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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.
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.
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.
In response to the impending spread of COVID-19, universities worldwide abruptly stopped face-to-face teaching and switched to technology-mediated teaching. As a result, the use of technology in the learning processes of students of different disciplines became essential and the only way to teach, communicate and collaborate for months. In this crisis context, we conducted a longitudinal study in four German universities, in which we collected a total of 875 responses from students of information systems and music and arts at four points in time during the spring–summer 2020 semester. Our study focused on (1) the students’ acceptance of technology-mediated learning, (2) any change in this acceptance during the semester and (3) the differences in acceptance between the two disciplines. We applied the Technology Acceptance Model and were able to validate it for the extreme situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. We extended the model with three new variables (time flexibility, learning flexibility and social isolation) that influenced the construct of perceived usefulness. Furthermore, we detected differences between the disciplines and over time. In this paper, we present and discuss our study’s results and derive short- and long-term implications for science and practice.
I examine the determinants of both perceived inflation and unemployment in one single survey and include Big Five traits in the analysis. This is the first survey on this topic in Germany. My sample consists of 1771 students from different fields and levels. Using PhD students’ estimates as a reference, I create categories for underestimation and overestimation of both variables. Multinomial logit regressions show that females overestimate both variables. Education and news consumption reduce misestimation. A higher level of Neuroticism is related with a higher probability to overestimate unemployment. Overstating (understating) one indicator is associated with overstating (understating) the other.
Economists argue that land rent taxation is an ideal form of taxation as it causes no deadweight losses. Nevertheless, pure land rent taxation is rarely applied. This paper revisits the case of land taxation for developing countries. We first provide an up-to-date review on land taxation in development countries, including feasibility and implementation challenges. We then simulate land tax reforms for Rwanda, Peru, Nicaragua and Indonesia, based on household surveys. We find that (i) land taxes provide a substantial untapped potential for tax revenues at minimal deadweight losses; that (ii) linear land value taxes tend to put a high relative burden on poor households as land ownership is pervasive; (iii) non-linear tax schemes could avoid adverse effects on the poor; and that (iv) with technological advances, administrative costs of land taxes have reduced substantially and are outweighed by tax revenues and co-benefits of formalized land tenure. Enforcement and compliance remain, however, a key challenge.
We analyze whether start-up rates in different industries systematically change with business cycle variables. Using a unique data set at the industry level, we mostly find correlations that are consistent with counter-cyclical influences of the business cycle on entries in both innovative and non-innovative industries. Entries into the large-scale industries, including the innovative part of manufacturing, are only influenced by changes in the cyclical component of unemployment, while entries into small-scale industries, like knowledge intensive services, are mostly influenced by changes in the cyclical component of GDP. Thus, our analysis suggests that favorable conditions in terms of high GDP might not be germane for start-ups. Given that both innovative and non-innovative businesses react counter-cyclically in ‘regular’ recessions, business formation may have a stabilizing effect on the economy.
In 2013, large floods affected Germany heavily. The natural disaster transcended jurisdictional and organisational boundaries, necessitating a coordinative effort by disaster relief forces and their administrative and political leadership. In the aftermath, politicians and experts praised the improvement of the German system of crisis management, also in direct comparison with the response to the last German “flood of the century” of 2002. This chapter takes a public policy and organisational perspective to analyse the German disaster relief governance throughout all four crisis management phases. By highlighting the central features of the German governance arrangements and the main organisational changes implemented in reaction to the previous flood in 2002, we find that Whole-of-Government approaches are increasingly used by the federal and Länder government.
The chapter presents an overview about the evolution of the teaching dimension in the academic debate within the EGPA community. Major topics of EGPA’s permanent study group on “PA and teaching” over the last decade are displayed. From a more general perspective, the authors discuss the various types and target groups of academic programs in Public Administration and their change over time. They also shed some light on the change of contents and pedagogical approaches in the last decades. Furthermore, different patterns and degrees of institutionalization of Public Administration as academic discipline across Europe are illustrated. In a short résumé the authors reflect about future educational developments in our field and about the role of EGPA
The development of new and better optimization and approximation methods for Job Shop Scheduling Problems (JSP) uses simulations to compare their performance. The test data required for this has an uncertain influence on the simulation results, because the feasable search space can be changed drastically by small variations of the initial problem model. Methods could benefit from this to varying degrees. This speaks in favor of defining standardized and reusable test data for JSP problem classes, which in turn requires a systematic describability of the test data in order to be able to compile problem adequate data sets. This article looks at the test data used for comparing methods by literature review. It also shows how and why the differences in test data have to be taken into account. From this, corresponding challenges are derived which the management of test data must face in the context of JSP research.
