Jan Keil, Steven Ongena, The demise of branch banking - Technology, consolidation, bank fragility, Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 158, 2024. (Journal Article)
We study bank branching dynamics across 3,143 US counties and 26 years. During the last decade, banks closed their branches at an unprecedented rate. At its peak in 2009, there were 90,783 branches. By 2020, this number has fallen by 12 percent. While technological factors correlate with these branching dynamics, bank fragility and consolidation are also strongly associated with changes in the number of branches (and their openings and closures). Interestingly, technological capabilities to service customers, such as online banking, seem less tightly linked to de-branching than technological capabilities to process internal information. Our analysis shows that large banks rely on internal technology to shed branches, while small banks close branches when they are vulnerable or consolidate. |
|
Erich Walter Farkas, Francesco Ferrari, Urban Ulrych, Pricing autocallables under local-stochastic volatility, In: Peter Carr Gedenkschrift: Research Advances in Mathematical Finance, World Scientific Pulishing, Singapore, p. 329 - 378, 2024. (Book Chapter)
This chapter investigates the pricing of single-asset autocallable barrier reverse convertibles in the Heston local-stochastic volatility (LSV) model. Despite their complexity, autocallable structured notes are the most traded equity-linked exotic derivatives. The autocallable payoff embeds an early redemption feature generating strong path and model dependency. Consequently, the commonly used local volatility (LV) model is overly simplified for pricing and risk management. Given its ability to match the implied volatility smile and reproduce its realistic dynamics, the LSV model is, in contrast, better suited for exotic derivatives, such as autocallables. We use quasi-Monte Carlo methods to study the pricing given the Heston LSV model and compare it with the LV model. In particular, we establish the sensitivity of the valuation differences of autocallables between the two models with respect to pay-off features, model. |
|
Christian Ewerhart, Guang-Zhen Sun, The n-player Hirshleifer contest, Games and Economic Behavior, Vol. 143, 2024. (Journal Article)
While the game-theoretic analysis of conflict is often based on the assumption of multiplicative noise, additive noise such as considered by Hirshleifer (1989) may be equally plausible depending on the application. In this paper, we examine the equilibrium set of the n-player difference-form contest with heterogeneous valuations. For high and intermediate levels of noise, the equilibrium is in pure strategies, with at most one player being active. For small levels of noise, however, we find a variety of equilibria in which some but not necessarily all players randomize. In the case of homogeneous valuations, we obtain a partial uniqueness result for symmetric equilibria. As the contest becomes increasingly decisive, at least two contestants bid up to the valuation of the second-ranked contestant, while any others ultimately drop out. Thus, in the limit, equilibria of the Hirshleifer contest share important properties of equilibria of the corresponding all-pay auction. |
|
Liudmila Zavolokina, Andreas Hein, Arthur Carvalho, Gerhard Schwabe, Helmut Krcmar, Preface to the special issue on “Enterprise and organizational applications of distributed ledger technologies, Electronic Markets, Vol. 34 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
|
|
Alberto Huertas Celdran, Pedro Miguel Sánchez Sánchez, Gérôme Bovet, Gregorio Martínez Pérez, Burkhard Stiller, CyberSpec: Behavioral Fingerprinting for Intelligent Attacks Detection on Crowdsensing Spectrum Sensors, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Vol. 21 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Integrated sensing and communication is a novel paradigm using crowdsensing spectrum sensors to help with the management of spectrum scarcity. However, well-known vulnerabilities of resource-constrained spectrum sensors and the possibility of being manipulated by users with physical access complicate their protection against spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks. Most recent literature suggests using behavioral fingerprinting and Machine/Deep Learning (ML/DL) for improving similar cybersecurity issues. Nevertheless, the applicability of these techniques in resource-constrained devices, the impact of attacks affecting spectrum data integrity, and the performance and scalability of models suitable for heterogeneous sensors types are still open challenges. To improve limitations, this work presents seven SSDF attacks affecting spectrum sensors and introduces CyberSpec, an ML/DL-oriented framework using device behavioral fingerprinting to detect anomalies produced by SSDF attacks. CyberSpec has been implemented and validated in ElectroSense, a real crowdsensing RF monitoring platform where several configurations of the proposed SSDF attacks have been executed in different sensors. A pool of experiments with different unsupervised ML/DL-based models has demonstrated the suitability of CyberSpec detecting the previous attacks within an acceptable timeframe. |
