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Web Tracking
(2018)
Web tracking seems to become ubiquitous in online business and leads to increased privacy concerns of users. This paper provides an overview over the current state of the art of web-tracking research, aiming to reveal the relevance and methodologies of this research area and creates a foundation for future work. In particular, this study addresses the following research questions: What methods are followed? What results have been achieved so far? What are potential future research areas? For these goals, a structured literature review based upon an established methodological framework is conducted. The identified articles are investigated with respect to the applied research methodologies and the aspects of web tracking they emphasize.
Track and Treat
(2018)
E-Mail tracking mechanisms gather information on individual recipients’ reading behavior. Previous studies show that e-mail newsletters commonly include tracking elements. However, prior work does not examine the degree to which e-mail senders actually employ gathered user information. The paper closes this research gap by means of an experimental study to clarify the use of tracking-based infor- mation. To that end, twelve mail accounts are created, each of which subscribes to a pre-defined set of newsletters from companies based in Germany, the UK, and the USA. Systematically varying e-mail reading patterns across accounts, each account simulates a different type of user with individual read- ing behavior. Assuming senders to track e-mail reading habits, we expect changes in mailer behavior. The analysis confirms the prominence of tracking in that over 92% of the newsletter e-mails contain tracking images. For 13 out of 44 senders an adjustment of communication policy in response to user reading behavior is observed. Observed effects include sending newsletters at different times, adapting advertised products to match the users’ IT environment, increased or decreased mailing frequency, and mobile-specific adjustments. Regarding legal issues, not all companies that adapt the mail-sending behavior state the usage of such mechanisms in their privacy policy.
Der Wandel zur automatisierten Produktion, die fortschreitende Digitalisierung der Wertschöpfungsprozesse sowie die stetige Implementierung von mobilen Industrial Internet of Things-Technologien (IIoT) in diese zur Unterstützung der Mitarbeiter stellen betriebliche Weiterbildung vor Herausforderungen. Komple-xere Anforderungen und veränderte Tätigkeitsprofile erfordern Handlungskom-petenzen bei Mitarbeitern im Sinne der Fähigkeit, in unbekannten Situationen auf Basis eigenen Könnens handlungsfähig zu bleiben. Jene sowie dafür notwendiges umfassendes Verständnis gegenüber digitalisierten Produktions-prozessen kann jedoch durch konventionelle Lehrmethoden nicht realisiert werden, da diese der erhöhten Anforderungskomplexität und den komplexen Rückkopplungen im Rahmen der Steuer- und Regelkreise nicht gerecht werden können. Diese Aspekte aufgreifend wird im Folgenden ein szenariobasierter Wei-terbildungsansatz für eine Lernfabrik vorgestellt, der insbesondere die Potenziale mobiler IIoT-Technologien zur Ausgestaltung dieser in den Blick nimmt.
Die Sorge um die Vorsorge
(2018)
Students often enter higher education academically unprepared and with unrealistic perceptions and expectations regarding academic competencies for their studies. However, preparedness and realistic perceptions are important factors for student retention. With regard to a proposed model of five academic competencies(time management, learning skills, technology proficiency, self-monitoring, and research skills), incoming students’ perceptions concerning academic staff support and students’ selfreported confidence at a German university were examined. Using quantitative data, an initial exploratory study was conducted (N = 155), which revealed first-year students’ perceptions of the role of academic staff in supporting their development, especially in
research skills, as well as low self-reported confidence in this competence. Thus, a follow up study (N = 717) was conducted to confirm these findings as well as to provide an indepth understanding of research skills. Understanding students’ perceptions is crucial if higher education institutions are to meet students’ needs and provide adequate support services in the challenging first year. Thus, in order to increase student retention, it is
suggested that universities assist first-year students in developing academic competencies through personalised competence-based programs and with the help of emerging
research fields and educational technologies such as learning analytics and digital badges.
Involvement of disadvantaged individuals into entrepreneurship facilitates their social integration into mainstream societies. The present study addresses the drivers of social entrepreneurial appraisal among hearing-impaired individuals within a unique social minority environment. In prior research, social appraisal was empirically shown to determine social entrepreneurial intention. Adopting the theory of planned behaviour, this study investigates the impact of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, general social support and perceived barriers on social entrepreneurial appraisal. Based on a survey with 221 respondents, our results demonstrate that social entrepreneurial appraisal of hearing-impaired individuals result from their entrepreneurial self-efficacy and general social support. In terms of taking advantage of social opportunities, importance should be given to the role of entrepreneurial education and heterogeneous networks across minorities.
The Limits of Buyer Power
(2018)
This paper studies the behavior of buyers confronting an incumbent monopolist and a potential market entrant in a repeated trade situation. In the experiment, buyers have two possibilities to demand lower prices in future trade periods. First, they can withhold demand. Second, they can voluntarily pay a higher price to the entrant in order to encourage future re-entry. Both these forms of buyer behavior occur in the experiment. They are less frequent when the number of buyers is large as opposed to small. A control treatment tests to what extent such behavior can be attributed to strategic motives.
If war is an inevitable condition of human nature, as David Hume suggests, then what type of societies can best protect us from defeat and conquest? For David Hume, commerce decreases the relative cost of war and promotes technological military advances as well as martial spirit. Commerce therefore makes a country militarily stronger and better equipped to protect itself against attacks than any other kind of society. Hume does not assume commerce would yield a peaceful world nor that commercial societies would be militarily weak, as many contemporary scholars have argued. On the contrary, for him, military might is a beneficial consequence of commerce.
