This paper documents that median holding period in structured products based on market index is less than a day from initial purchase to liquidation even for retail investors. Less than 6% of all series ever traded by retail investors are held until maturity. Based on a unique proprietary dataset that provides the details of all transactions - including account identifier and direction of the trade - in the Korean ELW (equity linked warrant) market between 2009 and 2011, we find that trading performance is negatively correlated with holding period. Specifically, both HFT (high frequency trader) accounts and non-HFT accounts perform worse when either average holding period is long or average end-of-the-day position is large. Our findings suggest that the relationship between holding period and trading performance in the structured product markets may be fundamentally different from those in equity markets.

We examine how corporate executives form and retain interpersonal ties with other executives. Drawing on social exchange theory, we argue that corporate executives have instrumental and sentimental motivations in their efforts to develop ties with other executives. Our results show that the higher (lower) instrumental (sentimental) motivations of an executive, the higher the likelihood of friendship seeking tie, since executives pursue different benefits from ties. Executives also seek advice from more competent executives, and the instrumental motivation continues to impact executive’s retention of friendship ties. Utilizing social network data among Korean executives, our empirical data provide support for our arguments.

Firms allocate divisions overhead costs, to provide information for management decisions (information perspective) and create incentives to control costs (motivation perspective). They occasionally distort (overor under-allocate) cost, so that the allocated cost is deviated from the optimal level for which divisions are expected to be accountable (hereafter, cost distortion). We study the impact of cost distortion on divisional performance and firm performance. We find that both over- and underallocation discourage divisional managers from improving their subsequent performance and that cost distortion negatively affects the overall firm performance. Our findings suggest that for motivation and decisionfacilitating purpose, it is desirable that overhead costs are allocated at an anticipated level.

This paper proposes an approach to measuring E-Service Quality (ESQ) in mobile commerce industry. Our approach is based on SERVQUAL instrument, which has been widely used in the context of web-based service quality measurement. Our model uses fuzzy method, specifically incorporating fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy TOPSIS to consider both quantitative and qualitative factors in order to measure electronic service quality (E-SQ) in mobile commerce application using SERVQUAL dimensions. Then, the model is utilized to rank four of the most competitive e-commerce related applications on mobile Android market using results from fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS.

This study concerns business ethics. In particular, this study is a critical review of consequentialist ethics, namely, the tragedy of contract, which underlies managerial practices at the workplace and which equates empirical flourishing with behavioural morality, an instance of the naturalistic fallacy. It shows that the application of consequentialist ethics in the corporate world is fundamentally flawed such that empirical consent, a key element of consequentialism, obtains at the expense of the weaker party to an exchange and that consent-based contracting both precludes the autonomy of the subject and paradoxically invites the influence of the third-part expert. The alternative practice is addressed with respect to the tradition of social contract, which places public ordering over private ordering.

Quality management has been regarded as a valuable strategy or activity for the public sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between implementation of quality management practices and performance in the public sector. Moreover, it investigates what effect the practices have on performance in the public sector by dividing relevant practices into two types of quality management practices based on the previous literature review. By analyzing data on 130 samples of StateOwned Enterprises and 370 samples of para-government agencies, this study reveals that implementing quality management has a positive effect on both financial performance and the customer satisfaction index. In addition, behavioral quality management practices have an indirect effect on the relationship between technical quality management and performance.

In an international context, we examine firms’ strategic choices in the management of knowledge flow. Multinational firms can manage subsidiary knowledge flows by adjusting the level of “localization” in the top management – by sending expatriates to transfer internal knowledge or hiring local managers to source external knowledge. Drawing on a panel data of Japanese overseas subsidiaries across 18 host countries, we find that subsidiaries localized top management more when firms had less internal knowledge and when external knowledge sources were rich. Greater subsidiary and parent local experience altered these two main effects in opposite directions. These findings highlight nuances in firms’ choices of how to manage knowledge flows in foreign markets.

Most data-driven decision support tools do not include input from people. We study whether and how to incorporate physician input into such tools, in an empirical setting of predicting the surgery duration. Using data from a hospital, we evaluate and compare the performances of three families of models: models with physician forecasts, purely data-based models, and models that combine physician forecasts and data. We find that combined models perform the best, which suggests that physician forecasts have valuable information above and beyond what is captured by data. We also find that applying simple corrections to physician forecasts performs comparably well.

Risk sharing among banks helps them diversify idiosyncratic risks, but their interbank borrowing costs can become more volatile and bring financial fragility. Banks facing liquidity shortages need to pay an extra cost of credit when their lenders have bargaining powers, which depends on the likelihood of fire-sale and the fire-sale price discount. Risk sharing can decrease likelihood of liquidity shortage and lower the borrowing cost. However, the fire-sale discount increases, since joint distress arises and more assets are liquidated simultaneously. Though the interbank borrowing cost decreases with risk sharing, it may become more sensitive to changes in aggregate uncertainty.

Using a non-expected utility function that exhibits constant relative risk aversion (CRRA), Cho (2001) explores a theoretical model of asset pricing under heterogeneous beliefs in the case where only one risky asset is traded. This paper extends his work into the case where agents trade a risky asset and the riskless asset as well, adopting a non-expected utility function that exhibits constant absolute risk aversion (CARA). In a variant of the general equilibrium setting of Lucas (1978), major findings of the paper are as follows: (i) When agents differ only in expectations about future dividends, the question of who is the buyer and who is the seller of each asset depends solely on the degree of optimism. Unlike the case of Cho (2001), there is no role of intertemporal substitution. (ii) Increased dispersion of expectations will raise the risk-free rate and lower the risky asset’s price. This result is consistent with that of Abel (1990). (iii) Although the equity premium goes up as a consequence of result (ii), heterogeneity per se does not help to resolve the puzzle posed by Mehra & Prescott (1985) and Weil (1989). (iv) The trading volume of the risky asset increases proportionately with the cross-sectional variance of expectations, and the same is true for the riskless asset. (iv) An increase in the risk-free interest rate will reduce the trading volume of the riskless asset unless the intertemporal substitution parameter is less than 1/2. In addition to these findings, many more comparative statics results are obtained from closed-form solutions for asset prices and trading volume.