"Looking behind the veil": invisible corporate intangibles, stories, structure and the contextual information content of disclosure

Purpose – This paper aims to use a grounded theory approach to reveal that corporate private disclosure content has structure and this is critical in making "invisible" intangibles in corporate value creation visible to capital market participants. Design/methodology/approach – A grounded theory approach is used to develop novel empirical patterns concerning the nature of corporate disclosure content in the form of narrative. This is further developed using literature of value creation and of narrative. Findings – Structure to content is based on common underlying value creation and narrative structures, and the use of similar categories of corporate intangibles in corporate disclosure cases. It is also based on common change or response qualities of the value creation story as well as persistence in telling the core value creation story. The disclosure is a source of information per se and also creates an informed context for capital market participants to interpret the meaning of new events in a more informed way. Research limitations/implications – These insights into the structure of private disclosure content are different to the views of relevant information content implied in public disclosure means such as in financial reports or in the demands of stock exchanges for "material" or price sensitive information. They are also different to conventional academic concepts of (capital market) value relevance. Practical implications – This analysis further develops the grounded theory insights into disclosure content and could help improve new disclosure guidance by regulators. Originality/value – The insights create many new opportunities for developing theory and enhancing public disclosure content. The paper illustrates this potential by exploring new ways of measuring the value relevance of this novel form of contextual information and associated benchmarks. This connects value creation narrative to a conventional value relevance view and could stimulate new types of market event studies

Conservation of information and the foundations of quantum mechanics

We review a recent approach to the foundations of quantum mechanics inspired by quantum information theory. The approach is based on a general framework, which allows one to address a large class of physical theories which share basic information-theoretic features. We first illustrate two very primitive features, expressed by the axioms of causality and purity-preservation, which are satisfied by both classical and quantum theory. We then discuss the axiom of purification, which expresses a strong version of the Conservation of Information and captures the core of a vast number of protocols in quantum information. Purification is a highly non-classical feature and leads directly to the emergence of entanglement at the purely conceptual level, without any reference to the superposition principle. Supplemented by a few additional requirements, satisfied by classical and quantum theory, it provides a complete axiomatic characterization of quantum theory for finite dimensional systems.Comment: 11 pages, contribution to the Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics, July 28-August 6 2014, Orthodox Academy of Crete, Kolymbari, Cret

Do information asymmetries constitute a solid foundation for the elaboration of a Keynesian theory of credit and financial institutions?

In the last 20 years, the New Keynesians (henceforth, NKs) have developed a theoretical approach which aims to elaborate an alternative monetary theory to the on traditionally associated with Keynes. The distinctive feature of this new approach is its emphasis on the credit market and the role played by financial intermediaries rather than the money market; the importance given to the credit market is justified by the presence of asymmetrical information. The objective of this paper is twofold: i) to show that the presence of asymmetric information constitutes a weak premise on which to build a Keynesian theory of credit and financial intermediaries; ii) to outline the elements on which a theory of credit consistent with Keynes's thinking can be built. The paper is divided into three sections. In the first one, the most important aspects of the NK's theory are described; the limitations of this theoretical approach are then demonstrated in the second section; in the third section, the elements which should characterise a Keynesian theory of credit and financial institutions are outlined.

Deformed Density Matrix and Quantum Entropy of the Black Hole

In the present work the approach - density matrix deformation - earlier developed by the author to study a quantum theory of the Early Universe (Planck's scales) is applied to study a quantum theory of black holes. On this basis the author investigates the information paradox problem, entropy of the black hole remainders after evaporation, and consistency with the holographic principle. The possibility for application of the proposed approach to the calculation of quantum entropy of a black hole is considered.Comment: 17 pages, Latex, new referenc

Are banks really special? A note on the theory of financial intermediaries

Economic theory has not paid much attention to the topic of firm financing; this lack of interest was common to the two principal macroeconomic theories, the Keynesian theory and the Monetarist one. This work considers two important exceptions to the mainstream theory. The first coincides with Tobin’s theory. The second exception is constituted by the asymmetric information approach. These two approaches define in a different way the role of banks; Tobin elaborates a ‘new view’ which, in contrast with the ‘old view’, maintains that there are no reasons to attribute a special role to the banks. In contrast with Tobin’s theory, the supporters of the AI approach attribute a special role to the banks but, unlike the ‘old view’, they think that banks’ specificity is justified by the characteristics of their assets rather than by the characteristics of their liabilities. The objective of this paper is twofold: a) to analyse critically Tobin’s approach and the asymmetric information approach; b) to elaborate a theory of financial intermediaries which get over the limits of these two approaches.

Information and the reconstruction of quantum physics

The reconstruction of quantum physics has been connected with the interpretation of the quantum formalism, and has continued to be so with the recent deeper consideration of the relation of information to quantum states and processes. This recent form of reconstruction has mainly involved conceiving quantum theory on the basis of informational principles, providing new perspectives on physical correlations and entanglement that can be used to encode information. By contrast to the traditional, interpretational approach to the foundations of quantum mechanics, which attempts directly to establish the meaning of the elements of the theory and often touches on metaphysical issues, the newer, more purely reconstructive approach sometimes defers this task, focusing instead on the mathematical derivation of the theoretical apparatus from simple principles or axioms. In its most pure form, this sort of theory reconstruction is fundamentally the mathematical derivation of the elements of theory from explicitly presented, often operational principles involving a minimum of extra‐mathematical content. Here, a representative series of specifically information‐based treatments—from partial reconstructions that make connections with information to rigorous axiomatizations, including those involving the theories of generalized probability and abstract systems—is reviewed.Accepted manuscrip

Quantum decision making by social agents

The influence of additional information on the decision making of agents, who are interacting members of a society, is analyzed within the mathematical framework based on the use of quantum probabilities. The introduction of social interactions, which influence the decisions of individual agents, leads to a generalization of the quantum decision theory developed earlier by the authors for separate individuals. The generalized approach is free of the standard paradoxes of classical decision theory. This approach also explains the error-attenuation effects observed for the paradoxes occurring when decision makers, who are members of a society, consult with each other, increasing in this way the available mutual information. A precise correspondence between quantum decision theory and classical utility theory is formulated via the introduction of an intermediate probabilistic version of utility theory of a novel form, which obeys the requirement that zero-utility prospects should have zero probability weights.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the authors because a much extended and improved version has been submitted as arXiv:1510.02686 under the new title "Role of information in decision making of social agents

Rough sets theory for travel demand analysis in Malaysia

This study integrates the rough sets theory into tourism demand analysis. Originated from the area of Artificial Intelligence, the rough sets theory was introduced to disclose important structures and to classify objects. The Rough Sets methodology provides definitions and methods for finding which attributes separates one class or classification from another. Based on this theory can propose a formal framework for the automated transformation of data into knowledge. This makes the rough sets approach a useful classification and pattern recognition technique. This study introduces a new rough sets approach for deriving rules from information table of tourist in Malaysia. The induced rules were able to forecast change in demand with certain accuracy