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International audience; We revisit the theory of financial crises using a predator-prey metaphor, highlighting the relationship between greed, risk aversion and debt accumulation and aggregating concepts from economics, finance and psychology. We argue that regulations that are implemented inefficiently, with weak enforcement or at the wrong time can have deleterious effects on the market, worsening the ailment they initially intended to correct and leaving a spray of prey in their wake. To illustrate our hypothesis, we examine the role of regulations in the years leading up to and during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in the United States, when the Federal Reserve tried to restrain the over-heated housing market propelled by the predatory mortgage frenzy and the increased use of securitization in risk-hiding financial tools such as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). Our results indicate that deleterious government interventions may act as a chemotherapy of sorts, causing harm followed by a slow recovery. This understanding can help governments draft better regulations to lower market frictions and better protect investors.

International audience; This multidisciplinary article attempts to bridge the gap between policy-driven, agent-driven, psychological and market variables that may be factors in financial crises and may have been involved in the 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which we use as an example. We conducted a quantitative study performed on 202 participants, who acted as proxies for consumers during that period. The results of this exploratory research tend to explain how transactions between eager borrowers/homebuyers and avid lenders developed in the context of a predatory broth, which had deceit at its center. This understanding can help regulators to canvas the use of financial tools and advertising techniques to minimize the negative impact on the economy.

The Fama-French (FF) five-factor model is cast into a dynamic setting to capture the impact of illiquidity over the phases of the business cycle on the returns of the passive FF twelve sector portfolios. We use two dynamic approaches, Kalman filtering and a recursive/rolling robust instrumental variables (IV) algorithm cast into a GMM framework, to determine time-varying alpha and beta estimates. Our principal result is that the Kalman filter approach supports the hypothesis that illiquidity is an important risk factor in a dynamic context. However, the only factor found to matter in the dynamic GMM approach is the market risk premium. Nevertheless, illiquidity may be prescient with respect to financial crises. Keywords: Illiquidity, Fama-French five-factor model, Kalman filter, Robust IV algorithm, JEL Classification: C58, G12

International audience; More and more, investors are solicited to invest in projects of all sizes. Companies like Apple rely on and operate based on projects. Bankers, in particular, are regularly presented with many projects in which they have to decide whether to provide funds or not, not always knowing what to expect in the end. Financials are not enough; investors want to know and contemplate the inner aspects of the project as it will materialize. This article reports the key criteria in ensuring project management success and proposes the creation of an emergent model following the guidelines associated with grounded theory.

International audience; This article presents Key Consensus Factors (KCFs), i.e., those factors that contribute to mutual trust and effective cooperation among stakeholders in project-oriented marketing organizations (POMOs) that aspire to work together toward success. We extract tentative KCFs using the data percolation methodology, which emphasizes the findings of contrasting cases through research. The results of the 18 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups conducted over four years in two different cultures France and Canada lead us to propose four Key Consensus Factors (KCFs): (1) the establishment of behavioral norms, including mutual listening; (2) the meticulous respect for the triple constraint of the calendar of tasks and activities, costs, and quality; (3) the establishment of a common belief system with a clear goal in mind; and 4) the careful anticipation of unexpected risks. Our paper contributes empirically to discussions about the makeup of KCFs, a topic that has been little addressed in the marketing and project management literature. This paper fills the current gap that exists between the notions of Key Success Factors (KSFs), Key Failure Factors (KFFs) and Key Conensus Factors (KCFs). While countless studies have been conducted on KSFs and KFFs, especially in the project management literature, the literature on KCFs is scarce and, to our knowledge, no research centers on the link between the three sets of factors. Our paper can benefit organizations that engage in significant marketing efforts to carry out projects, as it offers a practical model that can guide their activities toward fruitful relationships among all stakeholders, including with their staff and clients. To that effect, we provide a KCF-based checklist aimed at cohesiveness within project-oriented marketing organizations.; Les facteurs clés de consensus dans les organisations marketing axés sur les projetsCet article présente les facteurs clés de consensus (FCC, ou en anglais KCF) qui contribuent à une confiance mutuelle et à une coopération efficace entre les parties prenantes des organisations marketing axées sur les projets qui aspirent à travailler ensemble pour assurer la réussite de l’entreprise. Les résultats des dix-huit entretiens semi-dirigés et des deux groupes de discussion que nous avons menés sur quatre ans nous amènent à proposer quatre facteurs clés de consensus (KCF) : 1) l’établissement de normes comportementales, y compris l’écoute mutuelle ; 2) le respect méticuleux de la triple contrainte calendrier tâches/activités, coûts et qualité ; 3) la mise en place d’un système de croyances communes avec un objectif clair en tête ; et 4) l’anticipation prudente des risques inattendus Cet article apporte une contribution empirique au concept de facteur clé de consensus (FCC), peu abordé dans la recherche en marketing et en gestion de projet, afin de lier les FCC aux notions plus traditionnelles de facteur clé de succès (FCS) et de facteur clé d’échec (FCE). Les études sur les FCS et les FCE sont très nombreuses, surtout dans le domaine de la gestion de projet, mais celles sur les FCC sont beaucoup plus rares. A notre connaissance, aucune recherche n’a encore essayé de lier FCC, FCS et FCE. Nous espérons que cette recherche aidera les organisations qui déploient des efforts significatifs en marketing pour mettre en œuvre leurs projets, car elle présente un modèle pratique qui peut guider leurs activités vers l’établissement de relations fructueuses entre toutes les parties prenantes, y compris le personnel et les clients. A cette fin, notre article comporte une liste de vérification qui vise à renforcer la cohésion à l’intérieur des organisations marketing axées sur les projets.

