Appraising companies for acquisition

The author was involved in the 1973–1974 acquisition chase in the U.K. and in the Pacific Basin while working for a British company noted for its acquisitiveness. A mystique has grown up around those people who buy companies and individuals who surround themselves with secrecy and charisma are hiding one essential fact; appraising target companies is not very different from appraising any other direct investment. In fact the task lends itself to a combination of simple economics and plenty of common sense.     

Cellular telephones and motor-vehicle collisions: Some variations on matched-pairs analysis

We describe the analysis of some matched-pair binary data arising from a study designed to investigate whether cellular-telephone use is associated with motor-vehicle collisions. Conditional and random effects approaches to the problem are derived and compared. Driving intermittency is a potential confounder whose effect is assessed by strategic choices of the control period and by application of the bootstrap. The marked discrepancy between the conditional and random approaches merits further study.     

Three simple steps to determine optimum plant capacity

Plant investment decisions are frequently crowded with folk-lore, even though basic economics may provide a ready guide to optimum capacity.Increasing emphasis on corporate accountability is producing the need to accept a more numerate approach to business decision taking while the overall scope for off-the-cuff decisions is rapidly diminishing. One important area of business decision taking concerns plant investment and in this paper an approximation routine is outlined for determining by economic analysis the optimum plant size for new ventures. Attention is also drawn to the importance of organization structure for investment planning.     

Social welfare functions that satisfy Pareto,anonymity, and neutrality,but not independence of irrelevant alternatives

In the presence of Pareto, non-dictatorship, full domain, and transitivity, an extremely weak independence condition disallows both anonymity and neutrality.