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While markets internationalize and at the same time consolidate, companies have to ask themselves if they can develop to one of the market leaders in this broader international market. To give guidance to this question, the business brief introduces the concept of the consolidation index as a framework for developing and validating strategies in this regard and discusses the results of the consolidation index for the European banking and utilities industry.

Motivated by workforce planning problems in health care, professional, warranty, and repair services, we propose modeling service centers that are exclusively dedicated to fixed client constituencies as closed multiserver queueing systems, a framework we refer to as membership services. We provide fluid and diffusion approximations of the number of users within the membership who are requesting service. The approximations are obtained via many-server limit theorems, where the limiting regime assumptions of each theorem correspond to a particular staffing strategy a manager might employ. Accordingly, we propose staffing rules designed to meet a certain desired performance criterion. In particular, when the objective is to minimize the staffing size subject to a constraint on the probability of delay for a service-requesting customer, we suggest staffing rules inspired by the so-called quality- and efficiency-driven (QED), or Halfin-Whitt, limiting regime. Numerical evaluations of our proposed QED scheme indicate that, although justified for large systems, the staffing rule performs well for memberships of all sizes.

© 2008 INFORMS

We document a general pattern in the euro area overnight interbank rate (EONIA) and analyze how German banks compared to other EMU banks respond to these predictable changes in the price for reserve holdings. At the beginning of the maintenance period, when the EONIA is typically above average, we observe that German banks hold substantially less reserves than their daily average required reserves. Thus in contrast to other EMU banks, German banks back load the fulfillment of their reserve requirements over the reserve maintenance period and thereby benefit from the general pattern in the EONIA. Looking at the disaggregate data we find than this is particularly the case for the Landesbanks.We argue that the end of the calender month effect in the EONIA may be driven by a temporary shortage of liquidity, relative to reserve requirements, at the beginning of the maintenance period (which coincides with the end of the calendar month).

With permission of Elsevier

A pdf file of this working paper may be available at INSEAD.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the opportunities and challenges of serving low-income consumers in developing markets with mobile telecommunications.

With permission of Emerald