3,258 research outputs found

    A study of the effects of changing raw material prices and varying interest rates on the stockholding decisions of a small manufacturing company

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    A study is made of the inventory control procedures in a manufacturing company with an annual turnover of around £5M. The study is made at a time of fluctuating prices and varying interest rates in order to determine both their effect on, and ways of improving, the control procedures. The study concentrates on one of the many stock items carried, peppermint oil, it being fairly typical. The study lists the main costs of establishing and growing peppermint in Washington State. The study reveals the importance of price forecasting in the determination of timing and quantity of purchases. Various price forecasting methods including that due to Box and Jenkins are tested and found wanting for one reason or another. The ordinary economic order quantity formula is modified to take account of fluctuating prices and varying interest rates. It is then tested with an assumption of perfect price forecasts against the performance of the firm’s buyer over the years 1971-1978. The results indicate that the buyer possesses faculties which cannot yet, if ever, be emulated by machine based formulas. Normally economic models are devised with the assumption that the purchaser is at least risk-neutral if not risk-averse. This study reveals a pronounced bias in the opposite direction, namely risk-preference, in the case of essential oil traders. The study, in examining the market structure, also shows that there are peppermint farmers in the western United States who are both willing and able to make direct contracts with importers in the United Kingdom in order to eliminate the risks associated with dealing through second and third parties. The absence of a formal controlled market for the particular oil studied is noted together with the buyer’s inability uO ’hedge’ except with purchases of other equally risky oils. It is recommended that the possibility of such a market being organised be further investigated

    Complexity in Economic and Social Systems

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    There is no term that better describes the essential features of human society than complexity. On various levels, from the decision-making processes of individuals, through to the interactions between individuals leading to the spontaneous formation of groups and social hierarchies, up to the collective, herding processes that reshape whole societies, all these features share the property of irreducibility, i.e., they require a holistic, multi-level approach formed by researchers from different disciplines. This Special Issue aims to collect research studies that, by exploiting the latest advances in physics, economics, complex networks, and data science, make a step towards understanding these economic and social systems. The majority of submissions are devoted to financial market analysis and modeling, including the stock and cryptocurrency markets in the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic risk quantification and control, wealth condensation, the innovation-related performance of companies, and more. Looking more at societies, there are papers that deal with regional development, land speculation, and the-fake news-fighting strategies, the issues which are of central interest in contemporary society. On top of this, one of the contributions proposes a new, improved complexity measure

    Currency Crises in Emerging - Market Economis: Causes, Consequences and Policy Lessons

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    Currency crises have been recorded for a few hundreds years but their frequency increased in the second half of the 20th century along with a rapid expansion of a number of fiat currencies. Increased integration and sophistication of financial markets brought new forms and more global character of the crises episodes. Eichengreen, Rose and Wyplosz (1994) propose the operational definition, which helps to select the episodes most closely fitting the intuitive understanding of a currency crisis (a sudden decline in confidence towards a specific currency). Among fundamental causes of currency crises one can point to the excessive expansion and over-borrowing of the public and private sectors, and inconsistent and nontransparent economic policies. Over-expansion and overborrowing manifest themselves in an excessive current account deficit, currency overvaluation, increasing debt burden, insufficient international reserves, and deterioration of other frequently analyzed indicators. Inconsistent policies (including the so-called intermediate exchange rate regimes) increase market uncertainty and can trigger speculative attack against the domestic currency. After a crisis has already happened, the ability to manage economic policies in a consistent and credible way becomes crucial for limiting the crisis' scope, duration and negative consequences. Among the dilemmas that the authorities face in such circumstances is the decision on readjustment of an exchange rate regime, as the previous regime is usually the first institutional victim of any successful speculative attack. The consequences of currency crises are usually severe and typically involve output and employment losses, fall in real incomes of a population, deep contraction in investment and capital flight. Also the credibility of domestic economic policies is ruined. In some cases a crisis can serve as the economic and political catharsis: devaluation helps to temporarily restore competitiveness and improve a current account position, the crisis shock brings the new, reform-oriented government, and politicians may draw some lessons for future. The responsible macroeconomic policy can help to diminish a risk of an occurrence of a currency crisis. It involves balanced and transparent fiscal accounts, proper monetary-fiscal policy mix, and low inflation, avoiding indexation of nominal variables and intermediate monetary/ exchange rate regimes. On the microeconomic level key elements include privatization, demonopolization and introduction of efficient competition policy, prudential regulation of the financial sector, trade openness, and simple, fair and transparent tax system. All the above should help elimination of soft budget constraints, overborrowing on the side of both private and public sector and moral hazard problems. All these measures need to be strengthened by legal reforms, efficient and fair judiciary system, implementation of international accounting, reporting and disclosure standards, transparent corporate and public governance rules, and many other elements. Reforms can be supported by the IMF and other international organizations, which on their part should depoliticize their actions and decision-making processes, sticking to the professional criteria of country assessment and their consequent execution.currency crisis, financial crisis, contagion, emerging markets, transition economies, exchange rates, monetary policy, fiscal policy, balance of payments, debt, devaluation

    Qualitative Research in Gambling

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    Gambling is both a multi-billion-dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and ‘agile’. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of ‘problem gambling’ in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including geography, organisational studies, sociology, East Asian studies and anthropology to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technologies, the gambling industry and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including: the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalising technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; and the rise of games, virtual worlds and social media

