An important challenge faced by media broadcasting companies is how to allocate limited advertising space between upfront contracts and the spot market (referred to in advertising as the scatter market), in order to maximize profits and meet contractual commitments. We develop stylized optimization models of airtime capacity planning and allocation across multiple clients under audience uncerta...

The efficient market hypothesis states that an efficient market immediately incorporates all available information into the price of the traded entity. It is well established that the stock market is not an efficient market as it consists of numerous traders with differing strategies and interpretations of information. However there is substantial evidence to suggest that the stock market does ...

Supermarkets and hypermarkets already dominate the markets of some larger cities, and their continued expansion from major cities into smaller cities is expected to further drive competition in the grocery retail sector. Of the various retail channels, hypermarkets are expected to have the most growth potential in the Chinese market and are benefitting from consumer trends toward convenience an...

Most skills acquired through on-the-job training may be specific to an occupation and therefore transferable to some but not all firms. However, economists have typically focused on skills that are either specific to a given firm or skills that are completely general. This paper explores the relationship between the size of the local market for an occupation-specific skill and job-training outc...

A thin market is a market with few buying or selling offers. The concept of market thinness, while general, is typically used in the context of financial markets. When the number of buying or selling offers is small, investors' trading positions are large relative to market size. Trading then requires price concessions and thus exerts an impact on prices. A thin market is characterized by low t...

This paper studies the inventive performance and profitability of small and medium sized firms (SMEs) that are “technology specialists” compared to the inventive performance and profitability of SMEs that are instead vertically-integrated. In this paper perspective, “technology specialists” are firms that specialize upstream in generating inventions and trade those inventions in disembodied for...

The transition from conventional power sources to renewable energy sources is taking place in a number of European countries. Electric energy storage has been proposed as an environmentally friendly solution to make this transition possible. This thesis analyzes the profitability of investing in a battery bank in Germany and the UK, using a real options model. The model determines the option va...

The paper investigates issues of scale equivalence and generalisability across different populations. This area of research is important because it allows for valid comparisons to be made when studies investigate the same constructs across qualitatively distinct populations. The study investigates the generalisability of the Narver and Slater (1990) and the Kholi, Jaworski and Kumar (1993) mode...