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This paper aims to investigate how competition among online auction sellers influences the setting of both open and secret reserve prices, thereby affecting auction outcome.

Using a data set collected from eBay consisting of 787 identical product auctions, three empirical models have been proposed. Model 1 simultaneously estimates the effects of auction competition on a seller’s own open and secret reserve price strategies; Model 2 estimates the effects of auction competition on bidder participation; and Model 3 estimates the direct and indirect effects of auction competition on selling price.

Competition among sellers is central to shaping sellers’ reserve price strategies. When there are more concurrent auctions for identical items, sellers tend to specify a low open reserve and are less likely to set a secret reserve. Sellers are strongly influenced by competitors’ reserve price strategies, and tend to follow competition. Finally, auction competition and competitive reserve price strategies influence both bidder entry and selling prices.

This study has important implications for both sellers and bidders. It highlights the importance for sellers to adapt their reserve price strategies in light of their competitors’ reserve price strategies and offers implications for bidders regarding auction selection. An auction with low starting bid does not necessarily lead to a lower selling price as it attracts more bidders.

This paper focuses on competition among auction sellers, whereas previous literature has focused on competition among bidders. This paper is the first to study the impact of competing reserve prices in auctions.

This is a survey of users’ levels of satisfaction with reserve collection services at Delta State University Library, Abraka, Nigeria. By means of a questionnaire, data were collected. Findings revealed the personal characteristics of the respondents and their levels of satisfaction with reserve collection, loan policy, staff, condition of reading room, opening hours and the time it takes to serve users. The paper concludes by making recommendations for improvement.

Discusses the general usefulness of reserve collections in academic libraries and considers the place of the reserve collection in the University of the West Indies′ library. Describes the method of operation of this collection, and considers changes in its operation, relating both to library automation and to changing circumstances in the library.

The purpose of this research is to investigate a new approach with its supporting building information modelling (BIM) + augmented reality (AR) tool to enhance architectural visualisation in building life cycle. Traditional approaches to visualise architectural design concentrate on static pictures or three-dimensional (3D) scale models which cause problems, such as expensive design evolution, lack of stakeholders’ communication and limited reusability. The 3D animated fly-throughs still occur on a computer screen in two-dimensions and seem cold and mechanical, unless done with advanced production software.

The method of this research included case study and interview. It was, first, stated, from the building process perspective, how the BIM + AR for Architectural Visualisation System (BAAVS) was realised by integrating two types of visualisation techniques: BIM and AR, and four stages of building life cycle. Then the paper demonstrated four case studies to validate the BAAVS. Finally, four interviews were made with each case manager and team members to collect feedback on utilising BAAVS technology. Questions were asked in the areas of benefits, drawbacks and technical limitations with respect to BAAVS.

Feedback from the stakeholders involved in the four cases indicated that BAAVS was useful and efficient to visualise architectural design and communicate with each other.

This paper demonstrates BAAVS that integrated BIM and AR into architectural visualisation. The system supports an innovative performance that allows: designers to put virtual building scheme in physical environment; owners to gain an immersive and interactive experience; and property sellers to communicate with customers efficiently.

Eugene Meyer governed the Federal Reserve Board during most of the Great Contraction. Yet his role and import are almost unknown. He was not misguided by incorrect policy indicators or the real bills doctrine; the usual explanations for the failure of monetary policy. Meyer urged the adoption of expansionary policies and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to assist banks, especially nonmembers. However, the diffusion of power enabled the district bank Governors to stifle his efforts, although an expansionary policy was finally adopted in 1932. His unquestioning commitment to gold and lack of operational authority are the reasons policy failed.

Studies of Depression-era financial remediation have generally focused on federal deposit insurance and the provision of equity to banks by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). This paper broadens the concept of financial remediation to include other programs – RFC lending, federal guarantees of farm and home mortgages, and the elimination of interest on demand deposits – and other intermediaries – savings and loans, mutual savings banks, and life insurance companies. The benefits of remediation or the amounts potentially at risk to the government in these programs are calculated annually and allocated to the various intermediaries. The slow remediation of real estate loans (two-thirds of these intermediaries' loans) needs further study with respect to the slow economic recovery. The paper compares Depression-era remediation with efforts during the 2008–2009 crisis. Today's remediation contrasts with the 1930s in its speed, magnitude relative to GDP or private sector nonfinancial debt, the share of remediation going to nonbanks, and emphasis on securities markets.