Little is known about the conscious experience of internal bodily sensations in preschool-aged children. Given that preschoolers are in the most rapid phase of brain development, and display profound emotional development, it was the aim of the present study to establish an adapted interoceptive accuracy paradigm and to investigate associations between sociodemographic (age, sex) and emotional variables with interoceptive accuracy. Forty-nine children (aged 4–6 years) completed the jumping jack paradigm (JJP), a heartbeat tracking paradigm, which includes a noninvasive physical perturbation via performing jumping jacks for 10 s. An interoceptive accuracy score was based on the comparison between self-reported and objectively recorded heart rate prior to and after completion of jumping jacks. Children also completed validated measures for emotion recognition and emotion regulation. Children's objectively recorded heart rate significantly increased after the JJP by 20 bpm on average. There was a positive relationship between reactivity on self-reported heart rate and objectively recorded heart rate increase. The derived scores for interoceptive accuracy increased with age, suggesting older children to report more self-reported heart rate change than objectively recorded, but were unrelated to children's sex or BMI. While emotion recognition and regulation significantly increased with age, the interoceptive accuracy score was unrelated to emotion recognition, but marginally associated to emotion regulation. Children with higher interoceptive accuracy score (i.e., self-reporting more heart rate change than objectively recorded) received lower emotion regulation score. The present study is the first to depict a novel behavioral paradigm to assess interoceptive accuracy in preschool-aged children.
We take an error management perspective on audit quality. Drawing on 18 months of participant observations and 38 interviews conducted in a Big 4 accounting firm, we develop a multi-level model of error management. With this model, we propose how organizational structures, team procedures and practices, and individual cognitions and emotions interact to manage errors. The multi-level model of error management allows us to conceptually integrate previous behavioral and social research on audit quality, contributes to the rising accounting firm error management literature, and explains how and why two general approaches from the broader error management literature to errors that are usually considered as opposing each other, i.e., error prevention and error resilience, may interact and actually entail each other in accounting firms.
The human personality predicts a wide range of activities and occupational choices-from musical sophistication to entrepreneurial careers. However, which method should be applied if information on personality traits is used for prediction and advice? In psychological research, group profiles are widely employed. In this contribution, we examine the performance of profiles using the example of career prediction and advice, involving a comparison of average trait scores of successful entrepreneurs with the traits of potential entrepreneurs. Based on a simple theoretical model estimated with GSOEP data and analyzed with Monte Carlo methods, we show, for the first time, that the choice of the comparison method matters substantially. We reveal that under certain conditions the performance of average profiles is inferior to the tossing of a coin. Alternative methods, such as directly estimating success probabilities, deliver better performance and are more robust.
Price shock transmission
(2017)
This study assesses the degree of vertical price transmission along the wheat-bread value chain in Ethiopia. This is pursued by applying a vector error correction model and an impulse response analysis using monthly price data for the period 2000-2015. Our analysis considers transmission of price shocks across different market levels, including from the international and domestic wheat grain markets at the upstream to the domestic wheat bread market at the downstream of the value chain. The empirical findings indicate that significant cointegration exists across prices of the different market stages. There is a transmission from international prices to domestic prices at downstream markets, in particular to flour and bread prices. Prices at upstream markets are largely influenced by the domestic wholesale market. In general, the speed of adjustment is quite slow with a half-life of about one year for restoring the equilibrium price relationship. As price margins between the different market stages in the value chain have substantially decreased in the last 15 years, higher transmission, and thus exposure to international market shocks, can be expected in the future. The results also show that causal relationships exist between prices at different market stageswith the wholesale market identified as the key market level where prices and price expectations are formed.
Willentliches Vergessen
(2019)
Dieser Beitrag im Journal Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. stellt dar, wie willentliches Vergessen die Anpassung an notwendige Veränderungen für Individuen, Gruppen und Organisationen verbessert und wie willentliches Vergessen bewusst und gezielt gestaltet werden kann.
