When deciding about changes in levels of multiple marketing investments aimed at improving profits, managers need to know whether they are on the uphill side or the downhill side of the profit function with respect to each investment variable. Spending errors made by an uphill-located firm that believes that it is a downhill-located firm can have serious consequences. This article offers an eco...

this paper is concerned with the estimation of total factor productivity (tfp) growth for the iranian electric utilities during the period 1980-1993 on the basis of panel data. a translog cost function is used which accommodates firm - specific variability through a one - way error component model. the results show that the iranian electricity supply industry experienced increasing returns to s...

This natural experiment provides substantial evidence for the following major themes, which are based on a cognitively oriented, process-centered theory of stress and coping: First, a stressful encounter should be viewed as a dynamic, unfolding process, not as a static, unitary event. Emotion and coping (including the use of social support) were assessed at three stages of a midterm examination...

We analyze how a firm allocates information rights across its multiple banks. By differentiating their information, a firm prevents its banks from continuing projects only to use their superior information and seize assets during the reorganization. However, informational diversity can lead to the premature liquidation of good projects. We derive the optimal allocation of information as a funct...

I integrate under firm-specific benefit functions to estimate that the capitalized tax benefit of debt equals 9.7 percent of firm value (or as low as 4.3 percent, net of personal taxes). The typical firm could double tax benefits by issuing debt until the marginal tax benefit begins to decline. I infer how aggressively a firm uses debt by observing the shape of its tax benefit function. Paradox...

Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s characteristic function tells us that if this firm breaks off, it should anticipate whatever it is that the other firms can hold it down to. But this last number is zero, for it is certainly the case that the other two firms can flood the market and drive prices down to zero. So the characteristic function predicts that our firm should not object to any nonnegative...

We consider a quantity-setting duopoly market where firms lack perfect knowledge of the market demand function. They use estimated and therefore misspecified demand functions instead and determine their optimal strategies from the corresponding subjective payoff functions. The central issue of this paper is the question under which conditions a firm can learn the true demand function as well as...

Consider a symmetric oligopoly Cournot competition with linear cost functions ci (qi ) = cqi , 1 ≤ i ≤ n. The inverse demand function, F(Q), Q > 0, is a positive function (no monotonicity, continuity, or differentiability assumptions on F are needed). The profit function of Firm i is defined on Rn ++ as 5i (q1, q2, . . . , qn) = F(Q)qi − cqi , where Q =∑nj=1 qj . Define a function P: Rn ++ −→ R...

The present study explores empirically the hypothesis that ICT, new organizational practices and human capital are important determinants of firm efficiency and performance, further that the combined use of these three factors leads to a mutual strengthening of their impact on firm performance. The analytical framework is that of a production function at firm level. The study’s new contribution...