Events

Please join us for a talk by distinguished Oxbridge alumni, Professor Dennis Lo.  This will include a tour of the pathology lab at 14:00, followed by a networking drinks from 16:30 onwards.

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Join Conrad Chua, Executive Director of the Cambridge MBA, with CentreCourt co-founders, John A. Byrne and Matt Symonds, as they probe the minds of business school leadership about industry trends, what makes an MBA programme stand out, and what is in store for the business world in the future. (more…)

Professor Gerben van der Vegt, University of Gronigen

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Boris Nikolov, Professor of Finance at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. Director of the Department of Finance and Swiss Finance Institute Professor

A light lunch will be available outside W4.05 from 12:00.

We document a negative relation between CEO tenure and both corporate leverage and the level of cash flow risk. We rationalise this evidence in a dynamic investment and financing model where a risk averse CEO makes corporate decisions over a finite tenure span. In the model, the CEO enjoys quiet life by under- reacting to both good and bad profitability shocks. The CEO is fired after poor performance but termination decreases with tenure. We structurally estimate the model and show that quiet life is key in rationalising corporate trends over the CEO tenure.

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Professor Mihalis Markakis, IESE Business School

Marketplace platforms provide a convenient meeting point between customers and suppliers, and have become an important element of e-commerce. This sales channel is particularly interesting to suppliers that wish to learn quickly the popularity of new products, because a platform provides expanded reach to potential clientele. On the other hand, the associated lower margins (due to the platform’s cut) constitute a disincentive for suppliers to stay with the platform after learning enough about the demand for their products. In this paper, we show that, under limited capacity, the optimal price/quantity decision is primarily driven by the total demand rate during the sales season. When the latter is unknown, the seller may need to adjust its revenue management tactics over time as it learns the demand rate. We formulate the dynamic optimisation problem under Bayesian learning. We solve it analytically when there is one unit of capacity for sale, and develop effective heuristics for the multi-unit case. Surprisingly, we find that lack of information pushes the seller to opt for a low-volume, high-margin position for a longer time, and only reduce margins close to the end of the selling season, as opposed to earlier, which would accelerate learning.

Joint work with Victor Martínez de Albéniz and Marcos Serrano.

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