|
Rafael Henrique Vareto, Yu Linghu, Terrance Edward Boult, William Robson Schwartz, Manuel Günther, Open-set face recognition with maximal entropy and Objectosphere loss, Image and Vision Computing, Vol. 141, 2024. (Journal Article)
Open-set face recognition characterizes a scenario where unknown individuals, unseen during the training and enrollment stages, appear on operation time. This work concentrates on watchlists, an open-set task that is expected to operate at a low false-positive identification rate and generally includes only a few enrollment samples per identity. We introduce a compact adapter network that benefits from additional negative face images when combined with distinct cost functions, such as Objectosphere Loss (OS) and the proposed Maximal Entropy Loss (MEL). MEL modifies the traditional Cross-Entropy loss in favor of increasing the entropy for negative samples and attaches a penalty to known target classes in pursuance of gallery specialization. The proposed approach adopts pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) for face recognition as feature extractors. Then, the adapter network takes deep feature representations and acts as a substitute for the output layer of the pre-trained DNN in exchange for an agile domain adaptation. Promising results have been achieved following open-set protocols for three different datasets: LFW, IJB-C, and UCCS as well as state-of-the-art performance when supplementary negative data is properly selected to fine-tune the adapter network. |
|
Mathias Gehrig, Manasi Muglikar, Davide Scaramuzza, Dense Continuous-Time Optical Flow from Event Cameras, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2024. (Journal Article)
We present a method for estimating dense continuous-time optical flow from event data. Traditional dense optical flow methods compute the pixel displacement between two images. Due to missing information, these approaches cannot recover the pixel trajectories in the blind time between two images. In this work, we show that it is possible to compute per-pixel, continuous-time optical flow using events from an event camera. Events provide temporally fine-grained information about movement in pixel space due to their asynchronous nature and microsecond response time. We leverage these benefits to predict pixel trajectories densely in continuous time via parameterized Bézier curves. To achieve this, we build a neural network with strong inductive biases for this task: First, we build multiple sequential correlation volumes in time using event data. Second, we use Bézier curves to index these correlation volumes at multiple timestamps along the trajectory. Third, we use the retrieved correlation to update the Bézier curve representations iteratively. Our method can optionally include image pairs to boost performance further. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first method that can regress dense pixel trajectories from event data. To train and evaluate our model, we introduce a synthetic dataset (MultiFlow) that features moving objects and ground truth trajectories for every pixel. Our quantitative experiments not only suggest that our method successfully predicts pixel trajectories in continuous time but also that it is competitive in the traditional two-view pixel displacement metric on MultiFlow and DSEC-Flow. Open source code and datasets are released to the public. |
|
Arthur Carvalho, Chad Anderson, Liudmila Zavolokina, Designing Incentives for Attracting Peer Reviewers to Information System Conferences, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Vol. 54, 2024. (Journal Article)
