T study examines the use of wine futures (i.e., advance selling of wine before it is bottled) as a form of operational flexibility to mitigate quality rating risk. At the end of a harvest season, the winemaker obtains a certain number of barrels of wine that can be produced for a particular vintage. While the wine is aging in the barrel, expert reviewers taste the wine and create a barrel score...

In a highly interdependent economic world, the nature of relationships between financial entities is becoming an increasingly important area of study. Recently, many studies have shown the usefulness of minimal spanning trees (MST) in extracting interactions between financial entities. Here, we propose a modified MST network whose metric distance is defined in terms of cross-correlation coeffic...

The timing option embedded in a futures contract allows the short position to decide when to deliver the underlying asset during the last month of the contract period. In this paper we derive, within a very general incomplete market framework, an explicit model independent formula for the futures price process in the presence of a timing option. We also provide a characterization of the optimal...

A 24-hour exchange market was created on the Web to trade political futures contracts using fictitious money. In this online market, a political futures contract is a futures contract which matures on the election day with a liquidation price determined by the percentage of votes a candidate receives on the election day. Continuous double auctions were implemented as the system for order storag...

We document the impact of early stages COVID-19 pandemic on liquidity in U.S. agricultural markets. Notably, we show that soybean futures-market depth collapses weeks before financial markets’ crash March 2020. Soybean futures is affected earliest, most, and longest. drops by half for outright over 90 percent calendar spreads, bid-ask spreads increase significantly. This pullback starts night F...

In this paper, we propose a one-factor regime-switching model for the risk adjusted natural gas spot price and study the implications of the model on the valuation and optimal operation of natural gas storage facilities. We calibrate the model parameters to both market futures and options on futures. Calibration results indicate that the regime-switching model is a better fit to market data com...

This article examines the behavior and performance of speculators and hedgers in 15 U.S. futures markets. We find that after controlling for market risk factors, speculators are contrarians, but respond positively to market sentiment. In contrast, hedgers engage in positive feedback trading and trade against market sentiment. We also find that trades of speculators (hedgers) are positively (neg...