Traditional Private Research Articles

Financial Consumer Protection in the EU: Towards a Self-Sufficient European Contract Law for Consumer Financial Services?

The rapid expansion of European contract law in the field of consumer financial services gives rise to the question to what extent it is self-sufficient. A self-sufficient European contract law presupposes the existence of an EU-made and EU-enforced contract-related legal order which is largely distinct and independent from national private legal orders. In order to understand to what extent European contract law for consumer financial services reflects this pattern, the author explores the interaction between this supra-national regulatory legal order and traditional national private legal orders, and the consequences of this interplay for the extent of financial consumer protection. The author concludes that the self-sufficiency of European contract law is a matter of degree rather than an absolute; besides, a high degree of its self-sufficiency is not a must for ensuring a high level of consumer protection in financial services.

Comparing private label and manufacturer brand innovation projects in a Dutch Food processing company

The time when private labels consisted only of low-priced, low-quality products has long gone. A new type of cooperative innovation project has emerged in which food processors and retailers work closely together to target consumers with new and innovative products. These so-called high-end private label innovation projects can be typified as Early Customer Integration (ECI) projects. ECI projects may show a higher level of market orientation than manufacturer brand innovation projects, which companies carry out entirely in-house. However, ECI might lead to more incremental innovation because of the path dependency of the customer input. The present paper aims to fill this gap by investigating these assumptions by analysing the innovation portfolio of a leading Dutch producer and exporter of processed food products that produces manufacturer brand, high-end private label as well as traditional low-end tendered private label products. Twenty innovation projects, 10 manufacturer brand, 7 high-end private label and 3 traditional low-end private label innovation projects, including 76 respondents, were investigated using the Wageningen Innovation Assessment Toolkit. All respondents were employees of the company and members of the cross-functional project team of the innovation project that they assessed. In total 17 R&D staff members, 10 marketing and sales managers and 8 managers from the business units filled out the questionnaires. Based on the finding that the high-end private label projects showed the highest scores on product superiority it may be concluded that ECI indeed helps to better understand and fulfil consumer demands. It must also be concluded that the lower scores of high-end private label projects on product novelty are an indication that, ECI may have led to more incremental innovation.

Special Purpose Acquisition Corporations: A Public View of Private Equity

This Article tells the story of a new type of business — the special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC). The promoters of a SPAC begin by forming a shell corporation with no assets. They then take the company public on little more than a promise that they will strive to complete the acquisition of a target in the near future. We present the first empirical study of the SPAC contract design, and use a hand-collected dataset to trace its evolution over the past nine years.While SPACs are a new form, their contract design borrows heavily from private equity's playbook. Private equity managers famously (and sometimes controversially) receive 20% of their funds' profits, and funds typically last only ten years. From the traditional 20% incentive compensation to a short investment shelf life, SPAC entrepreneurs tried to transfer many hallmarks of the private equity contract to the public market. Reputational constraints got lost in translation. The private equity fund model is built on repeat business, and reputation is a crucial contractual gap filler. In contrast, SPACs are one-shot deals. Without managerial reputation to rely on, investors demanded increasing amounts of skin in the game from SPAC managers, and placed more conditions on managerial claims to 20% of the profits. On the other hand, without the force of reputation constraining investors, a supermajority vote created a powerful holdout right, which shareholders used to exploit SPACs until the form evolved to eliminate it. Our study of SPACs — by demonstrating the ways in which parties contract for credibility in the absence of long-term relationships between investors and managers—thus underscores the importance of reputation to the relational dynamics in traditional private equity.Aside from making private equity publicly tradable (with its concomitant loss of reputation as gap filler), SPACs' chief innovations were in the classic governance mechanisms of voice and exit. SPACs evolved from granting investors a supermajority vote to eliminating the vote altogether. At the same time, they granted investors an even stronger walk-away right. Thus, the SPAC story, new as it is, casts light on an old governance question: the relative value of voice and exit.