Information systems (IS) conferences, as venues for the introduction of new knowledge to the IS community, require effective peer review systems to evaluate submitted research for quality, validity, and originality. We argue in this paper that questionable practices and degrading review quality may arise without direct incentives beyond reviewer altruism to engage in the peer review process. In particular, we highlight potential issues with arguably common practices in some IS conferences, such as peer review invitations sent to researchers who have also submitted papers for publication consideration and the increasing number of reviews performed by graduate students. To address these issues, we suggest three solutions: 1) quid pro quo rules; 2) the use of incentive-compatible methods whose scores are linked to relevant rewards; and 3) the use of blockchain-based tokens in tandem with smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs. We conclude by offering directions the IS community can take to further study the highlighted issues and implement the proposed solutions. |
|
Anne Beck, Essays on inequality, trade, finance and climate change, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2024. (Dissertation)
|
|
Jan Cieciuch, Eldad Davidov, Values, In: Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Sociology, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK; Northampton Massachusetts, USA, p. 618 - 622, 2023-12-28. (Book Chapter)
|
|
Rajna Gibson Brandon, Matthias Sohn, Carmen Tanner, Alexander Wagner, Earnings Management and the Role of Moral Values in Investing, European Accounting Review, 2023. (Journal Article)
In this study, we use earnings management to examine (1) how investors regard a CEO’s commitment to honesty and (2) the impact of their perceptions, in light of their own moral values, on their investment decisions. In two laboratory experiments using students as investor proxies, we find that investors perceive a CEO as being more committed to honesty when they believe the CEO has engaged less in earnings management. A one standard deviation increase in a CEO’s perceived commitment to honesty, compared to that of another CEO, leads to a 40% reduction in the importance the investors assigned, when making investment decisions, to differences in the two CEOs’ claimed future returns. This effect is particularly pronounced among investors with a proself value orientation. For prosocial investors, their moral values and those they attribute to the CEO directly influence their investment decisions, with returns playing a secondary role. Our findings contrast with the idea, implicit in the literature on ‘sin’ stocks, that morality is a niche concern. By contrast, we find that moral values play a significant role for distinct types of investors and that they influence investment decisions for both moral and pecuniary reasons. |
|
Yu Zhou, Weilin Zhan, Zi Li, Tingting Han, Taolue Chen, Harald Gall, DRIVE: Dockerfile Rule Mining and Violation Detection, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Vol. 33 (2), 2023. (Journal Article)
A Dockerfile defines a set of instructions to build Docker images, which can then be instantiated to support containerized applications. Recent studies have revealed a considerable amount of quality issues with Dockerfiles. In this article, we propose a novel approach, Dockerfiles Rule mIning and Violation dEtection (DRIVE), to mine implicit rules and detect potential violations of such rules in Dockerfiles. DRIVE first parses Dockerfiles and transforms them to an intermediate representation. It then leverages an efficient sequential pattern mining algorithm to extract potential patterns. With heuristic-based reduction and moderate human intervention, potential rules are identified, which can then be utilized to detect potential violations of Dockerfiles. DRIVE identifies 34 semantic rules and 19 syntactic rules including 9 new semantic rules that have not been reported elsewhere. Extensive experiments on real-world Dockerfiles demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. |
|
Erich Walter Farkas, Anlegen mit KI - Herausforderung und Chance, In: Finanz und Wirtschaft, 101, p. 15, 21 December 2023. (Newspaper Article)
Künstliche Intelligenz hat die Effizienz der Datenanalyse revolutioniert und bietet die Möglichkeit, das Investment Research und Portfoliomanagement zu automatisieren. Ihr Einsatz ist aber kein uneingeschränkter Erfolgsgarant. |
|
Thorsten Hens, Sylvia Walter, "Das süsse Gift der Gewinne vergiftet mich": Interview mit Thorsten Hens: Der Professor am Institut für Banking und Finance erwartet für das kommende Jahr weniger Aktienperformance als in 2023, In: Finanz und Wirtschaft, p. 15 - 16, 20 December 2023. (Newspaper Article)
"Breit diversifizieren": Der Botschafter des FuW-Börsenspiels Thorsten Hens wich während der Spieldauer von seiner eigentlichen Anlagephilosophie ab. Nach Startschwierigkeiten schnitt er dennoch unter den besten 20% des Wettbewerbs ab. Für den Finanzprofessor und Verhaltensökonomen steht die breite Diversifikation im Vordergrund beim Aufbau eines langfristig angelegten Portfolios. Auf Einzeltitel setzt er in der Regel nicht.
