The first author would like to record his gratitude to the Julian Hodge Foundation for its support, and to Hong Kong Baptist University for its hospitality during the writing of this paper.

Doing research on future and emerging technologies raises a number of significant ontological and epistemological challenges. The fundamental uncertainty of the future, combined with problems of appropriate descriptions of technology in general, render it difficult to come to an appropriate account of the likely shape and use of future technologies. This paper discusses several streams of resea...

In the absence of market frictions, the cost of carry model of stock index futures pricing predicts that returns on the underlying stock index and the associated stock index futures contract will be perfectly contemporaneously correlated. Evidence suggests, however, that this prediction is violated with clear evidence that the stock index futures market leads the stock market. We argue that tra...

Allaz and Vila (1993) show that oligopolistic industries may become more competitive if a futures market is added previous to the spot market. Later, Hughes and Kao (1997) show that this result occurs only if positions in the futures market are observed, and that without this condition the result is again the Cournot equilibrium. In this work we study different explicit formulations of observab...

Pricing and estimation issues of exponential aÆne stochastic volatility models are discussed. One speci c model is estimated with Chicago Board of Trade futures price data, where the instantaneous mean and volatility of commodity spot price are allowed to be time varying. Model performance is evaluated based on its t to the futures price term structure and the model implied state variable behav...