TRENDS AND CHALLENGES OF ROMANIAN BROKERAGE INSURANCE MARKET

The distribution of insurance products represents a key aspect regarding theattainment of positive results by insurers. Insurance brokers represent one of the majordistribution channels in some national markets, including Romania. The present paper aimsat highlighting the importance of insurance brokerage on the Romanian market, analyzing theevolution of brokers in quantitative terms and also grasping the main characteristics of therecent evolution of this market. Based on the official statistics, the paper emphasizes the mainmanagerial aspects that have guided and will guide the Romanian brokerage market, as wellas the challenges brokers will have to solve in order to have a positive development.insurance, brokers, distribution channels

An Examination of the Market Structure of the U.S. Produce Industry

Recent literature, largely from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, indicates that substantial changes have occurred in the produce industry in recent years. With the rise of retail mass merchandisers and increased concentration in the retail food industry, the procurement power of these large firms reportedly has also increased. With direct buying and contracting, market intermediaries such as brokers and wholesalers allegedly are being bypassed. As a result, these market intermediaries ostensibly are also consolidating becoming fewer and larger with increased emphasis on servicing the food service industry. However, the findings of this study indicate that there is no convincing evidence that the market structure of the U.S. produce industry has markedly changed since the early 1980s. While supermarket concentration has increased noticeably, the same cannot be said for produce market intermediaries such as brokers and wholesalers.Agribusiness, Industrial Organization, Marketing,

Playing In Between: Patents’ Brokers In Markets For Technology

We here argue that patent brokers do not only stay in between supply and demand of innovation, but play in between executing complex transactions and taking entrepreneurial risk. In doing so they serve a support function to R&D managers of firms adopting various approaches to technological change. We discuss how economic and sociological theories explain brokerage and its existence. Our qualitative analysis of the current practice of patent brokerage in the U.S. finds only partial evidence in support of such argumentations. We conclude with our own proposition, suggesting that even in very dense environments, the bridging role of intellectual property intermediaries is that of market makers, who leverage their specific investment to play in between technology demand and supply.Open Innovation intermediaries patents intellectual property

E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..

Goal-Oriented RE for E-Services

Current research in service-oriented computing (SoC) is mainly\ud about technology standards for SoC and the design of software components that\ud implement these standards. In this paper we investigate the problem of\ud requirements engineering (RE) for SoC. We propose a framework for goaloriented\ud RE for e-services that identifies patterns in service provisioning and\ud shows how to compose business models from them. Based on an analysis of 19\ud business models for e-intermediaries we identified 10 intermediation service\ud patterns and their goals, and show how we can compose new business models\ud from those patterns in a goal-oriented way. We represent the service patterns\ud using value models, which are models that show which value exchanges\ud business patterns engage in. We conclude the paper with a discussion of how\ud this approach can be extended to include business process patterns to perform\ud the services, and software components that support these processes

Web-Based Brokerage System Development

Electronic Commerce (ecommerce) depends on the emergence of capabilities that empower buyers to obtain the product data they need to make informed purchase decisions, quickly and easily. Traditional physical markets are often brokered by intermediaries that facilitate market transitions by providing brokerage services. In the global Internet Electronic Brokers provide a central marketplace, and provide many essential third party services. Electronic Brokerages are regarded as the core functionality in overcoming many current limitation of Internet Commerce. Also, search costs, lack of privacy, incomplete information, contracting risk, and pricing are better managed with Electronic Brokers. However, Brokers are currently facing the problem of combining all the information within a single coherent structure through which buyers can navigate readily. This is due to the lack of interoperability standards between ecommerce applications, which leads to high costs for the brokers. The research is to design a framework for building a web-based brokerage system. The system plays a central role in allowing service providers to publish and advertise their offer and at the same time helping the consumer to access easily and in a moderate manner the offered services and information and try to solve the problem of interoperability. Consumer Buying Behavior model which consists of six stages that defines the decision process and acts of people involved in buying and using products had been applied in the design of the system. In addition to offering many essential third party services, the system offers some tasks, which simplify the functionality of brokers, which override the limitations of Internet e-commerce. Client-server communication that uses 3-tier architecture had been used to override the 2-tier limitations and enhance the security features of the system. To achieve the requirements of such as online e-commerce application Java servlets with JDBC on the server side, HTML and JavaScript on the client side are used. Unified Modeling Language (UML) had been applied in order to determine system structure and system behavior from user/system requirements. The study shows that online brokerage can replace traditional brokers with additional functionality. By designing reusable components and using certain tools will try to solve Interoperability problem between ecommerce applications. Java servlets shown as a powerful tool to be used on server side in this type of application which can help to override some limitations of Internet e-commerce