The purpose of this paper is to present a simulation‐based approach for modeling multi‐year non‐life insurance risk in internal risk models. Strategic management in an insurance company requires a multi‐year time horizon for economic decision making, for example, in the context of internal risk models. In the literature to date, only the ultimate perspective and, more recently, the one‐year perspective (for Solvency II purposes) are considered.

The authors present a way of defining and calculating multi‐year claims development results and extend the simulation‐based algorithm (“re‐reserving”) for quantifying one‐year non‐life insurance risk, presented in Ohlsson and Lauzeningks, to a multi‐year perspective.

The multi‐year algorithm is applied to the chain ladder reserving model framework of Mack (1993).

The usefulness of the new multi‐year horizon is illustrated in the context of internal risk models by means of a case study, where the multi‐year algorithm is applied to a claims development triangle based on Mack and on England and Verrall. This algorithm has been implemented in an excel tool, which is given as supplemented material.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, there are no model approaches or studies on insurance risk for projection periods of not just one, but several, new accident years; this requires a suitable extension of the classical Mack model; however, consideration of multiple years is crucial in the context of enterprise risk management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the survival capability of Chaoshan people in the maritime world of the South China Sea amidst the changing monetary systems of the rival empires and political regimes from 1939 to 1945. It particularly focuses on overseas Chinese remittance business in Shantou under the Japanese rule. Local societies in coastal China and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia experienced severe hardships due to the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War and the Chinese Civil War. As fighting among the rival empires and regimes intensified, Chinese migrant communities straddling between Southeast Asia and South China had to negotiate and adapt to survive these crises, regardless of whether they were government-affiliated or local autonomous subjects.

This research draws on archival materials to investigate the reactions of Chinese migrant communities in Chaoshan region in times of war and regime change. How did local maritime societies and overseas Chinese adapt to the harsh realities of the wartime? How did the Japanese Empire use Wang Jingwei’s puppet government in Nanjing to control the Chaoshan remittance network? How did the remittance network shift its operational structure in face of a wartime crisis?

Faced with the wartime crisis and the Japanese occupation, Chaoshan communities used a variety of survival strategies to protect and maintain the overseas Chinese remittance business. In dealing with remittances from Singapore, British Malay and Indonesia, they cooperated with the Japanese military authority and its puppet government to maximize the autonomy of their business operation in the Japanese-controlled East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. On the other hand, to secure the flow of remittances from French Indochina and Thailand, the indirectly controlled territories in the Japanese Empire, Chaoshan merchants sought an alternative path of delivering remittances, known as the Dongxing route, to bypass the Japanese ban on private remittances from these two regions.

It would be a better research if more resources, including remittance receipts and documents during the Japanese occupation, could be found and used to show more detailed features of Chaoshan local society.

This research is the first one to investigate the contradictory features of local Chaoshan society during the Japanese occupation, an under-explored subject in the Chinese historiography.

We analyze the impact of monetary policy instruments on interbank lending rates and retail bank lending in China using an extended version of the model developed by Porter and Xu (2009). Unlike the central banks of advanced economies, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) uses changes in the required reserve ratios and open market operations to influence liquidity in money markets and adjusts the regulated deposit and lending rates and loan targets to intervene in the retail deposit and lending market. These interventions prevent the interbank lending rate from signaling monetary policy stance and transmitting the effect of policy to the growth of bank loans. Since the global financial crisis, the PBoC’s monetary policy has gone through a full cycle. The combining effects of using different policy instruments simultaneously within a short period of time were quite effective in bringing the credit and money growth in line with its desired level. Most recently steps have been taken to speed up the interest rate liberalization. Effective July 2013, the PBoC removed the floors of the benchmark lending rates.