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Previous research on open innovation (OI) has primarily focused on the organisational level of R&D intensive industries. With this paper, we contribute to research on the individual level of analysis by analysing specific perspectives in the context of creative industries. Our study is based on 36 interviews with Haute cuisine chefs in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland listed in the 2012 Michelin Guide. Building on the OI capability concept, our results demonstrate that chefs use absorptive and desorptive capacity (AC, DC) as means to generate and market culinary innovations, respectively. Moreover, we found that chefs almost exclusively rely on their own inventive and innovative capabilities in the early stages of the culinary innovation process. In subsequent phases, however, chefs increasingly integrate other sources such as employees, suppliers, and guests. Our study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, we research the individual level within the OI process, and second, we provide insight into OI practices in the creative industries.
This article contributes to the debate on the use of performance information in the context of public sector performance management. Based on case studies, the authors analyze the appropriateness of the performance information provided in the newly established performance budgets of municipalities in Germany and Italy. They also examine the interest of politicians and senior managers in using such information for decision-making and monitoring within the municipal budget cycle. They find that the use of performance information is generally quite modest, and that the interest of different local actors varies to a great extent. Politicians are generally less interested in such information than top managers, particularly chief financial officers. The results are discussed by applying a theoretical framework based on institutional and legitimacy theories, and are compared with the literature on performance information use.
We conduct experiments based on the oligopoly model by Kreps and Scheinkman (1983) to assess the impact of demand side concentration on market outcomes. Both buyers and sellers in our markets are humans. The number of firms is fixed at three in all treatments. Only the number of buyers is varied and total demand is split equally among them. We observe that firms set lower prices in markets with only few buyers, namely one or two. Price dispersion is higher in markets with few buyers. Aggregate demand withholding decreases with the number of buyers. This results in lower profits for firms and higher profits for buyers in markets with few buyers. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Air pollution poses one of the greatest human health threats in the twenty-first century, accounting for an estimated 7 million premature deaths annually. In the light of this, global efforts to promote clean air are ever more important and should feature among the key priorities on the agenda of the international community. The universal 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in September 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly, offers an important opportunity to tackle air pollution at a global scale. Stressing the importance of air pollution as a human health hazard, this article examines to what extent air quality is covered by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and provides an analysis of the added value of the 2030 Agenda vis-a-vis existing international regulatory instruments addressing air pollution. Even though the SDGs do not include a stand-alone goal on air quality, the article concludes that the 2030 Agenda, by establishing clean air as an integral element of the principle of sustainable development, not only constitutes an important contribution to international (hard) law focusing on the atmosphere, but also sets out a much needed complementary pathway of tackling the issue in the absence of a global agreement on air pollution.
In some countries including Germany unemployed workers can increase their income by working a few hours per week. The intention is to keep unemployed job seekers attached to the labour market and to increase their job-finding probabilities. To analyze the unemployment dynamics of job seekers with and without marginal employment, we consider an inflow sample into unemployment and estimate multivariate duration models. While we do not find any significant impact on the job finding probability in a model with homogeneous effects, models allowing for time-varying coefficients indicate a decreased job finding probability of marginal employment at the beginning of the unemployment spell and an increased job finding probability for the long-term unemployed. Our results suggest that job seekers with marginal employment find more stable post-unemployment jobs, and we find some evidence that the relationship between marginal employment and wages and employment stability varies with respect to skill levels, sector and labor market tightness. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
This article addresses security and privacy issues associated with storing data in public cloud services. It presents an architecture based on a novel secure cloud gateway that allows client systems to store sensitive data in a semi-trusted multi-cloud environment while providing confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. This proxy system implements a space-efficient, computationally-secure threshold secret sharing scheme to store shares of a secret in several distinct cloud datastores. Moreover, the system integrates a comprehensive set of security measures and cryptographic protocols to mitigate threats induced by cloud computing. Performance in practice and code quality of the implementation are analyzed in extensive experiments and measurements. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial bench-marking as well as a variety of incentive-based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs. Simar and Wilson (Commun Stat Simul Comput 30(1): 159-184, 2001) and Schubert and Simar (J Prod Anal 36(1): 55-69, 2011) propose restriction tests to support such specification decisions for cross-section data. However, the typical oligopolized market structure pertinent to regulation contexts often leads to low numbers of cross-section observations, rendering reliable estimation based on these tests practically unfeasible. This small-sample problem could often be avoided with the use of panel data, which would in any case require an extension of the cross-section restriction tests to handle panel data. In this paper we derive these tests. We prove the consistency of the proposed method and apply it to a sample of US natural gas transmission companies from 2003 through 2007. We find that the total quantity of natural gas delivered and natural gas delivered in peak periods measure essentially the same output. Therefore only one needs to be included. We also show that the length of mains as a measure of transportation service is non-redundant and therefore must be included.
This article studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium, the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home production of public goods and child care. We then study how child care provision affects the equilibrium. Due to specialization in home production, the incentive to use child care is smaller for married mothers than for single mothers. We show that this increases the number of single mothers and the divorce rate. Using survey data from Germany, we present suggestive empirical evidence consistent with this finding. (JEL codes: J12 and J13).