The Effects of E-commerce on the Structure of Intermediation

The paper questions the notion that the diffusion of electronic commerce will lead to disintermediation. Rather than interpreting intermediation as a single service it is pointed out that intermediaries can provide a number of services. The analysis based on the New Institutional Economics, Market Microstructure Theory, and Information Economics shows that the three intermediation services studied are, generally, not under threat by the diffusion of electronic commerce. The overall effects on intermediation depend on the relevance of these services relative to others (e.g. order processing) which are supposed to become obsolete.B2C eCommerce, intermediation, new institutional economics

Value at Risk and Inventory Control

The purposes of this paper are two-fold. On the one hand, we shall provide a decision analysis justification for the Value at Risk (VaR) approach based on ex-post, disappointment decision making arguments. We shall show that the approach is justified by a disappointment criterion. In other words, the asymmetric valuation between ex-ante expected returns above an appropriate target return and the expected returns below that same target level, provide an explanation for the VaR criterion when it is used as a tool for VaR efficiency design. Second, this paper provides applications to inventory management based on VaR risk exposure. Although the mathematical problems arising from an application of the VaR approach, tuned to current practice in financial risk management, are difficult to solve analytically, solutions can be found by application of standard computational and simulation techniques. A number of cases are solved and formulated to demonstrate the paper’s applicability.Inventory; VaR; Disappointment

Why Are Asset Markets Modeled Successfully, But Not Their Dealers?

Market-level microstructure models of asset pricing succeed where dealer-level models do not. This study addresses this empirical difficulty in the context of foreign exchange dealers. New evidence is presented rejecting the latter models' specifications of how information asymmetry and inventory accumulation affect dealer pricing. This rejection is consistent with those of other dealer-level empirical studies. A new modeling avenue may be to reconsider optimal price setting while relaxing assumptions that specify incoming orders as the only component through which dealer inventories evolve. This approach is consistent with inventory evolution data and with market-level models' assumptions about currency markets. Copyright 2005, International Monetary Fund

Microstructure And Market Maker Price Strategies: Study Of A Tunisian Market Maker Activity

This paper provides evidence on market making behaviour of FX dealer in the Tunisian FX. It uses a complete data set that includes intra-day trades for the euro and US dollar. The sample period is 1 January 2007 to 31 December 2007. The results are consistent with the findings of the literature that used trades and inventories data. I find evidence that customer order flow has information effect on USD/TND. However, I do not find evidence that customer order flow has information effect on EUR/TND. Moreover, inter-dealer order flow has a positive effect on the market maker price strategy. I also find that the central bank intervention has positive and significant effect on dealer’s behaviour and price formation process. My study also suggests that dealer is risk aversion and his quotes flows the references quotes tendency.exchange rate, order flow, microstructure, trading