Detection of GNSS signals propagation in urban canyos using 3D city models

This paper presents one of the solutions to the problem of multipath propagation and effects on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals in urban canyons. GNSS signals may reach a receiver not only through Line-of-Sight (LOS) paths, but they are often blocked, reflected or diffracted from tall buildings, leading to unmodelled GNSS errors in position estimation. Therefore in order to detect and mitigate the impact of multipath, a new ray-tracing model for simulation of GNSS signals reception in urban canyons is proposed - based on digital 3D maps information, known positions of GNSS satellites and an assumed position of a receiver. The model is established and validated using experimental, as well as real data. It is specially designed for complex environments and situations where positioning with highest accuracy is required - a typical example is navigation for blind people

Trade credit and supplier competition

This paper examines how competition among suppliers affects their willingness to provide trade credit financing. Trade credit extended by a supplier to a cash constrained retailer allows the latter to increase cash purchases from its other suppliers, leading to a free rider problem. A supplier that represents a smaller share of the retailer's purchases internalizes a smaller part of the benefit from increased spending by the retailer and, as a result, extends less trade credit relative to its sales. In consequence, retailers with dispersed suppliers obtain less trade credit than those whose suppliers are more concentrated. The free rider problem is especially detrimental to a trade creditor when the free-riding suppliers are its product market competitors, leading to a negative relation between product substitutability among suppliers to a given retailer and trade credit that the former provide to the latter. We test the model using both simulated and real data. The estimated relations are consistent with the model's predictions and are statistically and economically significant

On the learning benefits of resource flexibility

Resource flexibility, arguably among the most celebrated operational concepts, is known to provide firms facing demand uncertainty with such benefits as risk pooling, revenue-maximization optionality, and operational hedging. In this paper, we uncover a heretofore unknown benefit: we establish that resource flexibility facilitates learning the demand when the latter is censored, which could, in turn, enable firms to make better-informed future operational decisions, thereby increasing profitability. Further, we quantify these learning benefits of flexibility and find that they could be of the same order of magnitude as the extensively studied risk-pooling benefits of flexibility. This suggests that flexibility’s learning benefits could be a first-order consideration and that extant theories, which view flexibility only as the ability to act ex post, could be underestimating its true value when learning the demand is desirable, for example, when it enables managers to make better ex ante capacity, assortment, or pricing decisions in future periods

Platform Tokenization: Financing, Governance, and Moral Hazard

This paper highlights two channels through which blockchain-enabled tokenization can alleviate moral hazard frictions between founders, investors, and users of a platform: token financing and decentralized governance. We consider an entrepreneur who uses outside financing and exerts private effort to build a platform, and users who decide whether to join in response to the platform's dynamic transaction fee policy. We first show that raising capital by issuing tokens rather than equity mitigates effort under-provision because the payoff to equity investors depends on profit, whereas the payoff to token investors depends on transaction volume, which is less sensitive to effort. Second, we show that decentralized governance associated with tokenization eliminates a potential holdup of platform users, which in turn alleviates the need to provide users with incentives to join, reducing the entrepreneur's financing burden. The downside of tokenization is that it puts a cap on how much capital the entrepreneur can raise. Namely, if tokens are highly liquid, i.e., they change hands many times per unit of time, their market capitalization is small relative to the NPV of the platform profits, limiting how much money one can raise by issuing tokens rather than equity. If building the platform is expensive, this can distort the capacity investment. The resulting trade-off between the benefits and costs of tokenization leads to several predictions regarding adoption

To share or not to share: the optimal advertising effort with asymmetric advertising effectiveness

In this paper, we study a two-stage model in which a manufacturer expands to a new market through a local retailer and has private information on the advertising effectiveness. The manufacturer chooses the information sharing format with the retailer, either no information sharing or mandatory information sharing. Under no information sharing format, the manufacturer and the retailer play a signaling game. We derive both separating and pooling equilibria and conduct equilibrium refinements for the signaling game. Under mandatory information sharing format, the manufacturer simply informs the retailer the advertising effectiveness. We also establish the stylized model and derive the optimal advertising effort. By comparing the manufacturer’s ex ante profit under the two information sharing formats, we find that the manufacturer always prefers mandatory information sharing, under which both the advertising effort and profit can be higher. We also observe that unlike the common case that the channel members may have different preference over the information sharing formats, the manufacturer and the retailer can actually achieve alignment. While some previous studies suggest that the manufacturer and the retailer may have different preference over the information sharing formats, we find that they can actually achieve alignment with asymmetric information on advertising effectiveness

A Theory of Strategic Mergers

We examine firms' strategic incentives to engage in horizontal mergers. In a real options framework, we show that strategic considerations may explain abnormally high takeover activity during periods of positive and negative demand shocks. Importantly, this pattern emerges solely as a result of firms' strategic interaction in output markets. We show that the U-shaped relation between the state of demand and the propensity of firms to merge, documented in past studies, is driven by horizontal mergers in industries that are: (1) relatively more concentrated, (2) characterized by relatively strong competitive interaction among firms, and (3) characterized by relatively low merger-related operating synergies and restructuring costs. The empirical evidence, based on parametric and semi-parametric regression analyses, is consistent with these predictions