incoherent numeric probability translations for the terms likely and unlikely when the elicitation of best estimates and lower and upper bounds were briefly spaced by intervening tasks.     

How Asymptomatic Transmission Influences Mitigation and Suppression Strategies during a Pandemic

Asymptomatic transmission complicates any public health strategies to combat a pandemic, which proved especially accurate in the case of COVID-19. Although asymptomatic cases are not unique to COVID-19, the high asymptomatic case rate raised many problems for developing effective public health interventions. The current modeling effort explored how asymptomatic transmission might impact pandemic responses in four key areas: isolation procedures, changes in reproduction rate, the potential for reduced transmission from asymptomatic cases, and social adherence to public health measures. A high rate of asymptomatic cases effectively requires large-scale public health suppression and mitigation procedures given that quarantine procedures alone could not prevent an outbreak for a virus such as SARS-CoV-2. This problem only becomes worse without lowering the effective reproduction rate, and even assuming the potential for reduced transmission, any virus with a high degree of asymptomatic transmission will likely produce a pandemic. Finally, there is a concern that asymptomatic individuals will also refuse to adhere to public health guidance. Analyses indicate that, given certain assumptions, even half of the population adhering to public health guidance could reduce the peak and flatten the curve by over 90%. Taken together, these analyses highlight the importance of taking asymptomatic cases into account when modeling viral spread and developing public health intervention strategies.