This study examined the effects of trade liberalization and exchange rate changes on carbohydrate staples in Nigeria. Secondary data published from 1974 to 2006 on cassava exports and rice imports as well as non-tradable carbohydrate staples were used. It was hypothesized that exchange rate changes and trade liberalization via price relatives, trade intensity and nominal protection coefficient ...

Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds are rapidly evolving into market-like environments that offer a wide range of server contracts. Amazon EC2’s spot market is the clearest example of this trend: it operates over 5000 markets globally where users can rent servers for a variable price. To exploit spot instances, while mitigating the risk of price spikes and revocations, many researchers and start...

Using data from one of the Internet’s leading price comparison sites for consumer electronics products, we present evidence for the persistence of price dispersion for 36 homogeneous products. The markets for these products are “thick” with an average of over 20 firms selling each product. We show that prices do not converge to the “law of one price” even after an 18 month period. This finding ...

The arbitrage-free range of values of the loss leg of an nth-to-default swap, and the arbitrage-free range of premium payments for such a swap, are derived for homogeneous baskets of arbitrary numbers of reference entities. Elementary arbitrage arguments are given which show that arbitrage opportunities exist if the prices lie outside of the bounds, and analyses of both a discrete-time model an...

We investigate whether car buyers are myopic about future fuel costs. We estimate the e↵ect of gasoline prices on short-run equilibrium prices of cars of di↵erent fuel economies. We then compare the implied changes in willingness-to-pay to the associated changes in expected future gasoline costs for cars of di↵erent fuel economies in order to calculate implicit discount rates. Using di↵erent as...

The aim of this paper is to present impact studies of economic and environment related constraints on the German electricity spot market. The analysis was carried out using the system dynamics based model for the German electricity market, called “Zertsim”. The model was applied for the first time in a workshop with entrepreneurs from the region of Karlsruhe in Germany. One result of the worksh...

The `volatility smile' is one of the well-known biases of Black-Scholes models for pricing options. In this paper, we introduce a robust method of reducing this bias by pricing subject to a deterministic functional volatility = (S; t). This instantaneous volatility is chosen as a spline whose weights are determined by a regularised numerical strategy that approximately minimises the di erence b...

Rapid changes in technology can have a sudden and differential impact on cost components of variants within product lines such as computers, printers, digital cameras and cellular phones. How should retailers react to such changes? We address this issue by answering three questions. First, when the costs of specific product components change (perhaps, precipitously), how should retailers adapt ...