Findings - The results provide (longitudinal) support for the proposed evaluative approach. They reveal new evidence that building brand equity is a means to mitigate negative effects, and indicate that negative spillover effects within a high-equity brand portfolio are unlikely. Finally, this research identifies situations in which developing a new brand might be more beneficial than leveraging an existing brand. Practical implications - This research has significant implications for firms with high-equity brands that might be affected by a scandal. The findings support managers to navigate their brands through a crisis.
This paper presents the first investigation of the effects of optimal energy taxation in an urban spatial setting, where emissions are produced both by residences and commuting. When levying an optimal direct tax on energy or carbon use is not feasible, the analysis shows that exactly the same adjustments in resource allocation can be generated by the combination of a land tax, a housing tax, and a commuting tax. We then analyze the effects of these taxes on urban spatial structure, showing that they reduce the extent of commuting and the level of housing consumption while increasing building heights, generating a more-compact city with a lower level of emissions per capita.
There are two fundamental ways in which consumers can express their concerns and obligations for society through their consumption decisions: They can boycott companies that they deem to be irresponsible or they may deliberately buy from companies that they perceive to act responsibly (‘buycott’). It has been largely ignored that individuals are driven by different motivational mechanisms to join boycotts and buycotts (punishment vs. reward of corporate behaviors), and thus, these mechanisms have disparate implications for the participating individual (e.g., high vs. low subjective costs because of a restriction in consumption habits). This paper fills this void and develops a framework suggesting that the extent to which consumers translate their concerns and obligations for society into a willingness to boycott and/or buycott is bounded by self-interest. Using a unique, representative sample of 1833 German consumers, this study reveals that the effects of environmental concerns and universalism on buycotting are amplified by hedonism, while the effects of social concern on buycotting and boycotting are attenuated by hedonism and simplicity, respectively. These results have far-reaching implications for organizations and policy planners who aim to change corporate behavior.
Entrepreneurship is a regional and persistent phenomenon. We jointly investigate spatial dependence and serial dynamics of new business formation. Using panel data from all 402 German counties for 1996-2011, we estimate dynamic spatial panel data models of start-up activity in the high-tech and manufacturing industries. We consider regions of different sizes and systematically search for the most suitable spatial weights matrices. We find substantial spatial dependence as well as time persistence of start-up activity, especially in the high-tech industry. This suggests that local start-up activity has positive extemal effects and that entrepreneurship policy could play an efficiency-enhancing role.
This paper presents results from an experiment on the effects of recommended retail prices on consumer and retailer behaviour. We present evidence that recommended retail prices, despite their non-binding nature, influence consumers’ willingness to pay by setting a reference point. At a given price, consumers buy more the higher the recommended retail price is, and their demand drops at prices above the recommended retail price, even when it is entirely uninformative about the value of the product. Retailers in this study are subject to similar anchoring effects, but they do not anticipate consumers’ behaviour well and are thus not able to exploit their behavioural biases.
Faced with the increasing needs of companies, optimal dimensioning of IT hardware is becoming challenging for decision makers. In terms of analytical infrastructures, a highly evolutionary environment causes volatile, time dependent workloads in its components, and intelligent, flexible task distribution between local systems and cloud services is attractive. With the aim of developing a flexible and efficient design for analytical infrastructures, this paper proposes a flexible architecture model, which allocates tasks following a machine-specific decision heuristic. A simulation benchmarks this system with existing strategies and identifies the new decision maxim as superior in a first scenario-based simulation.
We test the stability of locus of control, a measure that has been attributed substantial explanatory power for economic outcomes since it depicts how much people believe in their ability to affect life outcomes. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find that a job loss due to a plant closure has no long-lasting effect on locus of control. The common assumption of its stability is thus not rejected. However, during unemployment, control perception decreases by 30 percent of one standard deviation. The effect holds true independent from unemployment duration or socio-demographic characteristics and vanishes as soon as the unemployed find a new job. We therefore conclude that stated locus of control is affected by unemployment. Using this trait as explanatory variable can thus lead to biased estimations when this temporary deviation in measurement is not accounted for.
We assess the short-term employment effects of the introduction of a national statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015. For this purpose, we exploit variation in the regional treatment intensity, assuming that the stronger a minimum wage ‘bites’ into the regional wage distribution, the stronger the regional labour market will be affected. In contrast to previous studies, we construct two regional bite indicators based upon detailed individual wage data from the Structure of Earnings Survey (SES) 2014 and combine it with administrative information on regional employment. Moreover, using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we are able to affirm the absence of anticipation effects and verify the assumption of a common trend in wages before the reform. In sum, we find only moderate negative effects on overall employment of about 140,000 (0.4%) jobs, which are mainly driven by a sharp decline of marginal employment (‘mini-jobs’), while we do not find pronounced significant effects for regular employment in most specifications. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests.
Retail banking has undergone a massive transformation in the last few years. A major aspect is changing consumer behavior. The aim of the paper is to better understand retail banking consumers regarding the impact of digitalization. Consequently, we acquired online consumer review data from Germany, the UK and US. We analyzed the data using coding techniques of grounded theory, supported by interdisciplinary literature to identify and categorize the relevant influence factors. The outcome of the paper is an integrated model of consumer decision-making in today’s retail banking along with four detailed partial models of the respective decision stages.