Putting the ‘digital’ in Digital Intermediaries: the role of technical infrastructure in building business models

Digital Technology Innovation and Financial Business Practices The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This report addresses the mutual shaping of business models and innovations in digital technical infrastructure – both client-facing and administrative back-end – in two retail financial products currently in use in the United Kingdom: peer-to-peer consumer lending and a local digital/paper hybrid currency system. The two products and their issuing firms, Zopa Limited (Zopa) and The Bristol Pound Community Interest Company (the Bristol Pound), respectively, are established leaders in their respective product areas: Zopa was established in 2005 and the Bristol Pound in 2010. Each of these firms seeks to disrupt an established financial market through the application of digital technologies and processes: consumer lending for Zopa and retail payment for the Bristol Pound. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report is comprised of three primary sections: descriptions of the business and technological processes of each of Zopa and the Bristol Pound, and a final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.3DaRoC is funded by the UK’s Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ initiative. It has a substantial research budget of over £320K, with £35K of additional industrial support

Magnetic braking in young late-type stars: the effect of polar spots

The concentration of magnetic flux near the poles of rapidly rotating cool stars has been recently proposed as an alternative mechanism to dynamo saturation in order to explain the saturation of angular momentum loss. In this work we study the effect of magnetic surface flux distribution on the coronal field topology and angular momentum loss rate. We investigate if magnetic flux concentration towards the pole is a reasonable alternative to dynamo saturation. We construct a 1D wind model and also apply a 2-D self-similar analytical model, to evaluate how the surface field distribution affects the angular momentum loss of the rotating star. From the 1D model we find that, in a magnetically dominated low corona, the concentrated polar surface field rapidly expands to regions of low magnetic pressure resulting in a coronal field with small latitudinal variation. We also find that the angular momentum loss rate due to a uniform field or a concentrated field with equal total magnetic flux is very similar. From the 2D wind model we show that there are several relevant factors to take into account when studying the angular momentum loss from a star. In particular, we show that the inclusion of force balance across the field in a wind model is fundamental if realistic conclusions are to be drawn from the effect of non-uniform surface field distribution on magnetic braking. This model predicts that a magnetic field concentrated at high latitudes leads to larger Alfven radii and larger braking rates than a smoother field distribution. From the results obtained, we argue that the magnetic surface field distribution towards the pole does not directly limit the braking efficiency of the wind.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, accepted in A&

Electron-electron interaction in a MCS model with a purely spacelike Lorentz-violating background

One considers a planar Maxwell-Chern-Simons electrodynamics in the presence of a purely spacelike Lorentz-violating background. Once the Dirac sector is properly introduced and coupled to the scalar and the gauge fields, the electron-electron interaction is evaluated as the Fourier transform of the Moller scattering amplitude (derived in the non-relativistic limit). The associated Fourier integrations can not be exactly carried out, but an algebraic solution for the interaction potential is obtained in leading order in (v/s)^2. It is then observed that the scalar potential presents a logarithmic attractive (repulsive) behavior near (far from) the origin. Concerning the gauge potential, it is composed of the pure MCS interaction corrected by background contributions, also responsible for its anisotropic character. It is also verified that such corrections may turn the gauge potential attractive for some parameter values. Such attractiveness remains even in the presence of the centrifugal barrier and gauge invariant A.A term, which constitutes a condition compatible with the formation of Cooper pairs.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Revtex4 style, figures revised; to appear in Phys. Rev. D (2005

First- and second-order phase transitions in Ising models on small world networks, simulations and comparison with an effective field theory

We perform simulations of random Ising models defined over small-world networks and we check the validity and the level of approximation of a recently proposed effective field theory. Simulations confirm a rich scenario with the presence of multicritical points with first- or second-order phase transitions. In particular, for second-order phase transitions, independent of the dimension d_0 of the underlying lattice, the exact predictions of the theory in the paramagnetic regions, such as the location of critical surfaces and correlation functions, are verified. Quite interestingly, we verify that the Edwards-Anderson model with d_0=2 is not thermodynamically stable under graph noise.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, 1 tabl

Strong flavour changing effective operator contributions to single top quark production

We study the effects of dimension six effective operators on the production of single top quarks at the LHC. The operator set considered includes terms with effective gluon interactions and four-fermion terms. Analytic expressions for the several partonic cross sections of single top production will be presented, as well as the results of their integration on the parton density functions.Comment: 20 pages, 7 fig

On Describing Multivariate Skewness: A Directional Approach

Most multivariate measures of skewness in the literature measure the overall skewness of a distribution. While these measures are perfectly adequate for testing the hypothesis of distributional symmetry, their relevance for describing skewed distributions is less obvious. In this article, we consider the problem of characterising the skewness of multivariate distributions. We define directional skewness as the skewness along a direction and analyse parametric classes of skewed distributions using measures based on directional skewness. The analysis brings further insight into the classes, allowing for a more informed selection of particular classes for particular applications. In the context of Bayesian linear regression under skewed error we use the concept of directional skewness twice. First in the elicitation of a prior on the parameters of the error distribution, and then in the analysis of the skewness of the posterior distribution of the regression residuals.Bayesian methods, Multivariate distribution, Multivariate regression, Prior elicitation, Skewness.