My research addresses the role that digital technology plays in retailing and distributing products, and the impact that it has on firm incentives, inter-firm relationships, and consumers. This area of research is important not only because digital technology affects a growing set of product markets, but also because the nature of digital technology allows for the construction of much more gran...

The role of probabilistic models in the debate over genetics and insurance is discussed. A Markov model is used to show that, under quite extreme assumptions, adverse selection in life insurance ought to be controllable. The statistical problems of estimating small differences in mortality are discussed; these might limit the use of many genetic disorders as rating factors. The influence of the...

The payout and price of a rainfall-based index insurance contract are both functions of rainfall, which is a random process. In order to design and price these contracts, therefore, the buyers and the sellers of the contracts must both have a satisfactory understanding of the rainfall process, and must be able to communicate their beliefs to each other in order to negotiate the design and price...

There is a growing trend for asset intensive industries to outsource maintenance services of their complex assets since outsourcing through service contract reduces upfront investments in infrastructure, expertise and specialised maintenance facilities. Estimation of costs for such contracts is complex and it is important to the user and the service providers for economic variability. The servi...

This paper maintains that the consistent application of subjectivism helps to reconcile contemporary entrepreneurship theory with strategic management research in general, and the resource−based view in particular. The paper synthesizes theoretical insights from Austrian economics and Penrose’s (1959) resources approach, arguing that entrepreneurship is inherently subjective and firm specific. ...

OBJECTIVES Our prospective study aimed to elucidate the effect of long-term experience of nonstandard employment status on the incidence of depression in elderly population using the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (KLoSA) study. METHODS This study used the first- to fourth-wave cohorts of KLoSA. After the exclusion of the unemployed and participants who experienced a change in employment...

In Grid, the reputation of users is the important indicator for service selection, particularly in the situation with the combination of Grid technologies and economic models. A contract-management model based on reputation evaluation and a service selection algorithm are proposed in this paper. The applied strategy facilitates the users of similar reputation to carry out transactions. The expe...

This paper seeks to answer two questions about executive compensation. How important is hidden information relative to moral hazard, and how biased are empirical measures of moral hazard in econometric models that do not account for hidden information? An analytical stage of this paper exploit restrictions from the theory of optimal contracting to identify hidden information and di¤erentiate it...