Contributions in Merlin

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I provide a unified explanation for shareholder ownership, partnerships, mutuals, government ownership, cooperatives, and vertical and horizontal control: each ownership form constitutes a variation on a single underlying theme, the assignment of ownership to a subset of firm stakeholders. When not every facet of a transaction is contractible and high-powered incentives might divert investment toward the transaction’s contractible facets, to the overall transaction’s possible detriment, optimal organizational ownership allocates the right to set the power of managerial incentives to those stakeholders most affected by the noncontractible facets of the organization’s paramount transaction.

We successfully show that it is possible to optimize both for risk and for asset allocation without compromising the optimization of individual goals by introducing the novel concept of a compensation portfolio. Therefore, we solve for the global vs. local optimization paradox by bridging Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) and Behavioral Portfolio Theory (BPT).

Economists have previously made little use of high-performance computers (HPC) in their research. This is despite the fact that the complex interactions and heterogeneity of their models can quickly cause them to reach hundreds of dimensions, which cannot be calculated using conventional methods. In the past, simplified models were therefore often formulated for answering complex questions. These models solved some problems, but they could also provide false predictions, explains Simon Scheidegger, Senior Assistant at the University of Zurich's Department of Banking and Finance. For example, quantitatively studying optimal monetary policy in the wake of a financial crisis cannot be properly achieved using the conventional methods. However, calculating high-dimensional models on a supercomputer is not easy either. Until recently, researchers lacked appropriate numerical analysis and highly efficient software

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More and more academic studies and practitioner reportsclaim that human work is increasingly disrupted or evendetermined by information and communication technology(ICT) (Cascio and Montealegre 2016). This will make aconsiderable share of jobs currently performed by humanssusceptible to automation (e.g., Frey and Osborne 2017;Manyika et al. 2017). These reports often sketch a pictureof ‘machines taking over’ traditional domains like manu-facturing, while ICT advances and capabilities seem todecide companies’ fate. Consequently, ICT is often put atthe core of innovative efforts. While this applies to nearlyall areas of workplace design, a recent popular example ofincreasing technology centricity is ‘Industry 4.0’, which isoften delineated as ‘machines talking to computers’.As objects in the physical environment increasinglyhouse advanced computing and communication capa-bilities, the resulting composite systems are oftenreferred to as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), as theybridge the digital and physical world (Rajkumar et al.2010). In other words, CPSs are an integration of com-putation and physical processes, which is why they serveas an illustrative example in Exhibit 1 and throughoutthe article. We discuss manufacturing as an a pplicationarea, because here digital transformation is happeningfirst and fast. We also observe similar transformations inother areas, such as agriculture, logistics, and crafts. Theproliferation of ICT in these environments is often ter-med ubiquitous computing and denotes a shift towardsembedded computing that is less perceptible to the enduser (Cascio and Montealegre 2016)

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