Advisers and the Fiduciary Duty Debate

This work concerns itself with the debate taking place in the United States about the duty of care financial advisers owe investors. On one side it is argued that advisers need only concern themselves with recommendations which meet certain suitability standards. On the other side, there are those who argue the suitability standard is not strong enough to adequately protect investor interests. Instead of ensuring investment recommendations are merely suitable, financial advisers owe their investors a fiduciary duty to “act in the best interest of the customer without regard to the financial or other interests … of the investment adviser providing the advice.” (SEC, 2011). In applying a properly understood conception of what fiduciary means I argue that regulations should not be harmonized but that fiduciary duty should apply to all who provide personalized investment advice to retail customers. I will further argue that even if the regulations are harmonized as proposed, because of exemptions for broker‐dealers as envisioned in the proposal, and which currently apply to Registered Investment Advisers, the efficacy of fiduciary duty is diluted to the point of rendering its current application, much less its potential uniform imposition, irrelevant.     

手机App列表信息在信用风险评价中的应用——基于互联网借贷平台的实证研究

随着互联网的发展和智能手机的普及,用户手机数据被用来评估借款人的信用风险,使用到的数据有通讯记录、短信息接发、移动轨迹、用户行为数据等,而本文研究了手机上所安装的App列表和借款人信用风险之间的关系。通过对某大型互联网借贷平台上的个人借贷数据以及借款人手机上安装的App列表数据的分析发现,手机上安装的App和借款人的信用状况存在关联关系。安装生活类、金融类和买房买车类App的借款人比没有安装这些App的借款人信用风险低;其中,记账类App、外卖类App、股票类App和买房类App对借款人的信用风险有较强的识别能力。把手机App列表信息加入信用风险评价模型之后,信用风险评价模型的区分能力得到显著提高。     

Contradictions of commitment in the new economy: Insecurity, time, and technology

The new flexible, 24/7 economy is characterized by employment insecurity, time pressure, and technologies that increase employees’ accessibility to their workplace. Accompanying these changes is a changing social contract between employees and their employers. Labor process and organizational theories suggest that these employment characteristics will undermine the attachment component of organizational commitment that remains an important feature of contemporary workplaces. We use an unpublished dataset of a nationally representative sample of employed individuals from the Families and Work Life Institute to test hypotheses linking the attachment component of organizational commitment to organizational insecurity, time pressure, and technologically created accessibility. Our expectation is that these changes will be particularly important for decreasing older cohorts of workers’ attachment to the organization since they have experienced a change in the social contract. The data are largely consistent with these expectations.     

Learning how to learn: the key to CQI

All CQI/TQM efforts share a common purpose: to learn something that can correct past mistakes and/or to create better futures. Because learning is a dynamic circular process, the information about a problem or an opportunity will be limited unless four perceptions of the truth--each valid, and each incomplete--are accepted. These four types of learning styles or ways of perceiving are: abstract conceptualizers, active experimenters, concrete experiencers, and reflective observers. Unless all the stages of the learning process have been fully completed, unless all the strokes work in harmony, we cannot be confident that a CQI effort has added its full value. A CQI team's interpersonal process, the tools by which individually limited truths are forged into a consensual holistic truth, must ensure that the group's effort goes "around in circles."