Für das kommende Jahr empfiehlt er Schweizer Aktien, weil der heimische Markt grosses Aufholpotenzial aufweise. Doch gefeit vor systematischen Anlagefehlern sei auch er nicht. |
|
Marc Chesney, The Smell Of Hypocrisy In Dubai, In: The London Economic Newspaper, p. online, 19 December 2023. (Newspaper Article)
Professor Marc Chesney of the University of Zurich says that the foul stench oil, gas, and coal emanated from global climate summit COP28. |
|
Sandra Andraszewicz, Dániel Kaszás, Stefan Zeisberger, Christoph Hölscher, The influence of upward social comparison on retail trading behaviour, Scientific Reports, Vol. 13 (1), 2023. (Journal Article)
Online investing is often facilitated by digital platforms, where the information of peer top performers can be widely accessible and distributed. However, the influence of such information on retail investors’ psychology, their trading behaviour and potential risks they may be prone to is poorly understood. We investigate the impact of upward social comparison on risk-taking, trading activity and investor satisfaction using a tailored experiment with 807 experienced retail investors trading on a dynamically evolving simulated stock market, designed to systematically measure various facets of trading activity. We find that investors presented with an upward social comparison take more risk and trade more actively, and they report significantly lower satisfaction with their own performance. Our findings demonstrate the pitfalls of modern investment platforms with peer information and social trading. The broad implications of this study also provide guidelines for improving retail investor satisfaction and protection. |
|
Saeid Ashraf Vaghefi, Dominik Stammbach, Veruska Muccione, Julia Bingler, Jingwei Ni, Mathias Kraus, Simon Allen, Chiara Colesanti-Senni, Tobias Wekhof, Tobias Schimanski, Glen Gostlow, Tingyu Yu, Qian Wang, Nicolas Webersinke, Christian Huggel, Markus Leippold, ChatClimate: Grounding conversational AI in climate science, Communications Earth & Environment, Vol. 4, 2023. (Journal Article)
Large Language Models have made remarkable progress in question-answering tasks, but challenges like hallucination and outdated information persist. These issues are especially critical in domains like climate change, where timely access to reliable information is vital. One solution is granting these models access to external, scientifically accurate sources to enhance their knowledge and reliability. Here, we enhance GPT-4 by providing access to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6), the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and reliable source in this domain (refer to the ’Data Availability’ section). We present our conversational AI prototype, available at www.chatclimate.ai, and demonstrate its ability to answer challenging questions in three different setups: (1) GPT-4, (2) ChatClimate, which relies exclusively on IPCC AR6 reports, and (3) Hybrid ChatClimate, which utilizes IPCC AR6 reports with in-house GPT-4 knowledge. The evaluation of answers by experts show that the hybrid ChatClimate AI assistant provide more accurate responses, highlighting the effectiveness of our solution. |
|
Irem Erten, Steven Ongena, Environmental risk and bank lending, VoxEU, CEPR Policy Portal, London, https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/environmental-risk-and-bank-lending, 2023-12-14. (Scientific Publication In Electronic Form)
Belief in the effects of climate change remains stubbornly regionally specific. This column discusses how banks assess environmental risks in syndicated loan markets in the US. The deregulation following US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017 prompted banks to reduce the environmental-risk sensitivity of their loan pricing in Republican states, while lenders charged higher rates to borrowers causing severe environmental damage only in states where climate denial is low. The price of environmental risk in bank lending, the authors suggest, is driven by local beliefs and regulatory enforcement practices. |
|
Benjamin Kraner, Nicolo Vallarano, Claudio Tessone, Tokenization of the Common: An Economic Model of Multidimensional Incentives, In: Middleware '23: 24th International Middleware Conference, ACM Digital library, 2023-12-11. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
The concept of the tragedy of the commons, originally rooted in economics, describes the depletion of shared resources due to self-interested actions by individuals. This work proposes a novel solution to address this economic challenge by leveraging tokens to capture its multidimensional nature. By utilising blockchain and DLTs, this decentralised approach aims to achieve a social optimum while promoting self-regulation. The paper presents a mathematical treatment of the tragedy of the commons, incorporating multi-dimensional tokens and exploring the divergence from the classic optimal solution, highlighting the potential of tokenisation in shaping a sustainable and efficient economy. |
|
Dario Staehelin, Gianluca Miscione, Mateusz Dolata, From Solution Trap to Solution Patchwork: Tensions in Digital Health in the Global Context, In: 2023 International Conference on Information Systems, Association for Information Systems, 2023-12-10. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
This paper problematizes underlying assumptions in Design Science Research – and Information Systems Research more broadly by conceptualizing the „solution trap“. The solution trap is caused by the incompatibility of co-existing solutions in complex socio-technical contexts. Information systems bring diverse cultures and theories together, causing tensions in the different institutional logics. We emphasize the need for a nuanced understanding of context unevenness and propose solution patchwork as a coordination approach to evade the solution trap. Substantiating the preliminary insights and propositions with a literature review and further empirical grounding will transition this research-in-progress to a full paper. |
|