Enhancing information lookup privacy through homomorphic encryption

ABSTRACTRevealing one's interests in communication has been recognized as a growing problem in the Internet. We postulate that it is desirable for future information retrieval systems to provide privacy in both what information is requested and what information is received, without raising obstacles to the deployment of accounting and access control mechanisms. This paper outlines a solution that fulfills this requirement in the context of broker‐based systems, that is, systems in which brokers facilitate the communication between a consumer and a provider (of information). Broker‐assisted communication is a common paradigm used in many settings, including contemporary information‐centric networking approaches. We present the design and the evaluation of a solution that conceals consumers' interests, without hiding consumer identity or location. The developed solution is applied over a system of hierarchically organized brokers; similar systems are used in many information lookup services. Because in these systems, information is distributed in various locations, traditional private information retrieval (PIR) protocols exhibit significant communication overhead. Our solution achieves up to 97% less communication overhead compared with a PIR protocol, without additional computational overhead. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Public sector values: between the real and the ideal

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to identify and analyze the core values of the Peruvian public sector in the particular context of recent public management reforms. Design/methodology/approach – After distinguishing between traditional private and public sector values, the paper compared the presence of each of these types of values in two very different sources of data: input from employees' values survey and formal values statements of Peruvian public sector organizations. The analysis includes both a comparison of the presence of traditional public and private sector values in the two sources of data and the identification of the cultural profile of the public sector of Peru using the tri-axial model. Findings – The findings indicate a large gap between values at the theoretical level and values at the practical level. While values statements of public organizations in Peru clearly reflect traditional public sector values, in practice, public sector employees appear to follow a mixture of public and private sector values. Strengthening this conclusion is the finding that the cultural tri-axial profile of the sector is purely economic-pragmatic, which suggests that ethical and emotional values are positioned lower on the values hierarchy. Originality/value – This paper provides the first evidence of two important cultural phenomena in the Peruvian public sector: a broad adoption of private sector values and a gap between the values that are proposed as ethical guidelines (ideal) and the values that are followed in practice (real). The combination of these two phenomena suggests a potential risk to the ethical functioning of the public administration. This risk is especially significant in a developing country like Peru, where many of its poor citizens depend on government support. The paper discusses both the research and practical implications of this study.

The Changing World of Healthcare Delivery

Medicine is witnessing an unprecedented amount of change with respect to the delivery of health care services in the Unites States. This change had been occurring for the past 20 years, brought on by severe cost inflation as a result of the domination of third-party reimbursement in the delivery marketplace. This inflation led to efforts by both private and government payers to limit cost and the access to care. These trends initially slowed down cost inflation in the mid 1990s, but demographic changes, provider consolidations, vertical integrations, and malpractice premium increases mitigated the initial attempts of payers to limit medical inflation. The changes already in progress have recently accelerated because of a significant increase in the involvement of the federal government in managing the day-to-day affairs of medical practice through the HITECH (2009) and Affordable Care Acts (ACA 2010). HITECH mandated the use of electronic medical records (EMR) by 2015. The ACA vastly expands the government’s role by significantly increasing Medicaid enrollment, creating government controlled, defined, and subsidized health insurance–purchasing exchanges, and creating entirely new delivery entities, Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), to supposedly integrate and coordinate care. Physicians and other health care providers are being asked to define and document disease states and treatments better (EMR, ICD-10 Coding), coordinated care more efficiently (ACOs Bundled Payment methodologies), and report outcomes of care to demonstrate both efficacy and cost effectiveness. They are asked to do all these things in an environment of increasing business costs, unprecedented regulation and review (RACs and MACs), and decreasing reimbursements on a per-service basis. This is creating considerable anxiety and restlessness among providers, fueling an accelerating trend of physician employment and abandonment of the traditional private practice model of service delivery. These areas are all creating great interest in the socioeconomic issues surrounding the delivery of health care services, including sports medicine. This review is intended to be a primer on those issues affecting the practice of sports medicine and other areas of orthopedics. Surgeons will have to master these issues to have both clinical and financial success in the coming years. Bill Beach, MD Louis F. McIntyre, MD Westchester Orthopedic Associates, White Plains, NY

