We examine fees on bonds issued by Japanese corporations during the 1994-2002 period. We relate fees to firms’ membership of bank-led (financial) keiretsu. For the full sample of firms, we establish a positive relation between fees and risk factors. Over time, we find that fees have increased...

Services constitute a major part of the economy, and, contrary to popular believe, service firms do innovate. In this paper I take a closer look at one aspect of innovation in services: appropriability. I discuss the different elements that are possibly of importance for appropriability, and...

Plural form franchising is modeled from an incomplete contracting perspective. Complete franchising is the unique, efficient governance structure only when the plural form externality is limited and the costs of investment are low for both franchisees. Governance structure choice is irrelevant...

In this paper we will show that the closely K-convexlike vector-valued functions with K Rm a nonempty convex cone and related classes of vector-valued functions discussed in the literature arise naturally within the theory of biconjugate functions applied to the Lagrangian perturbation scheme in...

In this study we consider a pick-to-pack orderpicking system, in which batches of orders are picked simultaneously from different(work) zones by a group of order pickers. After picking, the orders are transported by a conveyor to the next station for packing. Our aim is to determine the optimal...

Component sharing may look great in the boardroom, but not in the showroom. Indeed, savings on R&D and production costs could be offset by a plunge in customer brand attractiveness and willingness to pay. This paper investigates the impact of component sharing on customer evaluation of luxury,...

Recognizing the importance of privacy management as a business process and a business support process, this paper proposes the use of service level agreements around privacy features, including qualitative and quantitative ones. It also casts privacy management into a business perspective with...

To address the problem why China, as a communist country, moves in the opposite direction when the public sector has undergoing a continuous growth in most Western economies since the World War I, we offer a new approach that the de facto fiscal decentralization curtails government size in...

Understanding decision-making processes for gifts is of strategic importance for companies selling small electrical appliances as gifts account for a large part of their sales. Among all gifts, the ones that are surprising are the most valued by recipients. However, research about...

When delegating an investment decisions to a professional manager, investors often anchor their mandate to a specific benchmark. The manager’s exposure to risk is controlled by means of a tracking error volatility constraint. It depends on market conditions whether this constraint is easily...