M ARKETING thinking and practice has been gradually moving into service industries. Its role in service industries is still limited, however. It has achieved some utilization in banks and airlines, to a lesser degree in insurance, brokerage, and public transportation, and still less in law, accounting, management consulting, medicine, architecture, and engineering. Even marketing research firms...

Mobile brokerage services represent an emerging application of mobile commerce in the brokerage industry. Compared with telephone-based trading services and online brokerage services, they have advantages such as ubiquity, convenience, and privacy. However, the number of investors using mobile brokerage services to conduct brokerage transactions is far smaller than those using other trading met...

We provide empirical evidence on the economic benefits of negotiating trades in the upstairs trading room of brokerage firms relative to the downstairs market. Using Helsinki Stock Exchange data, we find that upstairs trades tend to have lower information content and lower price impacts than downstairs trades. This is consistent with the hypotheses that the upstairs market is better at pricing ...

Brokerage analysts frequently comment on and sometimes recommend companies that their firms have recently taken public. We show that stocks that underwriter analysts recommend perform more poorly than “buy” recommendations by unaffiliated brokers prior to, at the time of, and subsequent to the recommendation date. We conclude that the recommendations by underwriter analysts show significant evi...

We argue that mutual fund investors are more sensitive to salient in-your-face fees, like loads and commissions, than operating expenses. Our empirical analysis of mutual fund flows over the last 30 years yields strong support for our contention. We find consistently negative relations between fund flows and load fees. We also document a negative relation between fund flows and commissions char...

Early access to stock recommendations provides brokerage firm clients with incremental investment value. After controlling for transaction costs, purchasing (selling) quickly following upgrades (downgrades) results in average two-day returns of 1.02% (1.50%). Short-term profit opportunities persist for two hours following the pre-market release of new recommendations. The results are robust wit...

Takeover target firms covered by more equity analysts are sold for higher premiums while their acquirers earn lower merger announcement returns. We confirm these results using exogenous shocks to coverage arising from brokerage-house mergers or closures (i.e., quasi-natural experiments) as instruments for the loss of analyst coverage. In general, our findings indicate that target coverage by eq...

Acquisition research has traditionally been dominated by economic and atomistic assumptions. This study extends acquisition research by integrating behavioral learning and social network perspectives to examine the acquisitions of alliance partners. Specifically, we examine, at the dyadic level, how firms’ alliance learning approaches (exploration versus exploitation) and their joint and relati...

Any competent data-miner should have already acquired strong technical skills. However, an outstanding data-miner will also understand the legal aspects of data analysis. It is because empirical analysis in the business world requires not only quantitative mastery but also strong business sense. This paper will provide an overview on several legal issues (consumer credit, investment strategy, a...

This paper describes the Natural Language Processing (NLP) component of an e-mail monitoring product called Assentor. Assentor monitors electronic correspondence for brokerage firms. It uses pattern-matching-based information extraction technology to find and quarantine e-mail messages that indicate, among others, customer complaints, insider trading, stock hyping, hard-pressure sales tactics,...