Two Crowdfunding Exemptions

Crowdfunding is commonly defined as raising small amounts of capital from a large number of people over the internet. To avoid the expense of securities regulation, companies often crowdfund by giving away rewards (like a free t-shirt) instead of selling stock or other securities. In April 2012, Title III of the JOBS Act sought to change this status quo by directing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to facilitate securities-based crowdfunding through websites like Kickstarter. Congress and the President believed this would broaden access to sidelined capital and help companies grow and hire. But this “retail crowdfunding” exemption, open to all investors, was not the only means of crowdfunding in the bill. A last minute compromise, which has been largely over-looked, expanded the ability of issuers to use the private placement exemption, as revised in new Rule 506(c), to crowdfund from accredited investors. This “accredited crowdfunding” exemption provides a less regulated alternative to retail crowdfunding that is available to the same companies and more.This article is the first to examine the impact that accredited crowdfunding will have on retail crowdfunding. It claims that accredited crowdfunding is likely to dominate and, depending on SEC action, could render retail crowdfunding superfluous or a market for lemons. But it also claims that accredited crowdfunding – when compared to traditional private placements – may face a similar lemons problem over the longer term on account of rules that discourage investors from fending for themselves. These potential problems threaten to undermine the social welfare goals of the JOBS Act: increasing access to capital, spurring business growth, and creating jobs. But the SEC can minimize these problems and promote social welfare by strengthening the bargaining incentives of accredited investors and encouraging retail investors to piggyback off of their work. The normative part of this article provides targeted recommendations that balance the need for capital formation against a novel incentives-based theory of investor protection.

The Obligations of Kinship and Alliance within Governance in the Scottish Borders, 1528-1625

The importance of kinship and lordship in determining relationships within medieval Scotland has long been acknowledged. In the late sixteenth century, however, Scotland underwent an intensification of government in which the crown increasingly drew judicial processes within its own remit, replacing the private justice dispensed by regional elites with the public justice of the central courts in Edinburgh. The assumption might therefore be that the older obligations of kinship and lordship would have been overridden by the newly persistent demands for personal accountability to the crown. This article demonstrates instead that such obligations were still significant in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and that processes associated with traditional private justice were now being used in an unprecedented way by a Scottish crown, increasingly intolerant of violent crime. Familial and fictive familial obligations continued to shape how early modern Scottish society was organized and regulated.

Investing in Non-Traded REITs

NTRs typically invest in sector specific real estate programs, targeting stable, fully occupied properties subject to long-term leases to strong credit tenants. They are thus able to generate immediate, durable, rent-driven cash flows from the inception of the investment as capital is deployed without a cash drag. Much like traditional private equity core real estate investing, they aggregate property through acquisitions and build diversified portfolios by tenant, geography, industry and lease duration. They return value from these aggregated portfolios via asset sales, public listings or mergers, usually over a five- to seven-year timeframe.

Local Food Plus: the connective tissue in local/sustainable supply chain development

Local Food Plus (LFP) is a non-governmental organisation that blurs the lines between traditional community and private sector functions by creating space for buyers and sellers to meet; building trust among diverse food-system actors; and creating new markets for goods. This article uses a participatory action research method to explore these functions in detail. The first section examines how LFP has both emerged from a community of food practice and in turn become a pivot in creating new communities of practice within values-based food chains. The second section identifies and analyses the diversity of tools that have proven essential to LFP's model. The third section examines how LFP has contributed to alternative norm construction by balancing various conventions. Finally, the fourth section explains LFP's engagement with the state and other “strange bedfellows” to advance change, to ultimately comment on LFP's role in fostering food hub development.

Medicare Essential: An Option To Promote Better Care And Curb Spending Growth

Medicare's core benefit design reflects private insurance as of 1965, with separate coverage for hospital and physician services (and now prescription drugs) and no protection against catastrophic costs. Modernizing Medicare's benefit design to offer comprehensive benefits, financial protection, and incentives to choose high-value care could improve coverage and lower beneficiary costs. We describe a new option we call Medicare Essential, which would combine Medicare's hospital, physician, and prescription drug coverage into an integrated benefit with an annual limit on out-of-pocket expenses for covered benefits. Cost sharing would be reduced for enrollees who seek care from high-quality low-cost providers. Out-of-pocket savings from lower premiums and health care costs for a Medicare Essential enrollee could be $173 per month, compared to what an enrollee would pay with traditional Medicare, prescription drug and private supplemental coverage. Financed by a budget-neutral premium, we estimate that this new plan choice could reduce total health spending relative to current projections by $180 billion and reduce employer retiree spending by $90 billion during 2014-23. Given its potential, such an alternative should be a part of the debate over the future of Medicare.

