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Retailers have long been aware that weather affects the sales of a myriad of products, but until now, most were not in a position to manage the risks weather presents. Rising weather variability combined with advances in weather-index financial instruments have prompted new interest in investigating the relationship between sales and weather. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of changes in weather on UK retail sales, to estimate the contribution of weather to sales, and evaluate the maximum potential loss caused by adverse weather, for each season and retail sector.

The authors present a methodology to identify and quantify the extent to which a company is exposed to weather risks, in order to incorporate them into its risk management policy and take actions to mitigate these risks. For each season and each retail category, the authors provide a measure of the impact of weather on sales that can be used as a benchmark to analyse sales performance.

The authors propose a new risk assessment indicator to evaluate the potential losses caused by adverse weather (WeatherRisk). The authors show that intra-annual changes in weather significantly affect retail sales. The exposure of retail categories to weather are not the same depending on the season, and the response of individual retail categories to the same change in weather varies considerably. Although temperature is a predominant explanatory variable, the authors show that weather-sensitivity analysis should include precipitation, humidity rate and wind.

One limitation of this study is that the authors individually compute WeatherRisk for each significant weather variable. Further research could explore new approaches to evaluate Total WeatherRisk, which take into account potential multicollinearity issues between weather variables.

The methodology allows retailers to measure the effects of weather on sales performance, evaluate the risks at stake, and protect sales and margins from weather risks, with newly available index-based financial instruments. Managers may now actively use weather as a differential advantage, and at the same time focus their efforts on improving resiliency to increasing climate variability.

In this paper, the authors produce a detailed analysis of the exposure of each retail sectors to unseasonal weather. This is the first time all retail sectors are analysed and ranked per season at a national level. The authors provide managers with actionable information to improve their understanding of how weather impact sales over each season, and to allow them to structure weather-index-based instruments with financial partners.

Do female CEOs face a compensation gap? The purpose of this paper is to examine whether gender affects the total compensation of today’s CEOs, and whether it moderates ten factors influencing their total compensation.

Taking the 54 female CEOs cited in the US 2014 Fortune’s 1000 report, a matched sample of male CEOs was selected, matched according to the crosstab of age by education and by the sizes of the companies directed by these female CEOs.

Using four years’ worth of Fortune reports, between 2013 and 2016, this matched sample indicates that female CEOs are not discriminated against in terms of total compensation. However, eight factors do show a significant effect on total compensation. Using moderation analysis, the present study reveals how gender interacts with company size, sector, membership of outside boards and nature of previous experience.

This paper addresses an important and under-researched gap, with contradictory findings in the existing literature, by compiling and testing the characteristics of male and female CEOs which are not cited in Fortune 1000 reports.

Arguably, this is therefore one of the first papers to study gender differences in total compensation among Fortune 1000 CEOs using a matched sample technique, based on a larger number of female CEOs and a larger number of years than any previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to make easily accessible models to test and compare the optimization algorithms we develop.

For this, the paper proposes an optimization framework based on software component, web service, and plugin to exploit these models in different environments.

The paper illustrates the discussion with optimizations in Matlab™ and R (www.r-project.org) of a transformer described and exploitable from the internet.

The originality is to make easy implementation of simulation model and optimization algorithm coupling using software component, web service, and plugin.

This paper aims to highlight myriad accomplishments of C. Bertrand Thompson, who is perhaps most well known as a scientific-management bibliographer and a Taylor disciple, in the belief that his contributions as a pioneer management theorist and consultant in Europe deserve to be more widely known and more deeply appreciated.

Archival, primary and secondary sources were used in the research.

Thompson was among the first to bring management consulting to Europe. He understood the importance of adapting scientific-management principles to meet the diverse needs of each client for whom he consulted. Thompson’s strong belief and value system remained constant throughout his life.

Understanding the needs of customers or clients and adapting systems to meet those needs is essential in achieving success as a consultant.