International audience; Predator-prey dynamics are widely used in ecology but seldom utilized in economics and marketing, despite their ability to express financial market agents' behaviors when considered in combination with economic cycles and financial crises. This multidisciplinary article presents a stylized framework of a market cycle that combines the notions of supply and demand and predator-prey interactions between buyers and sellers of housing mortgages. We illustrate our framework using data from the Global Financial Crisis and a Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model. We find that with our framework we can capture the dynamics of the market, particularly the peak and decline in the number of sellers and sold subprime mortgages. Our framework sheds a new light on consumer behaviors, pinpointing how they can put themselves into vulnerable prey positions. This article is one of the first of its kind to propose market phases and predator-prey dynamics nested in economic cycles and consumer buying trends.

International audience; The present article introduces the concept of consumer spinning. This occurs when consumers have lost track of their initial motivation to consume and engage unwittingly in hamster-like spinning in a “wheel of misfortune”, being encouraged to spend through sweetheart deals and thus incur debt without even realizing it. This article takes for example the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 (GFC) during which the use of such sweeteners by sellers of predatory mortgages and advocates for lax regulations led U.S. consumers to spin and, in the process, ignore the debt trap they were falling into. We discuss the results of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment we conducted to test the ratio of greed over risk aversion and the hypothesized phenomenon of spinning. We believe that this is the first academic attempt to examine spinning resorting to an experimental tool used regularly in neuroscience and psychology research. Our framework indicates that government regulators should take the role of marketing sweeteners into account when devising policies. Marketing managers, who strive to educate consumers and help them reduce their debt load, thus promoting better purchasing power, stand to benefit from an understanding of these possible spinning behaviors and adapt their campaigns accordingly. We believe that there should be legal consequences for encouraging consumer spinning, as this at times may be an intentional and deceitful invitation for consumers to harm themselves financially.

The sudden and unwelcome appropriation or use of a new technology by a stakeholder (hereafter called the ‘techno-predator’) in an innovation network to the detriment of the creator of said technology (hereafter named the ‘techno-prey’) is called ‘techno-predation.’ This phenomenon may take many forms and involves various stakeholders (investors, companies, universities, researchers, inventors, or a mix of the five). Techno-predation follows a clearly identifiable pattern that usually takes place in innovation networks. It is particularly evident in the case of small businesses, which may not have the financial means to protect themselves against techno-predators. It may also be the fate of inexperienced universities or various institutions that are unwilling or unable to protect their researchers. Understanding techno-predation is one way of counteracting its negative or even devastating effects on innovation networks and society at large.

We conjecture that market bubbles may be the results of the interplay of Goods and Bads (toxic products) which develop through three interlocking moments – herding, swarming and stampeding, with deviations marked by heteroscedasticity. We use our stylized model of financial predation, the Consolidated Model of Financial Predation, and data we have accumulated through in-the-field eight-year research and the study of 30 years of U.S. market history in order to explore the foundations of market crises. We find that blind trust (or the positivity bias) and of the fear to miss out on an opportunity to enter/exit a market impacts the investors’ decisions to invest or retract. We show how markets are driven towards a make-or-break predatory dynamic that creates winners and losers due in part to weak regulations and identify a constant k that permeates market behaviours.

