SPOUDAI - Journal of Economics and Business

31-46

Authors: Nikolaos K. Liapopoulos, Socrates J. Moschuris

This paper presents some preliminary results, regarding outsourcing decisions, based on a study, which was conducted using a sample of enterprises operating in Greece. Specifically, the motivations, the risks, and the impact, positive or negative, of outsourcing are described and analyzed. 56 companies, which operate in the trading and manufacturing sectors, participated in this research. Results indicate that cost reduction and acquisition of technology/skills are the most important motivations for outsourcing, whereas contracting-out core activities and loss of control are the most serious risks of outsourcing. Generally, the impact of outsourcing is positive, with cost reduction and increase in flexibility the mostly cited benefits. JEL Classification: L60, L81, M11. Keywords: Outsourcing, motivations, risks, benefits, strategic, Greece.

75-93

Authors: Nikolaos Kakogiannis

The purpose of this paper is to formulate and study a game where there is a player who is involved for a long time interval and several small players who stay in the game for short time intervals. Examples of such games abound in practice. For example a Bank is a long-term player who stays in business for a very long time whereas most of its customers are affiliated with the Bank for relatively short time periods. Another example is the Hellenic Electrical Grid. There is the Grid Administrator, which is the major long time player, and there are many minor players (power producers with different technologies, quantity and quality features). The Grid Administrator is considered to have an infinite time horizon and the minor players are considered as players who stay in the game for a fixed period of five years (indicative number). A minor producer/consumer who enters the system a certain year is considered as one player who is involved for five (specific) time levels. This player overlaps in action with the other players who entered at different time and with the Grid Administrator. The minor players (energy producers) try to improve their strategies, by changing their profile, so as to penetrate in the electrical grid and succeed to sell more energy to the Grid (improve their profits). The Grid Administrator tries to imply the best policy so as to improve his gain. JEL Classification: C63, C78, D47 Keywords: Energy optimization cost, Decision Policy tool, Strategies, Liberalized Energy Market

100-120

Authors: Argiro Svingou

This study is an investigation of the factors affecting the average returns of stocks that were traded on the Athens Stock Exchange for the period July 2004 - June 2011. The methodological approach is similar to that applied by Fama and French (1992), in the first stage, stocks are grouped into portfolios with predefined criteria, and subsequently monthly cross sectional regressions are carried out, according to the Fama-MacBeth approach (1973). The main result of this study is that average stock returns in the ASE are not associated with the market beta (market risk) and there is not a strong relationship with any other risk factor for the stocks market value or book to market ratio. JEL Classification: G10, G11, G14 Keywords: Cross-sectional analysis, market beta, size effect