Damit Verhalten in Folge einer notwendigen Veränderung angepasst wird, reicht es nicht aus, dass Menschen wissen was zu tun ist, willens und in der Lage sind ihr Verhalten zu verändern. Eine Veränderung gelingt nur dann, wenn nur noch das neue Verhalten zur Anwendung kommt und nicht mehr das Alte, wenn das alte Verhalten vergessen wird. Der notwendige Prozess des willentlichen Vergessens ist durch Entfernen von Hinweisreizen, die die Erinnerung des zu Vergessenden und durch Platzierung von Hinweisreizen, die die Aktivierung des Neuen auslösen, gestaltbar.
Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt die förderliche Wirkung von Hinweisreizen auf willentliches Vergessen dar, stellt sie im Rahmen des Berichts einer experimentellen Studie unter Beweis und gibt praktische Implikationen, wie für Individuen, Gruppen und Organisationen willentliches Vergessen gestaltet werden kann.
Organizations have discovered Design Thinking as a promising framework or language for innovation-focused project teamwork. The goal is to develop new products and services by being customer-centric and working iteratively and in an interdisciplinary way, using specific working principles and methods to create a common language among all stakeholders. The empirical results in this article show that Design Thinking teamwork is different from other forms of teamwork. The difference in Design Thinking team-based project work is that the teams go through a specific learning process that poses individual challenges but also provides the individual with experience-based learning. We show that teams going through this learning process repeatedly find themselves in seemingly insolvable conflicts-so called structural dilemmas-within the framework of project deadlines and under the influence of strategic guidelines of the organization. We explore these structural dilemmas and develop ways to overcome them.
How Will We Dine?
(2020)
Haute cuisine, the cooking style for fine dining at gourmet restaurants, has changed over the last decades and can be expected to evolve in the upcoming years. To engage in foresight, the purpose of this study is to identify a plausible future trend scenario for the haute cuisine sector within the next five to ten years, based on today’s chefs’ views. To achieve this goal, an international, two-stage Delphi study was conducted. The derived scenario suggests that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will lead to significant restaurant bankruptcies and will raise creativity and innovation among the remaining ones. It is expected that haute cuisine tourism will grow and that menu prices will differ for customer segments. More haute cuisine restaurants will open in Asia and America. Local food will remain a major trend and will be complemented by insect as well as plant-based proteins and sophisticated nonalcoholic food pairings. Restaurant design and the use of scents will become more relevant. Also, private dining and fine dining at home will become more important. The scenario also includes negative projections. These findings can serve as a research agenda for future research in haute cuisine, including the extension of the innovation lens towards the restaurant and the business model. Practical implications include the necessity for haute cuisine restaurants to innovate to cope with increasing competition in several regions. Customers should be seen as co-creators of the value of haute cuisine.
On May 17, 2012, the social networking company Facebook Inc. fixes its initial public offering (IPO) price at $38.00 a share. Over the next couple of months, contrary to expectations raised by previous IPOs, the stock price crashes more than 50 per cent. Immediately, the question arises whether the issuer’s or the stock market’s pricing of the share are in line with the firm’s fundamentals. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to determine the company value in close proximity to the date of IPO.
Social Media, Quo Vadis?
(2020)
Over the past two decades, social media have become a crucial and omnipresent cultural and economic phenomenon, which has seen platforms come and go and advance technologically. In this study, we explore the further development of social media regarding interactive technologies, platform development, relationships to news media, the activities of institutional and organizational users, and effects of social media on the individual and the society over the next five to ten years by conducting an international, two-stage Delphi study. Our results show that enhanced interaction on platforms, including virtual and augmented reality, somatosensory sense, and touch- and movement-based navigation are expected. AIs will interact with other social media users. Inactive user profiles will outnumber active ones. Platform providers will diversify into the WWW, e-commerce, edu-tech, fintechs, the automobile industry, and HR. They will change to a freemium business model and put more effort into combating cybercrime. Social media will become the predominant news distributor, but fake news will still be problematic. Firms will spend greater amounts of their budgets on social media advertising, and schools, politicians, and the medical sector will increase their social media engagement. Social media use will increasingly lead to individuals’ psychic issues. Society will benefit from economic growth and new jobs, increased political interest, democratic progress, and education due to social media. However, censorship and the energy consumption of platform operators might rise.