    Cryptocurrency trading as a Markov Decision Process

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    A gestão de portefólio é um problema em que, em vez de olhar para ativos únicos, o objetivo é olhar para um portefólio ou um conjunto de ativos como um todo. O objetivo é ter o melhor portefólio, a cada momento, enquanto tenta maximizar os lucros no final de uma sessão de trading. Esta tese aborda esta problemática, empregando algoritmos de Deep Reinforcement Learning, num ambiente que simula uma sessão de trading. É também apresentada a implementação desta metodologia proposta, aplicada a 11 criptomoedas e cinco algoritmos DRL. Foram avaliados três tipos de condições de mercado: tendência de alta, tendência de baixa e lateralização. Cada condição de mercado em cada algoritmo foi avaliada, usando três funções de recompensa diferentes, no ambiente de negociação, e todos os diferentes cenários foram testados contra as estratégias de gestão de portefólio clássicas, como seguir o vencedor, seguir o perdedor e portefólios igualmente distribuídos. Assim, esta estratégia foi o benchmark mais performativo e os modelos que produziram os melhores resultados tiveram uma abordagem semelhante, diversificar e segurar. Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient apresentou-se como o algoritmo mais estável, junto com seu algoritmo de extensão, Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient. Proximal Policy Optimization foi o único algoritmo que não conseguiu produzir resultados decentes ao comparar com as estratégias de benchmark e outros algoritmos de Deep Reinforcement Learning.The problem with portfolio management is that, instead of looking at single assets, the goal is to look at a portfolio or a set of assets as a whole. The objective is to have the best portfolio at each given time while trying to maximize profits at the end of a trading session. This thesis addresses this issue by employing the Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms in a cryptocurrency trading environment which simulates a trading session. It is also presented the implementation of this proposed methodology applied to 11 cryptocurrencies and five Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms. Three types of market conditions were evaluated namely, up trending or bullish, down trending or bearish, and lateralization or sideways. Each market condition in each algorithm was evaluated using three different reward functions in the trading environment and all different scenarios were back tested against old school portfolio management strategies such as following-the-winner, following-the-loser, and equally weighted portfolios. The results seem to indicate that an equally-weighted portfolio is an hard to beat strategy in all market conditions. This strategy was the most performative benchmark and the models that produced the best results had a similar approach, diversify and hold. Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient presented itself to be the most stable algorithm along with its extension algorithm, Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient. Proximal Policy Optimization was the only algorithm that could not produce decent results when comparing with the benchmark strategies and other Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms

    THEORETISING THE FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS of THE PROCESS of FINANCIAL CRIMES in COMPARATIVE ECONOMIC SYSTEMS: An Attempt in Grounded Theory

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    Financial crimes have become one of the most destructive types of crime in post-industrial societies in terms of economic and financial consequences. While the importance of financial institutions in the modern economic system cannot be negated, their critical function in the society with their enormous powers brings about many questions, especially in relation to systems of checks and balances. The increasing number of adverse examples in the last decades provide evidence for the enormous negative consequences of corporate failures resulting from shortcomings in the checks and balances. This study, hence, is motivated by the current financial failures, and aims at exploring and examining financial crimes in terms of the process of becoming a financial white-collar criminal in various financial systems, namely capitalist, socialist and Islamic systems, as well as exploring the vulnerability and propensity of each system in relation to financial crimes. In addition, this study, departing from the shortcomings of Eurocentric understanding and referring to cultural and religious norms, aims to re-conceptualise some of the concepts, subcategories and dimensions with the objective of developing and theorising an improved version of rational choice theory in criminology for a better comparison. In fulfilling the aims of the study, a discourse analysis approach through a deconstruction method is utilised to locate and identify the underpinnings of the existing theoretical frameworks through comparative case study as a method, by comparing extreme cases of market/capitalist finance, socialist/transitional and Islamic/moral finance. In addition, grounded theory is used as a method to construct a modified version of the existing theories by using a number of formal codes such as ‘motivation’, ‘environment’, ‘target’, ‘guardian’ as concepts and ‘opportunity spaces’, ‘real, perceived selves’, ‘ideal and feared’, ‘need and guarding gaps’, ‘haste’, ‘expectations’, ‘deviance’, ‘crime motivation’, ‘act of crime’ etc. as subcategories and ‘material’, ‘social’ and ‘moral’ as dimensions. Such an attempt is rationalised on the ground that the current criminology theories are unfortunately linear theories and they do not make decisions about a regular person. Therefore, there is no crime theory that is confident enough to receive a regular person and make dynamic, relativist, complex analysis about them in prospect, depending on the changing conditions of the inner and outer world of the individual, unlike the ‘complex theory of crime’ produced by this research through grounded theory. A comparative analysis to order the financial systems according to their vulnerability to financial crimes is also provided in this study using the ‘opportunity spaces’ concept of the grounded theory which develops the classical ‘opportunity’ argument of the rational choice theory to almost a small theory of opportunity. This analysis suggests that the most vulnerable financial system to financial crime is the market based financial system, which is followed by socialist/transitional and Islamized financial systems. The comparative analysis of the study on crime propensities of financial systems also confirms the literature on economic and financial systems that argues that the financial systems are converging despite their strong and distinctive ontological and epistemological differences and capacities to enrich and improve each other. The theoretical model developed in this study reveals that crime motivation is only an extension of ordinary motivation and has a dynamic nature. Dynamic in both the micro world of the individual and his/her close social/physical environment and also the macro environment in terms of the wider space of political-economy and social culture. This study fills an important gap in criminology literature which has been sought for decades since the 1970s. Indeed, the resultant theory in this study is unique in its approach because it is a micro-founded macro theory, unlike all the criminology theories which have either micro (biological, psychological theories, control theories) or macro (i.e. symbolic interactions, social bonds theory, life-course theory, conflict theory) foundations

    Three implications of learning behaviour for price processes.

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    no abstract availableConsumers' preferences; Economics -- Psychological aspects;
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