Whether Museum Spatial Experience can Synthesize its Exhibits in the Museum with Chinese Garden Configuration

Traditional Chinese private gardens with their fascinating spatial layouts represent a tiptop accomplishment of classical garden art. However, whether the museum spatial configuration with Chinese style garden can still synthesize its exhibits when the spatial attribute of Chinese private garden is imitated and imbedded into modern museum? To better testify the consideration, this paper took Suzhou Museum as an example, a museum with the layout of Chinese style garden, to analyze its spatial visual attribute by using Depthmap software based on space syntax theory. Meanwhile, through comparing with Zhuozheng Garden which is a classical private garden adjacent to Suzhou Museum, we found a similar spatial attribute both in Zhuozheng Garden and Suzhou Museum: the indoor spaces for exhibit layout are separated while the outdoor spaces for traveling and landscape are continuous by studying visual connectivity and integration graphs. That is to say, Suzhou Museum with Chinese garden configuration, its space for exhibit layout is generally segregated from the overall museum spatial experience. In addition, in order to re-examine above findings, visitors were randomly selected to be observed and recorded their traveling routes or stops for sightseeing. The analysis results of visitor behavior pattern also showed a relatively close relation with the former visibility graph analyses.

Property in Virtual Worlds

This work is a dissertation. However, it was written with the intention of disseminating it to the broad public and to be of use to academics, judges, legal practitioners, as well as the broad public. In due course a published book version will follow. This dissertation analyses and investigates how virtual property functions inside virtual worlds. It also determines if, within that context, virtual property is similar to, or should be treated like real world property. The questions that are addressed include the following. What is the (real world) legal status of property in virtual worlds? Is it worthwhile to recognise and protect virtual property in real world law? Is it possible to recognise and protect virtual property in real world law, given the differences? Would recognition and protection of virtual property in real world law require or be restricted to instances where virtual property is or can be recognised as real rights?The dissertation finds that there is a definable concept of “virtual property” as it is encountered in virtual worlds and there is a great degree of similarity between the function of property in virtual and real world systems. There are also sufficient justifications (social, economic and normative) to recognise virtual property as property. Even though the function of property is similar in both systems, the similarities are undermined by the absence, complete or almost complete, of real rights in virtual worlds. This creates a problem since, in real world law, real rights enjoy stronger protection than weaker personal rights. The first reason for this absence of real rights stems from the unique (and mostly uncircumventable) nature of game-code that removes the necessity to make all rights in virtual worlds real rights. The second reason relates to the fact that most virtual world rights are completely derived from and regulated by contract. It is concluded that it is possible to recognise and protect virtual property by means of traditional private law property law (both Roman-Germanic and Anglo-American), constitutional property law, and criminal law. While criminal law will fill some gaps left by the absence of real rights, the rest that are left are contractual rights. In certain circumstances, these contractual rights may be strong enough and in other cases they may require support from special legislation that strengthens weak personal rights and makes them into stronger property-like rights. In constitutional cases, these rights derive support from constitutional property law. However, in other circumstances recognition and protection will probably require recognition of real rights.

Towards practical private processing of database queries over public data

Privacy is a major concern when users query public online data services. The privacy of millions of people has been jeopardized in numerous user data leakage incidents in many popular online applications. To address the critical problem of personal data leakage through queries, we enable private querying on public data services so that the contents of user queries and any user data are hidden and therefore not revealed to the online service providers. We propose two protocols for private processing of database queries, namely BHE and HHE. The two protocols provide strong query privacy by using Paillier's homomorphic encryption, and support common database queries such as range and join queries by relying on the bucketization of public data. In contrast to traditional Private Information Retrieval proposals, BHE and HHE only incur one round of client server communication for processing a single query. BHE is a basic private query processing protocol that provides complete query privacy but still incurs expensive computation and communication costs. Built upon BHE, HHE is a hybrid protocol that applies ciphertext computation and communication on a subset of the data, such that this subset not only covers the actual requested data but also resembles some frequent query patterns of common users, thus achieving practical query performance while ensuring adequate privacy levels. By using frequent query patterns and data specific privacy protection, HHE is not vulnerable to the traditional attacks on k-Anonymity that exploit data similarity and skewness. Moreover, HHE consistently protects user query privacy for a sequence of queries in a single query session.

