The role of trust in financial sector development

In any economic environment where decisions are decentralized, agents consider the risk that others might unfairly exploit informational asymmetries to their own disadvantage. Incomplete results, especially, lies at the heart of financial transactions in which agents trade real claims for promises of future real claims. Agents thus need to invest considerable resources to assess the trustworthiness of others with whom they know they can interact only under conditions of limited and asymmetrically distributed information. Thinking of finance as the complex of institutions and instruments needed to reduce the cost of trading promises among anonymous individuals who do not fully trust each other, the author analyzes how incomplete trust shapes the transaction costs in trading assets, and how it affects resource allocation and pricing decisions from rational, forward-looking agents. His analysis leads to core propositions about the role of finance and financial efficiency in economic development. He recommends areas of financial sector reform in emerging economies aimed at improving the financial system's efficiency in dealing with incomplete trust. Among other things, the public sector can improve trust in finance by improving financial infrastructure, including legal systems, financial regulation, and security in payment and trading systems. But fundamental improvements in financial efficiency may best be gained by eliciting good conduct through market forces.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Decentralization,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform,Insurance&Risk Mitigation

Improving Informational Bases of Performance Measurement with Grey Relation Analysis

Performance measurement (PM) needs objective empirical data with causal relevance in order to steer and control financial performance generation. In business practice, there is often a lack of such objective data. A surrogate might be collected subjectively based on data generated by questioning corporate experts. Such an involvement of subjects can rapidly lead to an immense extent of data that (partially) imply incomplete information. To handle this imperfection of data, the Grey systems theory (GST) and especially its element, the Grey relation analysis (GRA), seem to be methodologies able to improve informational bases for PM purposes. Therefore, GRA is able to reveal those performance indicators that considerably influence the corporate financial performance, the key performance indicators. GRA is able to supply valid results with only four data points of a time series. Hence, the GST provides an improvement of the PM framework in situations of incomplete information, which is demonstrated in the following

Textual Economy through Close Coupling of Syntax and Semantics

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in Pollack's sense. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation and reasoning used in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator's simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization.Comment: 10 pages, uses QobiTree.te

Privacy, Ideology, and Technology: A Response to Jeffrey Rosen

This essay reviews Jeffrey Rosen’s The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (2000). Rosen offers a compelling (and often hair-raising) account of the pervasive dissolution of the boundary between public and private information. This dissolution is both legal and social; neither the law nor any other social institution seems to recognize many limits on the sorts of information that can be subjected to public scrutiny. The book also provides a rich, evocative characterization of the dignitary harms caused by privacy invasion. Rosen’s description of the sheer unfairness of being “judged out of context” rings instantly true. Privacy, Rosen concludes, is indispensable to human well-being and is at risk of being destroyed unless we act fast. The book is far less convincing, however, when it moves beyond description and attempts to identify the causes of the destruction of privacy and propose solutions. Why is privacy under siege today? The incidents that Rosen chooses as illustrations both reveal and obscure. From Monica Lewinsky’s unsent, deleted e-mails to the private online activities of corporate employees and the Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, the examples offer a rich stew of technology, corporate mind control, public scapegoating, and political intrigue. But for the most part, Rosen seems to think that it is sex that is primarily to blame for these developments—though how, exactly, Rosen cannot seem to decide. He suggests, variously, that we seek private information out of prurient fascination with other people’s intimate behavior, or to enforce upon others authoritarian notions of “correct” interpersonal behavior, or to inform moral judgments about others based on a hasty and ill-conceived equivalence between the personal and the political. Or perhaps Rosen is simply upset about the loss of privacy for a specific sort of (sexual or intimate) behavior, whatever the origin of society’s impulse to pry. Yet there are puzzling anomalies in Rosen’s account. Most notably, appended to Rosen’s excavation of recent sex-related privacy invasions is a chapter on privacy in cyberspace. This chapter sits uneasily in relation to the rest of the book. Its focus is not confined to sex-related privacy, and Rosen does not explain how the more varied information-gathering activities chronicled there bear on his earlier analysis. Rosen acknowledges as much and offers, instead, the explanation that intimate privacy and cyberspace privacy are simply two examples of the same problem: the risk of being judged out of context in a world of short attention spans, and the harms to dignity that follow. This explanation seems far too simple, and more than a bit circular. Why this rush to judge others out of context? Necessity is one answer—if attention spans are limited, we cannot avoid making decisions based on incomplete information—but where does the necessity to judge come from? And what do computers and digital networking technologies—factors that recur not only in the chapter on cyberspace privacy, but also in most of Rosen’s other examples—have to do with it? This Review Essay argues, first, that the use of personal information to sort and classify individuals is inextricably bound up with the fabric of our political economy. As Part II explains, the unfettered use of “true” information to predict risk and minimize uncertainty is a hallmark of the liberal state and its constituent economic and political markets. Not sex, but money, and more broadly an ideology about the predictive power of isolated facts, generate the perceived necessity to judge individuals based on incomplete profiles. The harms of this rush to judgment—harms not only to dignity, but also to economic welfare and more fundamentally to individual autonomy—may undermine liberal individualism (as Rosen argues), but they are products of it as well. Part III argues, further, that the problem of vanishing informational privacy in digital networked environments is not sui generis, but rather is central to understanding the destruction of privacy more generally. This is not simply because new technologies reduce the costs of collecting, exchanging, and processing the traditional sorts of consumer information. The profit-driven search for personal information via digital networks is also catalyzing an erosion of the privacy that individuals have customarily enjoyed in their homes, their private papers, and even their thoughts. This process is transforming not only the way we experience privacy, but also the way we understand it. Privacy is becoming not only harder to protect, but also harder to justify protecting. Part IV concludes that shifting these mutually reinforcing ideological and technological vectors will require more drastic intervention than Rosen suggests

Privacy, Visibility, Transparency, and Exposure

This essay considers the relationship between privacy and visibility in the networked information age. Visibility is an important determinant of harm to privacy, but a persistent tendency to conceptualize privacy harms and expectations in terms of visibility has created two problems. First, focusing on visibility diminishes the salience and obscures the operation of nonvisual mechanisms designed to render individual identity, behavior, and preferences transparent to third parties. The metaphoric mapping to visibility suggests that surveillance is simply passive observation, rather than the active production of categories, narratives, and, norms. Second, even a broader conception of privacy harms as a function of informational transparency is incomplete. Privacy has a spatial dimension as well as an informational dimension. The spatial dimension of the privacy interest, which the author characterizes as an interest in avoiding or selectively limiting exposure, concerns the structure of experienced space. It is not negated by the fact that people in public spaces expect to be visible to others present in those spaces, and it encompasses both the arrangement of physical spaces and the design of networked communications technologies. U.S. privacy law and theory currently do not recognize this interest at all. This essay argues that they should

Robust implementation under alternative information structures

In this paper we consider a model in which agents have complete information about their neighbours and, possibly, incomplete information about the rest of the economy. We consider two different informational frameworks. In the first, agents do not have priors about what is going on in the rest of the economy. In the second, agents are supposed to have priors about the unknown characteristics. We present a mechanism which any social choice correspondence satisfying monotonicity and no veto powet in both informational settings for every possible prior thus requiring little knowledge from the point of view of the designer of the information possesed by agents about the economy