Call option on the maximum of the interest rate in the one factor affine model

We determine an explicit formula for the Laplace transform of the price of an option on a maximal interest rate when the instantaneous rate satisfies Cox-Ingersoll-Ross's model. This generalizes considerably one result of Leblanc-Scaillet

Political-support lobbies responses to international environmental agreements

Studies of the stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs) assumed a benevolent government who maximizes social welfare. The aim of our paper is to develop a theoretical framework in which the Governement's decisions are influenced by green and producer lobbies. To this end, we extend the political support approach of Hillman (1982) and model the IEA formation as a two stage non-cooperative game. our work studies the coalition formation process and determines both coalition abatement level and the size of stable coalition. The basis conclusion that emerges from the analysis of politically motivated coalition formation is that government's decision depends not only on ecological vulnerability and abatement cost in each but also on the political strength of green lobby over industrial lobby and its capacities to give political support to the government.Non-cooperative game, interest group, coalition theory, environmental policy.

"Strange forms" : Still in need for a framework.

Planification stratégique; Coût de transaction;

Examining resource based view against transactional costs Approach in the french poultry industry : treading upon eggs..

France; Intégration verticale; Coûts de la transaction; French Poultry Industry; Aviculture;

Board of Directors’ Involvement in Strategic Decision Making Process: Definition and Literature Review.

Over the past few years, research in corporate governance has devoted increased attention to board of directors’ involvement in the strategic decision making process. But in spite of its growing interest, the literature provides theoretical pluralism and mixed empirical results. Indeed, the concept has not been well defined by past studies and there is no consensus about its operationalization. In this paper, we review the literature on board’s involvement in the strategic decision making process and question the definitions of this phenomenon and if an operational measure can be proposed for future research.Board of Directors; Strategic Decision Making Process; Board involvement; Corporate Governance.

The logic of two-level games with endogenous lobbying : the case of international environmental agreements

International environmental agreements (IEAs) are increasingly important in a globalized economy. The aim of our paper is study the effect of political pressure groups-lobbies on the size and stability of IEAs. To this purpose we use the framework of two-level games to explain how national political situation influences the decisions of governments at the international negotiations arena. We present an endogenous lobbying model in which we assume that lobbies try to influence the policy choice of governments by offering political contribution in return for policy compromise. Indeed, we use the "interest based explanation" of international environmental policy to describe the incentives of countries to join an agreement. This approach classifies countries in four categories : pushers, bystanders, intermediate and draggers. We found that, when government gives the same weight to contribution and to social welfare, the contributions from the industrial lobby give incentives to government (Pushers, intermediate) to participate in the grand coalition making it stable. Our results suggest that in order to sustain the grand coalition, weak global environmental agreements -i.e. those involving small abatement targets- should be negotiated. The result is similar if governments are more interested by political contribution. However, if governments care less about political contribution than about social welfare, industrial contribution is not enough to limit the free riding incentives of each type of government. In this situation, pushers are the more expected to sustain a small stable coalition.Non-cooperative game, interest group, coalition theory, environmental policy.

On Neighborhood Tree Search

We consider the neighborhood tree induced by alternating the use of different neighborhood structures within a local search descent. We investigate the issue of designing a search strategy operating at the neighborhood tree level by exploring different paths of the tree in a heuristic way. We show that allowing the search to 'backtrack' to a previously visited solution and resuming the iterative variable neighborhood descent by 'pruning' the already explored neighborhood branches leads to the design of effective and efficient search heuristics. We describe this idea by discussing its basic design components within a generic algorithmic scheme and we propose some simple and intuitive strategies to guide the search when traversing the neighborhood tree. We conduct a thorough experimental analysis of this approach by considering two different problem domains, namely, the Total Weighted Tardiness Problem (SMTWTP), and the more sophisticated Location Routing Problem (LRP). We show that independently of the considered domain, the approach is highly competitive. In particular, we show that using different branching and backtracking strategies when exploring the neighborhood tree allows us to achieve different trade-offs in terms of solution quality and computing cost.Comment: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO'12) (2012