Transaction Function Research Articles

An early evaluation of the introduction of euro banknotes and coins

The final stage of the changeover to the euro consisted of the introduction of euro coins and banknotes on 1 January, 2002. The national changeover plans, that provided the scenarios, were based on the exclusive transaction function of money. However, in most European countries high‐denomination banknotes were significantly hoarded and/or used in the underground economy. Since the holders of these banknotes could not convert them anonymously in the two months changeover period, some feared that many banknotes would invade the payment system, leading to a cash‐crash. Nevertheless the changeover process evolved smoothly. As for the future, chances are that some users in the regular sector have permanently changed their payment habits by shifting towards electronic means of payment. In the longer run we believe, however, that the tolerant attitude of the authorities with respect to currency use in the underground sector, will sustain the demand for currency.

A Theoretical Model of Optimal Forest Resource Regimes in Developing Economies

The standard economic theory of natural-resource management has its roots in a conventional economic theory of commons that overlooked the role of institutional structures and the transaction costs. Hence, it has not been able to explain cases of successful management of forests as common property. An economic model in-corporating the role of transaction costs has been developed. A mathematical form that can represent the general nature of a transaction function is suggested. Static models for separable and nonseparable transformation and transaction functions are discussed. The possibility of different resource regimes being optimal in different socioeconomic conditions is highlighted.

Design, implementation and performance study of reliable transactions in X.500 directory service

Replication of Directory information improves system performance and availability. This is provided in 1993 Standard through a shadowing mechanism. However, the standard specifies only weak consistency requirement. This is not satisfactory as some applications may require strong consistency with atomic (all-or-none) updates. This article describes the effort to incorporate the transaction function into the Directory in order to support the strong consistency requirement. An object-oriented approach is used to design and implement the system. Appropriate object models for the DUA and the DSA are developed to include the transaction capability. The atomic update is ensured by the transaction manager, which controls and coordinates the distributed transaction and the CCR ASE, which tracks and transfers the atomic transaction messages on single transaction branch. This is assisted by a resource manager consisting of a local database with appropriate APIs and the underlying database manager which, ensures the ACID properties of the atomic updates. Performance evaluation of the system implemented indicates a transaction overhead of 31% for commit case and 14% for rollback case. The bottleneck areas include the local database access, the network processing overhead and the size of replicas. The overheads can be reduced by employing advanced hardware and software. Thus, the usefulness of transaction capability outweighs the overhead consideration.

Un modello non lineare per la serie storica dell'indice della produzione industriale italiana

In this paper we intend to experiment Smooth Threshold Autoregressive model (STAR) in order to capture asymmetric business cycle in the time series of the industrial production index. First we obtain some evidence of non linearity by non parametric lag-regression, then we fit an ESTAR model using the Granger-Terasvirta's procedure. The results are better than the ones available from a linear model. In addition the graph of the transaction function tell us some interesting features on the changing regimes. In the paper we suggest also an informal way to easily obtain a STAR model for various asymmetries in business cycles.

Die Wertschöpfungskette des Handels im Zeitalter des Electronic Commerce.

In the USA the share of retail sales through Electronic Shopping (WWW) is increasing dramatically. If this trend picks up in Germany soon, one may expect significant structural changes in the retail sector here, too. Due to the low transaction costs in the Electronic Commerce Environment the traditional functions of retailing may be no longer offered bundled only: physical distribution, assortment, informing and consulting the consumer as well as financial transaction function. We show how external players from other economic sectors can provide many of those functions as specialists of information processing better and cheaper. We conclude with some remaining strategic options for traditional retailers.

The two-variable CES transaction function in macroeconomic rationing models

The CES transaction function is derived from the Weibull distribution using less restrictive assumptions than hitherto used in the literature. The CES function is shown to have basically the same properties as the ‘exact’ transaction function derived from the lognormal distribution.