By drawing on rarely accessed published and unpublished materials, this paper discusses Thompson’s many contributions to management thought and practice, most of which previously have not been highlighted in the referent literature.

ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR CYBERNETICS (1982) This meeting, the theme of which was cybernetics and education, was held in Columbus (USA) from 18 to 21 October, 1982. It was sponsored by the Academy of Sciences and the State University of Ohio. Most of the participants were from the United States, but some came from Canada (4), United Kingdom (1), France (1).

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

This paper seeks to investigate the work performed by French Cour des comptes magistrates as part of performance audits. The research objective is to understand who the magistrates are, what they do, how they do what they do, how they perceive their role, what authority they feel they can claim, and how, through performance audits, they try to influence the way the organisations they visit are run.

In addition to 35 interviews conducted with Court magistrates (based on a semi-structured interview questionnaire) and non-participant observation, public documentation was analysed. To understand how magistrates perform their tasks at the Court, basic theories on influence processes and theories on decision making developed by Herbert A. Simon were applied.

After exploring the universe in which magistrates of the French Cour des comptes operate, it appears that their undertaking of performance audits has engendered a host of competing visions: the transition to modernity has to occur. The Court presents itself officially as a supreme audit institution but it acts as a grand corps de l ' État (senior branch of the Civil Service). Magistrates come to the Court of their own accord and make every effort to avoid being viewed as control professionals. The Court openly positions itself as a “judge of management”, wishing to impose its jurisdictional authority on activities that are essentially professional in character. A migration from traditional roles is observed: the role of the Court as a critic of the Administration has been sidelined. In addition, the magistrates claim to be judges when they are in the ambit of the Court, but shed this role for that of “catalysts of change” when they interact with representatives of the organisations audited.

The research is based on a detailed analysis of a specific context. This may limit the wider applicability of the findings. However, the data gathered from the French experience could be useful for other supreme audit institutions (SAIs) whose status is equivalent to that of the Court, or whose mandate has expanded in the past decade.

This study lifts the veil on the performance audit practice at one of the numerous supreme audit institutions. In addition, the French context has received scant attention from researchers.

Given the growing supply of wines and the large number of new consumers with purchasing power but lacking knowledge of the subtleties of high-quality wines, expert opinions are used for consumers as proxies for quality. This study aims to determine the determinants of prices in top-quality wine market. The authors also seek to estimate the role for country of origin, grape, producing region and winery in prices. And, finally, the authors try to show how countries, regions and wineries can help increase their position in international rankings.

The authors try to answer: What factors explain the price of top-quality wines (defined as best rated in a standardized ranking)? To some extent, in the hands of producers influence prices, which imply long-term decisions or large investments in land and marketing. Other variables that consumer value does affect prices. The authors try also to detect undervalued or overvalued wines, grapes, regions, wineries or producer countries. The authors estimate an econometric model of hedonic prices using a 14-year sample of the Wine Spectator’s 100 top-rated wines for the American market between 2003 and 2016, totaling 1,400 observations. The sample is a great cross-section because each wine is unique.

The authors’ contribution is twofold: the determination of the price explanatory values and the identification and attribution of price differences by country, grape, region and winery. Also, the authors detected grapes, countries, regions and wineries which are overvalued or undervalued with respect to the average prediction of the model.

The findings are useful to understand the role of price explanatory variables, as well as for making policy and managerial decisions. From the model, collective or managerial actions can be derived to increase particular wines’ positions in international rankings. The proxy for “quality” in the study is not the only possible definition.

In some cases, managerial choices could be conditioned by the policies or history. There is some room for collective action and public policies to improve regions’ and countries’ reputation.

There are clear synergies for policies that can raise the prestige of countries and regions and their spillovers on the brand name reputation of individual wineries.

The results, policy and managerial implications are of interest for business, countries interested in improving their position in international rankings and for consumers to make more informed decisions.