Books about Inefficiency from Amazon.com

The recent evolution of an independent cross market, combined with the technological advancements in computerized trading marked the beginning of a new era in the Foreign Exchange Market. Triangular arbitrage among currencies, once only a theory, is now common practice for those with access to large amounts of money. This book illustrates how converting from one currency to another, then to another, and back to the original currency can be very profitable. This study provides the first direct and precise test of triangular arbitrage based on actual data. A risk-free profit can be made by taking advantage of price discrepancies of a currency in several different markets. The study begins by reviewing past work on triangular arbitrage and provides a comprehensive review of the Foreign Exchange Market and the procedures of computerized trading. The author then presents the theory of triangular arbitrage, given a group of five major currencies. The last chapters develop methods of testing that are original and based on empiracal information. The author is careful to explain that profits arer dependent on many variables related to market volume, volatility, inefficiency, and unexpected news. The markets that consistently show the largest amounts of inefficiency are the dollar-pound-yen, dollar-mark-yen, and dollar-yen-franc markets. Inefficiencies in triangular arbitrage imply that risk-free profitable opportunities exist. Traders can take advantage of those opportunities by focusing their attention on the markets in which profitable opportunities are available..
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The Child Left Behind. Is this your child?! Most parents, and unfortunately most schools, have little idea of what the educational performance of individual children ought to be. Grades on their report cards rarely, if ever, provide insight into what educational achievement should be expected for individual children.The purpose of this book is to alert parents and teachers to specific symptoms of brain inefficiencies and help to identify and possibly develop strategies to reduce their impact upon individual so afflicted.Again parents, and unfortunately most schools, do not appear to understand and evaluate a child's abilities to achieve academically or behave emotionally and socially. An accepted standard of normal intelligence is a mean (average) intelligence quotient score of 100 with a range of 15 points, plus or minus 5 points, or roughly an IQ score range of 80 to 120. Most parents, and unfortunately many professionals, do not recognize the critical relationship between intellectual ability and academic achievement. Hopefully this book will alert parents to significant factors that affect not only their children's academic achievement, but impact their emotional and social behavior as well. Psychiatric "diagnoses" such as autism, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, and conduct disorder, among a number or others, provide parents and teachers, or even the child so afflicted, with little insight into their behavior. It is the author's view that these "diagnoses" are primarily used to prescribe psychotropic medications (drugs), with a minimal regard to the potential hazards of their use..
Price: $9.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Why are most businesses less efficient that they could be? Why do two identical Ford plants in England and Germany, manufacturing identical cars, have vastly different rates of production? Harvey Leibenstein explores such questions in depth, using ideas and evidence from economics, game theory, psychology, and other disciplines. He observes that employees usually perform best when they work under a moderate amount of pressure - not too little and not too much. But this sort of balanced situation is rare, so most workers in low-pressure situations may shirk their tasks, while those in a stressful environment may cave in.

To avoid this state of affairs, Leibenstein argues, workers tacitly adopt conventions about proper degrees of effort. These standards, which frequently defy rational considerations, are largely governed by the history of the firm, the degree of hierarchy, and the nature of the competitive relationships within the firm. Leibenstein analyzes the structure and functioning of companies with multiple levels of hierarchy, pinpointing sources of inefficiency. He also examines the question of entrepreneurship..
Price: $10.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]