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Public procurement of innovations (PPIs) addresses a specified need of the public-sector customer or aims at fostering private firms’ innovativeness. In an operational sense, issues of information asymmetry and risk sharing between the public agency and the supplier are of paramount importance. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the contract design issues of PPI.

Explicit and implicit contracting methods are reviewed, and a conceptual framework is proposed in which procurement characteristics are analyzed, focusing on the dimensions of the supplier’s sensitivity to the procurement risk and the power of implicit contracting methods.

Because of its complex nature, applying cost-plus contracts instead of more common fixed-price contracts is advisable in PPI.

Possible reasons for the more prominent role of contract design in the USA as opposed to the European Union procurement are discussed.

In the European Union, the Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities Directive (UCITS IV) requires fund management companies to provide a Key Investor Information Document (UCITS KIID) for investors. This papers uses archival data from the Finnish mutual fund market to test how the regulation's information disclosure requirements concerning past performance, risk and fund fees are associated with mutual fund flows.

The study uses archival data on the mutual funds market in Finland to test how the regulation relating to retail investors' information requirements is associated with mutual fund flows.

Our findings suggest that the UCITS KIID predicts retail investors' fund flows. While past performance is associated with fund flows throughout the observation period, retail investors appear to have become more sensitive to fund fees and invest in less risky funds following the adoption of the UCITS IV period.

Information relating to fund fees and risk appears to be relevant to retail investors, which should be acknowledged in future iterations of short-form disclosure and in mutual fund marketing.

This paper is the first to assess the significance of KIID in actual market environment.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the existence of inter-market market segments in the adolescents' and young adults' cell phone product-market in Finland, United Arab Emirates, Canada, China, and New Zealand. Drawing upon cell phone feature preferences criteria cited by Işıklar and Buyuközkan, the existence of inter-market market segments using these feature preferences as the cluster variate was examined.

Using a survey questionnaire, data was gathered from 403 high school and 892 undergraduate students in Finland, UAE, China, Canada and New Zealand.

The results of the study suggest the inter-market market segments do exist in the countries of this study, but their existence varies to some degree by country.

An important implication of the research is the existence of the five inter-market segments among the adolescents and young adults in the five countries was established. Consequently, the inter-market segments extend over the borders. The five inter-market segments exist in all country markets except in New Zealand, which included only four segments. These five segments also appear to be unique and large enough in size, which are the key requirements in terms of successful segmentation, and thus warrant the development of unique products, services and marketing programs for the segments.