International audience; Whilst there are many models discussing the mechanics of financial crises, the notion of predation seems to be insufficiently taken into consideration as one of the explanatory behavioral factors, although it would enrich the understanding of dysfunctional financial markets. This paper provides a stylized model for disruptive and toxic economic behaviors in the context of predatory markets like the subprime crisis of 2007–2009. In this context, we investigate why consumers and sellers buy products they know to be toxic. Conventional economic models contain classical tenets that assume that consumers are rational and search for utility maximization; however, these models cannot straightforwardly explain the behaviors consumers and sellers adopted during times of financial crises, known as “exuberantly irrational”. Hence, we use and expand on a predator-prey perspective that endeavors to capture such behaviors more effectively while showing that four market variables must be considered together over time – consumers, suppliers, toxic products and regulations. Our analysis shows that during the GFC, consumers and lenders as well as regulators embraced whole-heartedly, and contrary to common economic sense, the development and marketing of toxic products. Their behaviors were actually quite rational in the context of a poisoned market. Such observation could assist in drafting regulations.

We examine the behaviour of market agents during the years leading to the 2008 US subprime mortgage crisis using a stylized capital asset pricing model model. In our study, an average investor eager to make money by flipping houses meets a banker who offers him subprime mortgage deals. We refer to recent research that shows the mechanics of the psychological and behavioural components of these two market agents. In particular, much in line with the famous Stanford experiment, it is assumed that investors adopt a predator or a prey position. Our analysis shows that, given a historical tendency towards financial predatory acts on the part of market agents (including buyers), government regulations should be adapted and strengthened to face this dooming reality.

The present paper examines decision making during market bubbles. In the context of high market volatility, high speculation and inappropriate regulation (e.g., as such was the case in the years prior to the 2008 subprime crisis), market agents adopt either a predator or prey position. By way of a neurobiological study, it is shown that market-agent-turned preys benefit from moderate stress when it enhances their level of vigilance; however, past a certain stress threshold, their efforts at wealth maximization are considerably reduced. This may explain some of the cognitive causes of failures found by various authors in their description of the market bubble phenomenon. The paper emphasizes the importance of setting up proper regulations aimed at preventing the emergence of predatory behaviors (such as those that prevailed with the establishment of predatory mortgages during the year 2000 in the United States) and better educating average investors.

This paper presents the concept of psychological point of equilibrium (PPE), which is a mental state achieved by average investors when trying to make decisions during market bubble's inflationary stages. The PPE results from an interplay between agents acting in a volatile market that is characterized by predatory behaviors. Prior to the 2008 subprime crisis, average investors are assumed to have displaced their logical PPEs in large part as a consequence of their attraction towards predatory mortgages and teaser rates. A better understanding of average investor's vulnerabilities may help governments to implement more efficient measures aimed at curving predatory behaviors.

International audience; We advance the idea that the predator-prey dynamics that take place among key market agents play an important role in explaining financial crises. As such, we posit that financial markets evolve through fault lines involving toxic behaviors (such as deceit), toxic products (such as predatory mortgages) and inefficient regulations. We provide data to show that the puzzle of the lack of congruence between the market behaviors and what some economic models predict at times of financial crises may be the result of predator-prey interplays, and of so-called “predatory cells”, which are under the influence of financial accelerators.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of physical distance between offices located in different countries working on the same international project, within an exploratory scope rather than a confirmatory perspective. Qualitative and quantitative investigations were conducted that show that physical distance impacts six competencies of the international project under investigation, including ability to instill trust and to cooperate. However, this impact can be positive or negative depending on circumstances, as physical distance acts as a moderating variable most particularly between trust and cooperation. A ratio between control and transparency, two of the six competencies, appears to be in line with past research on the importance of ensuring sound management.

This paper reviews the paradigm of financial decision making as being oblivious to sentiments such as blind trust. It is based on a recent neurobiological study in which participants' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. The study was devised on the tenets of the consolidated model of financial predation (CMFP). It is shown that participants do not target profit maximization concurrently with cost minimization when put in a situation of blind trust. Trust is revealed as a multidimensional construct having mathematical links with other constructs such as perceived predation, cooperation and reward.

