Fundamental changes in the market environment force insurance intermediaries to redefine their roles. This article focuses on the future functions of brokers, which are analyzed from a functional as well as a customer-oriented perspective. To cope with the limitations of current intermediation research, the customer-value approach is applied as an alternative framework. This approach suggests t...

The importance of using healthcare evidence by policymakers is widely recognized [1,2]. For over a decade, several strategies to improve the use of knowledge by policy makers have been promoted [3,4]. Among them, the use of individuals called “intermediaries” or “knowledge brokers” is presented as a potential strategy [5,6]. Situated at the organizational interface, these actors benefit from a ...

We combine data on individual trade transactions from U.S. customs records with comprehensive information on firms' employment from the Census Bureau's business register to examine wholesalers and retailers in U.S. exports and imports. Exporters and importers with 100 percent employment in wholesale and retail differ from pure "producer and consumer" trading firms along a number of dimensions: ...

The number and size of information services available on the internet has been growing exponentially over the past few years. This growth has created an urgent need for information agents that act as brokers in the sense that they can autonomously search, gather, and integrate information on behalf of a user. To remain useful, such brokers will have to evolve throughout their lifetime to keep u...

Although brokers’ trading is endemic in securities markets, the form of this trading differs between markets. Whereas in some securities markets, brokers may trade with their customers in the same transaction (simultaneous dual trading or SDT), in other markets, brokers are only allowed to trade after their customers in a separate transaction (consecutive dual trading or CDT). We show theoretic...

This paper is concerned with the design and implementation of MICOSim, an event-driven simulator written in Java for evaluating the performance of Grid entities (users, brokers and resources) under different scenarios such as varying the numbers of users, resources and brokers and varying their specifications and employed strategies. Keywords—Grid computing; Economic Scheduling; Simulation; Eve...

Prime brokers and hedge funds form relationships in a matching market. What are the determinants of these matches? How did they change after the financial crisis? I estimate a matching model in which part of the profits of prime brokers and hedge funds depends on variables that are defined at the level of the entire portfolio of clients that a prime broker serves. I show that prime brokers and ...