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We have raised executive management's awareness, and expectations of the strategic role of information systems technology. Teams of managers are commonly involved in workshops or planning processes designed to identify such applications. Conceptual frameworks to assist in such "idea-generation" sessions are widely cited in the literature and used in practice. Less well understood is the process used to evaluate the sustainability of proposed applications. We present a framework for evaluating sustainability based on the competitor's anticipated response time, differences among competitors, and the potential of the application to preempt competitive responses. Such an analysis is proposed as an evaluation tool for intended strategic applications of information technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses whether a lottery ticket is a good investment based on using elementary mathematics and economics. It presents a mathematical model of a lottery drawing which considers ticket sales and the size of jackpot. Using Portfolio theory and Kelly criterion, it examines whether the drawings with positive expected rates of return or the good bets is a good investment. It concludes that lotteries are still too risky to make good investments even with good expected rate of return.

Calculating the expected rate of return to their own college degree and comparing it to those of students with other majors can be an interesting and fruitful project for students in a labor economics course. Data from the surveys of the National Association of Colleges and Employers (not all that well known but available in most college career-planning and placement offices) allow students to use current starting salary offers reported for about 80 different major fields and another 80 types of occupations (first jobs) to estimate the financial payoffs to their college training. In this article, the author discusses the various steps, data sources needed, and caveats for students and instructors working this exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relationship between the risk premium on the Center for Research on Security Prices (CRSP) value-weighted index total return and its conditional variance. We propose a new semiparametric model in which the conditional variance process is parametric and the conditional mean is an arbitrary function of the conditional variance. For monthly CRSP value-weighted excess returns, the relationship between the two moments that we uncover is nonlinear and nonmonotonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents letters to the editor. Relation between income and social security; Facts regarding welfare loss due to market power; Economist-critic of advertising.