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This chapter explores accounting transparency as an important aspect of corporate accountability. After defining accounting transparency and identifying factors that influence it, the chapter considers the debate between providers and users of accounting information on how transparent accounting information should be defined, measured, and reported. It also discusses the roles of international standard-setting organizations in promoting accounting transparency as well as measures of accounting transparency, including disclosure level and market reactions. Finally, it looks at future prospects for setting international accounting standards, paying particular attention to International Financial Reporting Standards.

This chapter examines the potential discrepancies in the regulation applied to overseas issuers, as opposed to domestic issuers, of four leading financial centers. They are New York, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It consists of three substantive sections. The first section will reviews existing literature and empirical evidence concerning the motivations and current state of cross-listing. The second section examines the listing route for an overseas issuer and inquires how it might differ from a domestic listing in the host country. This chapter particularly concerns the potential discrepancies of rules between a foreign listing and a domestic listing and asks if those discrepancies would lead to better or inferior investor protection. The third section examines the continuing regulation of foreign-listed companies, reviewing some regulatory concerns involving cross-listed companies and discussing what can be done to curb the problems, for instance, through regulatory cooperation between home and host regulators.

We study various analytical frameworks relating productivity change to change in the cost structure and cost efficiency of the firm. We begin by motivating a focus on the cost side, and not the revenue side, of the profit objective of the firm. We continue by relating the cost accounting tool of standard cost variance analysis to the economics tool of cost efficiency analysis. We focus on managerially controllable drivers of cost efficiency, including productivity change and its components. We conclude by noting some significant empirical applications of the analysis, by recommending cost efficiency analysis as a valuable tool for benchmarking against the best, and by suggesting some new directions for research.

There has been much interest in pricing strategies and tactics both in the research and practice domains. This chapter examines the recent literature on pricing with a focus on blending an economics approach with that of marketing. It begins with a brief discussion of the fundamental principles of optimal pricing, which serves as the foundation for the more advanced pricing methods. The chapter provides an in-depth discussion in the areas of second degree price discrimination, bundling strategies, revenue management, pricing using conjoint analysis, dynamic pricing, price psychology, personalized pricing, competitive considerations in pricing (Nash and Stackelberg games), dynamic structural models in pricing, and pricing in two-sided markets. The end of the chapter provides brief concluding remarks.

This article first introduces some essential airline pricing and revenue management (PRM) terms and concepts, and then briefly reviews historical events that have shaped the field of airline PRM. It discusses current PRM practices, including strategy, tactics, processes, distribution, and systems, and, finally, highlights trends that will impact the future practice of PRM. The article focuses on the current practices of the major US airlines, which include Delta Air Lines, United-Continental Airlines, American Airlines, and US Airways and account for approximately 75 per cent of US industry revenue; and the practices of the largest low-cost carriers, such as AirTran, JetBlue, and Southwest Airlines.

This chapter examines whether and how different types of institutional ties affect new venture performance at different organizational stages. The authors propose that equity ties to government agencies will enhance the speed and returns of initial public offerings (IPOs) but hinder post-IPO market growth. By contrast, equity ties to research institutes will contribute positively to both IPO performance and post-IPO market growth. The authors build their arguments on how the two types of institutional ties meet new ventures’ need to be legitimate and competitive pre- and post-IPO. They test their hypotheses with new ventures in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries that went public in China and find supportive evidence.

This article discusses crowdfunding as an alternative way of financing projects, with a focus on small, entrepreneurial ventures. It first provides a description of crowdfunding and discusses existing research on the topic. The next section looks at crowdfunding in the context of entrepreneurial finance and thereby describes factors affecting entrepreneurial preferences for crowdfunding as a source of finance. Thereafter it elaborates different business models used to raise money from the crowd, in particular with respect to the structure of the crowdfunding process. Building on this discussion, the article presents and discusses extensively a case study, Media No Mad (a French start-up). It concludes with recommendations for entrepreneurs seeking to make use of crowdfunding and with suggestions for researchers about yet-unexplored avenues of research.

This article focuses on a class of angel investors that lies between venture capitalists and the typical informal individual angel investor. It discusses why people become angel investors. It then covers angel investors in groups and discusses group traits and their advantages. The section after that discusses angel investments and the investment process. The article discusses characteristics of a good deal, the financial parameters of an investment, and the angel's exit from the investment. A review of the literature on expected returns on angel investments and the problems with measuring them follows. The final section summarizes.

This article reviews literature on the important role played by asymmetric information in entrepreneurial finance from two perspectives: asymmetric information and relationship lending, and the theoretical modeling of asymmetric information. Then it examines the relationship between capital market conditions and entrepreneurial finance and attempts to answer two questions: Why is the capital market condition important for entrepreneurial finance? and What are the effects of capital market conditions on entrepreneurial financial behavior in terms of discouraged borrowers, cash holding, and the availability and costs of finance?

By bringing together multiple workers, organizations can perform tasks that are outside the reach of any individual. In order to be productive, however, workers must coordinate their actions. Often this requires communicating information that is dispersed throughout the organization, but communication is time-consuming and costly. As Arrow (1974) noted, given the importance of communication both as an opportunity and as a cost, organizations will strive to optimize information flows between workers. As a result, communication patterns within an organization will not be random but will be shaped by the goals of the organization. An attention network describes how communication flows and, as a result, how decisions are made within the organization. This chapter reviews optimal and equilibrium attention networks.

This article gives some historical background on auctions and describes the different varieties of auction, such as English, Dutch, Japanese, candle, silent, sealed-bid, Vickery, and simultaneous ascending auctions. It summarizes the most important results from auction theory, including the optimality of the Vickery auction and the revelation principle. The article also describes some of the current topics in auction research, including approaches to combinatorial auctions.

