OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of targeted marginal annual investments by local healthcare commissioners on the outcomes they expected to achieve with these investments. DESIGN Controlled before and after study. SETTING 152 commissioning organisations (primary care trusts) in England. METHODS National surveys of commissioning managers in 2009 and 2010 to identify: the largest margina...

We present analytical investigations of a multiplicative stochastic process that models a simple investor dynamics in a random environment. The dynamics of the investor’s budget, x(t), depends on the stochasticity of the return on investment, r(t), for which different model assumptions are discussed. The fat-tail distribution of the budget is investigated and compared with theoretical predictio...

Using firm age as a proxy for the learning process within a firm, we show that the investments of young firms react more aggressively to profit realizations than the investments of mature firms. With time, firms learn about their long-term quality and their investment decisions become less influenced by the random shocks they receive. We also show that the learning process depends on the volati...

INTRODUCTION Electronic data interchange (EDI) technology gives organizations an opportunity to exchange their information and messages electronically, instead of with paper documents, and leads to a new way of doing business known as electronic commerce (EC). The benefits of EDI include less delay in data handling and labour savings in the areas of data transcription, controls, and error inves...

In the past, international real estate investment has consisted of direct equity investment in foreign countries. Such investments have traditionally been considered to provide diversification benefits given that it was assumed that such properties were affected predominately by their respective domestic economies. Of course another benefit of international investment is the ability to seek out...

This paper proposes a new approach for portfolio allocation. The novel concept of forward dynamic utility is introduced. General classes of such utilities are constructed by combining the local variational utility input with the market dynamics represented by multidimensional Ito process. Explicit closed form expressions for optimal allocations are obtained. They depend exclusively on the optim...

This paper will present a simple coin toss model which will illustrate the effect of collusion and its impact on the expected payoff for any given player. Such a game has direct links to community investment clubs where people are aggregating their investments. Without any knowledge about the impact of collusion such behaviour and its significant can be hard to detect. This paper will also revi...

This study investigates the politico-economic determinants of the crowding-in effects of public investments in a cross-section of 25 developing countries for the 1975-2000 period using multivariate probit analysis. The estimation results show that public fixed capital investments may crowd in private investments, but this still depends on the developments in the economic, political, and legal e...

Mississippi forest landowners were surveyed to determine average discount rates or “hurdle rates”—the lowest rates of return they consider acceptable—for 3 nonforestry investments, and for 5, 15, and 25 yr forestry investments. The survey included 829 individuals who owned at least 20 ac of uncultivated land and had harvested timber during a recent 5 yr period; survey results are therefore orie...