BACKGROUND Free ranging foraging animals can vary their searching intensity in response to the profitability of the environment by modifying their movements. Marine diving animals forage in a three dimensional space and searching intensity can be varied in both the horizontal and vertical planes. Therefore understanding the relationship between the allocation of searching effort in these two sp...

Customer value creation is allegedly at the centre of relationships between service recipients and service providers (such as financial service organisations in general, and commercial banks in particular). This research considers the role of customer value creation in the strategic response of banks to external changes in their growth opportunities. The analysis established that there had been...

The optimum design of solar energy systems strongly depends on the accuracy of  solar radiation data. However, the availability of accurate solar radiation data is undermined by the high cost of measuring equipment or non-functional ones. This study developed a feed-forward backpropagation artificial neural network model for prediction of global solar radiation in Makurdi, Nigeria (7.7322  N lo...

● The classic Markowitz model that optimizes for the Sharpe ratio has proven to be suboptimal. ○ Summary is used directly as prediction. ○ Variance is not a good risk measurement since it penalizes positive shocks and says little about tail risks ● Other risk measurements such as Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall introduce non-linear, non-convex risk constraints and render the mean-variance ...

This article examines the effect of GDP growth on bank profitability in China over the period 2003-2009. The one-step system GMM estimator is used to test the persistence of profitability in Chinese banking industry. The empirical findings suggest that cost efficiency is positively related to bank profitability, while lower profitability can also be explained by higher taxes paid by banks. In a...

This article examines the effect of GDP growth on bank profitability in China over the period 2003-2009. The one-step system GMM estimator is used to test the persistence of profitability in Chinese banking industry. The empirical findings suggest that cost efficiency is positively related to bank profitability, while lower profitability can also be explained by higher taxes paid by banks. In a...

Using data on listed and unlisted firms in the U.K., this study documents systematic changes of profitability with age. In their early years, firms realize substantial profitability increases, on average, while mature firms face slow declines in profitability. A model of endogenous profitability changes arising from product development captures this pattern. Investment in product development ge...

Introduction: Sports and war metaphors abound in business today. For example, one management book, Thunder in the Sky, by Thomas Cleary, opens with a Chinese saying that translates: “The marketplace is a battlefield. The Asian people view success in the business world as tantamount to victory in battle.” The book advises American executives to do the same. However, such metaphors are misleading...