This chapter focuses on the selection of an audit firm by UK initial public offering (IPO) firms. It documents that many IPO firms switch to an audit firm in a different segment (big, midsize, or small), which suggests that IPO firms carefully select an audit firm of a particular quality level before they go public. It examines whether the selection of an auditor by IPO firms is driven by the demand for certification or insurance. The authors find that IPO firms are more likely to choose a high-quality auditor when the uncertainty of the firm’s future prospects is higher and they want to signal quality (certification driven by signaling). In addition, they find that firms with riskier IPO offerings select higher-quality auditors, in line with the insurance hypothesis. They find mixed results for the certification hypotheses when testing for the effect of auditor reputation on initial returns.

This article describes various discrete choice models of consumers who may be heterogeneous both in terms of their preferences and in their sensitivities to marketing variables such as price. It addresses a distinct set of challenges that are being posed through the use of hierarchical priors. It considers standard statistical approach that generates discreteness by applying a censoring function to underlying continuous latent variables. This approach generates models that can be employed in situations where more descriptive models are required. Nonparametric and flexible parametric models involving Dirichlet processes and other mixtures are also accepted and favored in marketing. This article outlines several utility specifications that incorporate discreteness and other important aspects of consumer decisions. Computational issues are important when dealing with large marketing data sets and this article discusses on how to implement posterior simulation methods in marketing models.

This article discusses the literature that uses sports gambling markets as an analogy to financial markets. It also expands the study of actual sportsbook behavior, comparing the traditional models to the Levitt hypothesis and considering alternative theories, by examining the betting market for Major League Baseball (MLB). The reverse favorite-longshot bias and home/road biases are then explored. It appears that bettors prefer road favorites by a large margin, but this is not captured by the sportsbook odds, which, likely not coincidentally, tend to map closer to actual favorite win percentages. There are no statistically significant returns to betting against the public. The findings that sportsbooks do not set prices to balance the book calls into question the source of some of the earlier findings of market efficiency in sports wagering markets and its underlying support for the forecasting power of prediction markets.

Modern strategic decision theory focuses on those actions taken by senior executives (on behalf of the owners) that commit substantial resources, set precedents, and create waves of less important decisions. This chapter explores key behavioral assumptions that dispute the notion that strategic decisions are wholly rational in a neoclassical economics sense. It classifies deviations from rationality as non-standard preferences, non-standard beliefs, and non-standard decisions. Insights are provided on how behavioral economics can be applied to strategic decisions in organizational settings, and moreover on how behavioral economics can be enriched by asking questions that are unique to the role of executives making strategic decisions within firms.

Behavioral theory suggests a myriad other policy options that can have substantial impacts without restricting choices in any real sense. This article focuses on three general areas of research: food choice, food consumption volume, and the evaluation of foods. It discusses two primary literatures of behavioral economics and food consumption. One of these literatures seeks to apply general behavioral economic models to food consumption, while the other seeks to identify and incorporate known food psychological phenomena into models of economic behavior. It introduces many new concepts to the field of behavioral economics, and provides some promising areas for future research. Finally, it mentions that much remains to be done in terms of incorporating the important elements of food behavior, and creating and using suitable individual data to calibrate these models for policy purposes.

This article demonstrates how human deviations affect pricing management in both areas of consumer pricing and pricing contracts among firms. It is organized as follows. Section 20.2 discusses some important theories regarding human decision making and social preferences, including the well-known ‘prospect theory’. Section 20.3 focuses on consumer pricing and investigates how different behavioural regularities affect a firm's marketing and pricing decisions. Section 20.4 discusses critical behavioural issues that impact the design and performance of pricing contracts among firms. Section 20.5 summarizes the discussion and concludes by suggesting future research that considers behavioural issues in pricing management.

The behavioural revolution has profoundly affected how we conceptualize behaviour. The rational agent of standard microeconomic theory has been found wanting and, in its place, new formulations have been presented which take seriously human traits like myopia and loss aversion. Here it is argued that the behavioural revolution offers a way of understanding common problems in economic geography, such as co-location, clusters of innovation, the diffusion of innovation, and home bias. It is noted that earlier versions of behaviouralism stressed bounded rationality but underestimated the far-reaching consequences of the behavioural revolution. To explain the significance of these developments for understanding the intersection between cognition and context, we look closely at behaviour in time and space. The implications of behaviouralism for institutions are briefly considered, emphasizing the role that collective action in or through institutions can play in ameliorating the adverse effects of behavioural biases and anomalies.

Productivity gains play a crucial role in value creation and distribution in firms. This chapter connects the strategy framework of value creation and value capture with the tools from the productivity literature in order to understand better how returns are distributed between different stakeholders in the business and how this distribution might evolve over time. The authors distinguish between business model innovation and replication as two genuine sources of value creation. The historical analysis of Southwest Airlines in the US airline industry illustrates the insights that can be gained using a formal model to measure productivity gains at the firm level.

This article has two parts. The first part provides a brief literature review on existing theoretical and empirical research in the capital structure of family firms. It argues that there are several important aspects of being a closely held family firm that have opposing impacts on the optimal choice of debt leverage. One important feature is that families are typically nondiversified investors that not only have most of their wealth tied to the company but also often their human capital. Another salient feature is that families want to have control over their company. This control objective restricts the willingness to raise new capital outside the family and therefore often results in a stronger dependence on banks and various forms of debt instruments. The second part provides an empirical analysis of the leverage structure of family firms in Denmark. Using a unique data set the family can be tracked behind each of the 200,000 Danish firms and the firms categorized into family or nonfamily firms. Three definitions of family firms are used in the analysis: multiple family members owning the firm; a family owner is also CEO; and there has been at least one family succession in the firm.