It is a pleasure to be able to address this year’s Retail Financial Services Forum. As you know, this is the sixth year that the Forum has been held and I think it is fair to say that the current environment is more challenging than at any time over that six-year period. The global fi nancial system is having to deal simultaneously with a very large repricing of risk, an unwinding of the levera...

This paper aims at measuring the loss in the value of a firm due to the gamble for resurrection, in a standard contingent claims model. Just before a debt repayment is due, the equityholders of a levered firm can decide to shut the firm down or to keep it as an ongoing concern. We study how leverage affects the operating decision and we provide a closed form formula for the associated agency co...

This paper extends the existing research on real estate investment trust (REIT) operating efficiencies. We estimate stochastic-frontier, panel-data models specifying a translog cost function. The specified model updates the cost frontier with new information as it becomes available over time. The model can identify frontier cost improvements, returns to scale, and cost inefficiencies over time....

We describe a methodology that embeds the theory of preemptive Time Petri Nets (pTPN) along development and verification activities of a V-Model lifecycle to support the construction of concurrent real time SW components. Design activities leverage on a pTPN specification of the set of concurrent timed tasks. This supports design validation through simulation and state space analysis, and drive...

innovations. This past November, Software AG tested the latest version of Adabas and its add-on products on new IBM mainframe hardware and operating system software at the IBM System z® Benchmark Center in Poughkeepsie, NY. Recommendations on how to leverage IBM’s zHPFTM, Flash ExpressTM and Large Pages with Adabas for increased scalability and throughput are discussed below. To dive into the d...

The use of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technologies can prove to be a strong, strategic initiative for many businesses. However, to leverage these potential benefits, organizations must be able to transform ineffective operating procedures and explore alternative implementations of EDI. The project reported here illustrates how a major Fortune 500 corporation was able to meet the challeng...

We document the process of strategic renewal of organizations through niche pioneering and new product development in a population of firms. Our main finding is that market pioneering capabilities routinized through product customization efforts lead to continued survival of firms in industries composed of niches. In addition, such capabilities shield firms operating in older technological traj...

The rapid increase in Internet communications’ products such as high-speed switches, SerDes (serial-deserializer) elements and XAUI (X=10G, attachment unit interface) ports has energized the need for process technologies that support both digital and analog (mixed-signal) elements at radio frequencies (RF). In order for these products to be competitive, process technologies that support analog/...

The MANTIS MultimodAl system for NeTworks of In-situ wireless Sensors provides a new multithreaded embedded operating system integrated with a general-purpose single-board hardware platform to enable flexible and rapid prototyping of wireless sensor networks. The key design goals of MANTIS are ease of use, i.e. a small learning curve that encourages novice programmers to rapidly prototype novel...

Based on an analysis of the articles in this special issue, the authors propose five operating principles for systems change work. These principles are: clarifying the purpose of the systems change; identifying whether the change is one to an existing system or the change is to create a new system; conceptualize the work as systems change from the beginning; use an eclectic approach; and be ope...