Contributions in Merlin

We study the complexity of bidding optimally in one-shot combinatorial auction mechanisms. Specifically, we consider the two most-commonly used payment rules: first-price and VCG-nearest. Prior work has largely assumed that bidders only submit bids on their bundles of interest. However, we show the surprising result that a single-minded bidder may lose an exponential amount of utility by playing his optimal simple strategy (only bidding on his bundle of interest) compared to playing his optimal complex strategy (which involves bidding on an exponential number of bundles). Our work suggests that it is important for future research on combinatorial auctions to fully take these effects into account.

Corruption is ubiquitous in practice and has severe negative consequences for businesses and societies at large. This paper focuses on an issue largely neglected in research on corruption: why individuals differ in their susceptibility to engage in corruption. Drawing on a laboratory experiment, we propose that individuals high in moral commitment are less likely to engage in corruptive behaviors and hence forego financial benefits. Specifically, we posit that individuals refrain from corruption (i) the more they hold integrity as a protected value, (ii) the more they experience compromising their integrity for monetary gains as unacceptable, and (iii) the higher their level of Honesty-Humility. The results of our two-step experiment largely support the hypotheses: people who treat compromises to integrity as unacceptable were less willing to accept bribes, and Honesty-Humility decreased bribe-giving. The findings are robust to demographic variables (e.g., age, gender, cultural background) and additional personal characteristics (e.g., risk tolerance, dispositional greed) and have important implications for ongoing theory-building efforts and business practice.

Given a stock price process, we analyse the potential of arbitrage by insiders in a context of short-selling prohibitions. We introduce the notion of minimal supermartingale measure, and we analyse its properties in connection to the minimal martingale measure. In particular, we establish conditions when both fail to exist. These correspond to the case when the insider's information set includes some non null events that are perceived as having null probabilities by the uninformed market investors. These results may have different applications, such as in problems related to the local risk-minimisation for insiders whenever strategies are implemented without short selling.

Recent research and practical implementations in the area of open innovation and business ecosystems have found that ecosystem theory can play an important part in strategic management. The term Open Innovation Ecosystem stands for an ill-defined concept. In both theory and practice, the term is used in different combinations and with different meanings. The attempt of this paper is to briefly define the open innovation ecosystem, including the derivation of its two theories, i.e. open innovation and (business) ecosystem. We explain the conceptual analogy between the biological ecosystem, as observed in nature, and our understanding of the open innovation ecosystem that we adopted from manufacturing and technology. By examining the financial sector, we found some generally valid definitions. The focus of our research is the value of creating open innovation ecosystems and the forces and processes that cause them to evolve over time. Based on a case study of Alibaba’s cross-sector ecosystem, we show that in today’s sharing economy, the winner takes it all. We conclude by suggesting strategy development through the lens of the ecosystem theory, as this approach clearly drives innovation and growth in an increasingly connected digital world.

Rapid and unpredictable events as we have experienced with the financial crisis or recently with COVID-19 together with macro trends that change societies and businesses over ten years have become recurring themes in the global competitive landscape. The open innovation concept helps firms to reconfigure their resources across company boundaries and in turn, nurtures organisational agility and entrepreneurial flexibility. Collaboration and co-creation are the core elements of a new management mindset to serve specific client demands fast, precisely, and effectively. A long-term study, exploring the impacts of emerging open business models in financial services, found that digital convergence accelerates the disruption of established banking businesses. Based on a literature review, complemented with information from case studies of notable banks, this abstract shows what affects markets and society most and provides insights into a sector that is in transformation. It broadens the understanding of scholars as well as practitioners that acknowledge open innovation to develop opportunities by creating and capturing value in business ecosystems.

We study local loan conditions when, under external pressure, banks close branches. After the closure of nearby branches of their credit granting banks, firms that locally and hurriedly transfer to other banks receive an equivalent interest rate. However, and in stark contrast, where branch closures do not take place firms that purposely switch banks receive a 63 basis points discount. At the same time, the loan default rate for the (more expensive) transfer loans is on average a full percentage point lower than that for the (cheaper) switching loans. This suggests that firms that establish new relationships after their bank branch closes are “better” than regular switchers in terms of unobservable characteristics. Taken together, these findings provide evidence of losses for firms when banks close branches, even if local markets remain competitive.

We analyze the price effect of the introduction of Collective Action Clauses (CACs) in all newly issued sovereign bonds of Eurozone countries as of January 1, 2013. By allowing a majority of creditors to modify payment obligations, such clauses reduce the likelihood of holdouts while facilitating strategic default by the sovereign. We find that CAC bonds trade in the secondary market at lower yields than otherwise similar no-CAC bonds. The yield differential widens in countries with worse ratings and in those with stronger legal systems. The results suggest that CACs are seen as pro- rather than anti-creditor provisions.

We use the theory of cooperative games for the design of fair insurance contracts. An insurance contract needs to specify the premium to be paid and a possible participation in the benefit (or surplus) of the company. It results from the analysis that when a contract is exposed to the default risk of the insurance company, ex-ante equilibrium considerations require a certain participation in the benefit of the company to be specified in the contracts. The fair benefit participation of agents appears as an outcome of a game involving the residual risks induced by the default possibility and using fuzzy coalitions.

Although policy uncertainty has drawn regulators’ attention in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, little is known on how to alleviate its adverse effects. In this paper, we examine the role of political connections in mitigating the detrimental impact of policy uncertainty on banks. Our estimates show that banks are more cautious when facing policy uncertainty, but that the effect is partially alleviated when banks are politically connected. For an increase of one standard deviation in policy uncertainty, connected banks maintain a loss provision to loan volume ratio that is almost seven percent lower compared to their unconnected peers. These findings are robust to a geographical regression discontinuity setting, as well as to a placebo test. Lastly, the mitigating role of political connections is driven mainly by smaller banks and periods of stricter banking regulations.

In this paper, we use the content of U.S. mutual funds' prospectuses to examine the informational value of funds' qualitative disclosures. We document significant heterogeneity in the cross-section of funds' qualitative disclosures, primarily attributed to characteristics at the investment company level. Using textual analysis, we decompose funds' qualitative disclosures into informative and standard content. Our results show that funds' risk-taking behavior and risk-adjusted-performance increase with the informativeness of their disclosures. Content-based updates of disclosures are informative about funds' future risk-taking and their future performance. Finally, we document evidence that investors react to some extent to the informativeness of fund disclosures.