The Minimum Assumed Incentive Effect of Executive Share Options

In granting executive share options (ESOs), companies hand over financial assets to the executive at an opportunity cost that generally outweighs the value placed on those assets by the executive on the receiving end. This outcome can be explained by risk aversion on the part of the executives. For such transactions to make commercial sense, the difference in valuation must be at least made up by the impact of the incentive effects induced by compensating executives in this particular manner. This paper extends such a line of analysis to examine the executive's reward-risk trade-off, in addition to the certainty-equivalent pay-performance sensitivity and uses a UK data set to provide some estimates of the size of these effect

Density constraints and low-resolution phasing

Direct phasing needs additional information of a non-specific kind in order to select the correct phase set from all possible ones. This paper analyses the use of constraints which can be formulated in terms of electron-density values. One- and multi-dimensional histograms and connectivity properties are implemented as such constraints in density-modification procedures. These approaches usually cannot unambiguously select the best solution from a set of alternative phase variants. Nevertheless, they do allow the rejection of wrong solutions and the use of cluster analysis and averaging on the remaining variants provide a good starting point for further phase-refinement procedures