The Impact of Stock Transfer Restrictions on the Private Placement Discount

The literature contains four explanations for the private placement discount. I find that all four contribute to the discount: loss of option value due to transfer restrictions, equity ownership concentration, information gathering, and overvaluation and expected underperformance post‐issue. An average‐strike put option model calculates marketability discounts that are consistent with empirical private placement discounts when observed discounts are adjusted for equity ownership concentration, information, and overvaluation effects. In contrast to the positive signaling effect of traditional private placement announcements, there is a negative signaling effect for private investments in public equity when the firm commits to register the shares promptly.

Positive Effect of Non-territorial Office on Privacy

Abstract: The office research in environmental psychology that was inspired by the office experiments of Allen and his colleagues in 1970, and undertaken since the 1980s, deemed privacy in the open office setting problematic; however, experiments by Allen showed improvements in privacy. Why was privacy not seen as a problem in Allen's experiments? The office in Allen was not limited to being open; in fact, it also incorporated a free-seating arrangement. Further exploration of Allen's experiments shows that a free-seating arrangement not only enabled employees to move about the office at will but also facilitated the adjustment of their mutual interaction. As a result, it was thought that privacy had actually improved. In other words, extracting an open setting, which is only one aspect of a office space, is insufficient, and thus, free-seating arrangement must also be considered. Doing so increases the possibility of significantly remedying privacy problems.Keywords: office, open plan office, free seating, privacyAllen's Non-territorial Office ExperimentFrom the 1990s into the first decade of the 21st century, the concept of a office space had been adopted by many companies, particularly those aiming to reduce facility costs, increase communication, and facilitate knowledge creation (Becker, 1990; Becker & Steele, 1995; Elsbach & Bechky, 2007; Elsbach & Pratt, 2007; Zelinsky, 1998).Thomas J. Allen, well-known for his research on communication in R&D organizations (Kuwashima, 2012), coined the term office. His proposed concepts of gatekeeper and NIH syndrome continue to be widely researched (e.g., Takahashi & Inamizu, 2012).From June 1970 to April 1971, Allen and Gerstberger (1973)1 performed an experiment that included changing the office layout of a large company's production engineering department. The production engineering department had 10-20 employees, whose daily work involved communicating with various peers to find solutions to new problems. Prior to the experiment, the office of the production engineering department had been divided into separate, traditional private rooms occupied by one or two employees. However, during the experiment, office walls were removed and the existing seating arrangement was replaced with a more communal setting, changing the office layout to non-territorial one.Allen and his colleagues conducted surveys two months prior to the change in layout (June 1970) and again eight months after the change (April 1971). A result, although not statistically significant, showed the tendency for improvement in the items for privacy. Due to this finding, Allen reported an improved sense of privacy among employees that was attributed to the change in the office layout.Prior to the experiment, Allen feared that the subjects would claim their own territories and occupy specific areas. However, contrary to Allen's apprehension, the survey on seating positions showed that the employees frequently moved around throughout the day and almost none of the employees claimed territory by continuing to occupy a specific space.The ratio of employees that were actually in the office (in-office ratio) was calculated with the median at 62.5% and almost never exceeding 80%.An increase was also seen in the amount of communication and in the number of communication partners. In addition, the degree of satisfaction regarding the communication also significantly improved. Although none of the results showed a significant improvement in the overall performance of the department, Allen conjectured, although slightly optimistic, that the resultant active communication would increase the department's performance in the future.Definition of PrivacyThe office proposed by Allen proved to be ahead of its time in Europe and America, where traditional private offices were the norm. …

