Some argue that managers cannot operate with multiple measurements of business-unit performance. While they recognize that aggregate financial measures (such as operating income, return on investment, and economic value added) are not perfect by themselves, they claim that financial measures at least are well understood and provide clear, unambiguous, and objective goals on which all organizati...

In recent years, efforts have been made for automatically identifying opinions, emotions and sentiments in text. The problem considered in this paper is the analysis of messages uttered by the users of a telephone service in response to a recorded message that asks if a problem they had was satisfactorily solved. Very often in these cases, subjective information is combined with factual informa...

Keywords: Using data of short rates from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland money market, I find predictive power in the term spread of 3-, 6-, and 12 month maturities for the future one-month interest rate. Evidence with regard to the pure expectations theory is ambiguous, the theory is generally rejected for the Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway. However for the UK mark...

This paper investigates the impacts of the liberalisation of the European electricity market. We apply a game theoretic modelling framework in order to assess the economic consequences of different market behaviour. It turns out that, because of different developments of European countries, some countries benefit substantially by strategic market behaviour whereas others could also profit from ...

I present a model for consumer boycotts. The more a firm complies with consumers’ wishes, the higher its marginal cost, but the lower the probability of facing a consumer boycott. I show that the threat of a consumer boycott can increase the expected profits of firms. Firms lose out when they do face a boycott, but gain even more when their competitor does, giving them more market power. The st...

We consider a model of endogenous human capital formation with competitively determined wages. Discrimination is sustainable in equilibrium in the presence of two distinguishable, but ex ante identical groups of workers. An affirmative action policy consisting of a quota may ‘fail’ in the sense that there still may be equilibria where groups are treated differently. However, the incentives to i...