Editorial

Welcome to this INFOR Special Issue on Multidimensional Perspectives in Finance and Investment, from the 6th edition of The International Conference on Multidimensional Finance, Insurance and Investment (ICMFII), in memory of Enrique Ballestero. This conference was held in the Technical University of Valencia, Alcoy Campus (Spain) from the 26th to the 29th of June, 2016.

A deep knowledge of many economic topics and a remarkable clarity of exposition were two of the many outstanding features that characterized Professor Ballestero. Beyond his ability to teach, it is important to highlight his contributions to enhance multiple criteria decision making within the field of economics and finance. The portfolio selection problem including new formulations to consider socially responsible investment, and important theoretical contributions to economic optimization and compromise programming paved the way for better decision making in economics and finance. An additional scientific contribution of Professor Ballestero is that he significantly fostered a new generation of researchers in Madrid, Valencia and Alcoy.

The ICMFII conference and its prior version Multi-Attribute Portfolio Selection conference have been always devoted to developments and applications of the Multi-Criteria Decision Aid tools in the field of finance and insurance. This scientific event disseminates recent methods and procedures designed to solve problems related to finance, insurance and portfolio selection formulated through a mathematical programming framework and for which a stack of conflicting and incommensurable objectives (criteria, attributes) is simultaneously optimized. This issue reconfirms, once again, the fact that multi-criteria methods are impressive tools to solve problems in many fields and that the range of problems in the conference topics are so vast that they will never run out of potential applications.

In the particular case of this special issue from the 6th ICMFII conference, the selected papers address topics such as diversification, share collateralization, corporate government, cash management, mortgages and microfinances.

The first paper by Qi, Y., Zhang, Y. and Ma, S. obtains the structure of whole efficient frontiers in the construction of investment portfolios and proposes new diversification measures from this structure that could improve the effectiveness in diversification status.

The second paper analyzes a completely different problem: effects of share collateralization. This article from Lee, K., Lu, S. and Lin, C. yields some interesting conclusions such that the higher the ratio of director/supervisor share collateralization the greater the firm's risk, and that directors’/supervisors’ actual shareholdings have positive correlation on the firm’s performance.

Maravelaki, A., Doumpos, M. and Zopounidis, C. use a multi-attribute approach to derive conclusions about the effect of women’s administrative participation. Moreover, they discern how this participation impacts the risk-adjusted financial performance of the corporations.

Compromise programming is another technique that can help managers in their decision processes. Salas-Molina, F., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J.A. and Pla-Santamaria, D. propose an approach to aid cash managers in a given firm to choose the best policies in a real and changing context. These authors propose a method to identify the best compromise policies in terms of cost and risk to be applied in the cash management departments.

A basic service not only provided to companies but also to families or citizens such as mortgages is a cornerstone contributing to the development and growth of a country’s economy. A multiple criteria system using cognitive maps and the MACBETH technique has been applied by Pereira, V., Ferreira, F. and Chang, H. to respond to the growing demand for realistic and informed credit risk analysis models. Their findings show that multi-criteria techniques allow for more transparent mortgage risk assessment systems.

One last paper deal with the microfinance sector. Bensalem, S. and Ellouze, A. describe those variables related to the microfinance institutions which influence financial and social efficiency in their countries.

Multi-criteria methodologies not only could help in the microeconomic decisions as Sharomi, O., La Torre, D. and Malik, T. demonstrate in their research. They also use a multiple criteria optimal control problem with finite horizon to propose a dynamic macroeconomic model that describes the interaction between physical capital, environmental quality and population dynamics. These authors are able to achieve the determination of the optimal trajectories of state and control variables and an approximation of the Pareto frontier.

David Pla-Santamaria
Universitat Politècnica de València, Alcoy Campus, Spain
[email protected]
Hatem Masri
College of Business Administration, University of Bahrain, Zallaq, Bahrain
Fouad Ben Abdelaziz
NEOMA BS, Rouen Campus, France