This article, theoretical in essence, complements two previous articles published in The Journal of Wealth Management (JWM) regarding the Consolidated Model of Financial Predation (CMFP). It expands further on the role of information and discusses in particular the key characteristics of a dynamic financial system: such a system engages two rival investors, each aiming at maximizing his financial gains. The author looks at financial predation in terms of asymmetry of information serving the egoistic goals of a few (predators). A U.S. historical predatory index (HPI) is developed and a vision of the future is proposed.

This article explains how competitive advantage can be achieved by a producer to the detriment of another producer using the Consolidated Model of Financial Predation (CMFP). The article refers to recent literature on this particular model, including findings resulting from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in which 20 participants took financial decisions while in a brain scanner. The surprise element is thought to play a key role in the capacity of one producer to quickly seize a market opportunity against his only competitor based on asymmetry of information. The main conclusion is that asymmetry of information provides market players an opportunity to catch their competitors by surprise, thus gaining a competitive advantage, which can turn into predatory practices. The article shows that regulatory authorities can identify those responsible for the 2008 market chaos by identifying those who provoked and sustained asymmetry of information to their advantage with the purpose of causing harm to the other market agents, by surprise.

This paper proposes a theoretical view of the financial predator and prey's brain, with the hypothalamus being the core cerebral structure driving financial predatory behaviors. This model will hopefully help opening doors to possible better management as it appears that the number of financial scandals that have their source in the malevolent behavior of a selected few keeps rising. Indeed, neuromarketing is an emerging trend but lots of work remains to be done. This paper suggests that future research could be oriented toward the understanding of the predatory core in human behavior, more specifically referred to as the black box of consumers.

This article posits that fear, predatory webs, and blind trust characterize the emergence and implosion of market bubbles. It rests on a psychological view of market agent’s behavior anchored in the Consolidated Model of Financial Predation (CMFP). Two mathematical formulae are generated with the growth phase formula correctly depicting herd behavior, overshooting, and over-optimism followed by an unavoidable crisis phase. This article hopes to shed new light on market bubbles, a better understanding of which can assist governments in setting up proper measures to control them, if not to eliminate them altogether.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at human interdependence and its significance in project management. Design/methodology/approach – The paper focuses solely on human interaction in the context of a short-term project consisting of preparing a small “international” fair in Gatineau, Québec (Canada). For this purpose, an established questionnaire was used which aimed to evaluate the predator-prey dynamic between team members (as described by Mesly in a recent paper). Findings – Human interdependence indeed plays a key role in the functioning of short-lived projects (and, this paper assumes, of long-term projects as well). Originality/value – The paper places emphasis on considering the human power-game factor (predator-prey) more strongly in future project endeavors.

This article examines the functioning of small family-owned financial businesses under the angle of the consolidated model of financial predation (CMFP). According to this model, small businesses that handle financial services run the risk of attracting investors who will trust them blindly based on such factors as empathy and family ties rather than on sound economic decisions. On the other hand, as proven by recent real-life examples, some family businesses may take advantage of blind trust to earn money in insidious ways that lure vulnerable customers. The author offers 20 recommendations to reduce so-called predation and examines the looming dangers of investors who blindly trust their advisors.

This multidisciplinary article uses the works of Mesly from 1999 to 2013 to develop a mathematical model of financial predation to determine whether financial predators can be detected before they commit substantial fraud. Previous works by the author have shown that financial predators follow certain logic, which can be expressed by mathematical formulae. This article hypothesizes that the so-called predatory curve which has been identified in previous studies by the author is the result of the mobilization of four elements: essential resources (R), nonessential resources (R n), work or effort (T) and knowledge (T h). Failing to be able to detect a financial predator directly, one can measure one or all of these four elements that generate the predatory curve to see if abnormal behaviours are displayed, which would then be an indication of possible otherwise undetected financial predation. The implication for the average or wealthy investor is obvious: detecting the predator before he can act may mean sa...

For at least the past 100 years, a number of financial scandals have rocked the world and ruined the lives of thousands of citizens. In the past decades alone, a number of financiers (most notably Robert Madoff) have been caught and sent to jail. Financial predators have erroneously been labeled as psychopaths. In fact, many are not anti-social at all and do not display dysfunctional impulsively, but rather quite the opposite. The term that describes them best is “functional psychopaths.” This multidisciplinary paper proposes to warn banking and financial institutions about the possibility that an undetected functional psychopath (a financial predator) will, in his drive for success, run their company down. Leeson at Barings is a painful reminder of such a grim scenario.