Implications of Changing Paradigms on Management Education

The world market has globalised and companies have extended their operations into more and more locations. This has led to an increase in the demand for young and well-educated leaders. Management education aims at developing leadership qualities thus creating a relationship between all stakeholders and connecting the industry with academia. The success of these institutions lies on their culture and the faculty. But of late management education seems to have lost its glory due to its inability in preparing skilled and ethical leaders. Also a wide gap is evidenced in the educational and research missions leaving the institutions more vulnerable to focused criticism, attack and competition. The traditional university system and private B-schools have certain routine and innovative faculty roles. This research paper is an attempt to compare the benefits and drawbacks of innovative and creative practices adopted by the management of B-schools and University teaching systems for high performance expectations from the faculty. The B-schools of today have adopted the corporate culture and fixed targets for faculty with respect to teaching, training, research and consultancy affecting the entire academic scene. This has transformed the role of a teacher in numerous ways and is looked at as a complete rebirth of teaching profession. An attempt is also made on attitudinal study of faculty for their acceptance of this innovative approach from management since the social and economic values attached to this transformation may influence the entry and exit of talent in the academic world.

Market Power in Power Markets: The Filed-Rate Doctrine and Competition in Electricity

State and federal initiatives have opened the American electric power industry to competition over the past four decades. Although the process has not occurred uniformly across the country, wholesale electricity markets exist everywhere today. Independent power producers can construct generation facilities and sell their output to utilities and industrial customers through bilateral contracts. In many regions, centralized power markets now facilitate the sale of billions of dollars in electricity annually through auctions. Although market forces have replaced direct price regulation in electricity, antitrust enforcement has not expanded its role commensurately. A lack of competition has been a serious problem in many power markets and led to billions of dollars in wealth transfers from ratepayers to generators. The federal courts, however, have invoked the filed-rate doctrine to prohibit private antitrust suits against generators and other market participants accused of collusive behavior. They have held that federal and state regulation is adequate to maintain competitive markets and questioned their own ability to deter anticompetitive behavior, effectively immunizing power generators from antitrust damages liability. Congress or the Supreme Court should limit the application of the filed-rate doctrine in electricity markets and allow for the antitrust laws to be enforced against collusive conduct. Eliminating the filed-rate immunity, however, is not sufficient to create competitive power markets. Private treble-damages suits could help deter express collusion between competing generators. Yet the antitrust laws are comparatively powerless to remedy two important types of anticompetitive behavior seen in power markets. Antitrust jurisprudence in the United States does not proscribe the exercise of unilateral market power and creates high hurdles to finding liability for tacit collusion. Given the limitations of traditional private antitrust remedies, federal and state regulators must focus on creating competitive market structures. They can take three concrete steps toward this end: police generator consolidation more carefully, encourage expansion of the transmission grid, and expose more ratepayers to wholesale price signals. Applying these broader competition policy measures is necessary to redeem a restructuring project that has resulted in several episodes of serious market-power abuse and yielded uncertain benefits.

Efficient and optimal mechanisms with private information acquisition costs

Abstract In auctions with private information acquisition costs, we completely characterize (socially) efficient and (revenue) optimal two-stage mechanisms, with the first stage being an entry right allocation mechanism and the second stage being a traditional private good provision mechanism. Both efficiency and revenue optimality require that the second-stage selling mechanism be ex post efficient and the number of entry slots be endogenously determined. We show that both efficient and optimal entry can be truthfully implemented in dominant strategies, and can also be implemented via all-pay, though not uniform-price or discriminatory-price, auctions.

Between Illusion and Reality, ‘Who's to Know’: Threshold Spaces in the Interwar Novels of Jean Rhys

This article considers the concept of the threshold in the interwar novels of Jean Rhys and demonstrates how the attempts by Rhys's female characters to transform themselves both internally and externally are complicated by the threshold spaces in which they operate. Rhys's novels draw attention to the social and economic situation for women living alone in European cities and moving between the liminal spaces of cafés and hotel rooms. In addition to these physical thresholds, the threshold also becomes a precarious psychological space for Rhys's characters, where the boundaries between truth and illusion, reality and fantasy merge freely and identity is always provisional. By drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and theories of the threshold as a site for transition and transformation, this article argues that Rhys's characters’ attempts to create a stable identity can be read as an attempt to survive in the threshold space between the traditional public and private identities available for women in the interwar period.