Is urbanization good for the environment? This paper establishes a simple core-periphery model with monocentric cities, which comprises key forces that shape the structure and interrelation of cities to study the impact of the urban evolution on the environment. We focus on global warming and the potential of unfettered market forces to economize on emissions. The model parameters are chosen to match the dichotomy between average "large" and "small" cities in the urban geography of the United States, and the sectoral greenhouse gas emissions recorded for the United States. Based on numerical analyzes we find that a forced switch to a system with equally sized cities reduces total emissions. Second, any city driver which pronounces the asymmetry between the core and the periphery drives up emissions in the total city system, too, and the endogenous adjustment of the urban system accounts for the bulk of the change in emissions. Third, none of the city drivers gives rise to an urban environmental Kuznets curve according to our numerical simulations. Finally, the welfare-maximizing allocation tends to involve dispersion of cities and the more so the higher is the marginal damage from pollution.
This paper examines the consequences of international financial integration in a two-sector standard incomplete markets model with occupational choice under risk and financial constraints affecting entrepreneurial activity. We endogenize international productivity differences and discuss the implications of international integration for the macroeconomy, inequality, and welfare. Lending countries are characterized by tighter domestic constraints and experience an increase in gross national product, whereas the gross domestic product effect is ambiguous. We conclude that international integration is beneficial only for economies where there are substantial financial constraints on entrepreneurial activity. Otherwise, a majority of households suffer, due to the unequal distribution of welfare gains and losses across the heterogeneous population.
A large literature exists examining the functions of legislatures and the behaviour of MPs in established democracies. But little efforts have been made to observe how MPs behave in new democratic assemblies. This article seeks to address this shortcoming through an exploration of the use of parliamentary questions in two new democracies: Kenya and Zambia. Analysing an innovative dataset we offer one of the few attempts to directly measure legislative behaviour in new democracies. We examine how the factors found in the literature on parliamentary questions in liberal democracies react to this shift of context and to what degree legislatures in these countries fulfil their core functions. Results show that opposition MPs are not necessarily among the most active but that electoral incentives such as the margin by which MPs have won their seats or the number of voters they represent explain the use and content of parliamentary questions.
The paradox of openness is inherent to all platform ecosystems-the tension in enabling maximum openness to create joint innovation while guaranteeing value capturing for all actors. Governance mechanisms to solve this paradox are embedded into the technical architecture of the platform, addressing the dimensions of access, control, and incentives. Blockchain technology offers unique ways to design novel governance mechanisms through the standardization of interactions. However, the design of such an architecture requires careful consideration of the cost associated with it.
Narratives are shaping our understanding of the world. They convey values and norms and point to desirable future developments. In this way, they justify and legitimize political actions and social practices. Once a narrative has emerged and this world view is supported by broad societal groups, narratives can provide powerful momentum to trigger innovation and changes in the course of action. Narratives, however, are not necessarily based on evidence and precise categories, but can instead be vague and ambiguous in order to be acceptable and attractive to different actors. However, the more open and inclusive a narrative is, the less impact can be expected. We investigate whether there is a shared narrative in research for the sustainable economy and how this can be evaluated in terms of its potential societal impact. The paper carves out the visions for the future that have been underlying the research projects conducted within the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funding programme "The Sustainable Economy". It then analyzes whether these visions are compatible with narratives dominating societal discourse on the sustainable economy, and concludes how the use of visions and narratives in research can contribute to fostering societal transformations.
We model migration across domestic labor markets (internal migration) as the outcome of a job search process in which job seekers form subjective beliefs about the return search effort that are related to their locus of control. Job seekers with an internal locus of control are predicted to search across larger geographic areas and migrate more frequently as a result. We empirically test the relationship between locus of control and the propensity to migrate using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We find that not only do individuals with an internal locus of control express more willingness to migrate, they do in fact also migrate more often.
In a multi-source, lagged design field study of 197 leader-follower dyads, we test a model that predicts positive interactive effects of visionary and empowering leadership on follower performance. Based on the paradox perspective, we argue that visionary and empowering leadership are synergistic in that their combination enables leaders to address a key paradox inherent to leader behavior identified by Waldman and Bowen (2016): Maintaining control while simultaneously letting go of control. We argue that visionary leadership addresses the former and empowering leadership addresses the latter pole of this pair of opposites. Hence, in line with paradox thinking, we posit that leaders will engender more positive effects on follower performance when they enact visionary and empowering leadership behaviors simultaneously and adopt a "both-and" approach, rather than focus on one of these behaviors without the other. Our results support our hypothesized interactive effect of visionary and empowering leadership on goal clarity, as well as a conditional indirect effect such that goal clarity mediates the interactive effect of visionary and empowering leadership on individual follower performance.
We analyse the top tail of the wealth distribution in France, Germany, and Spain using the first and second waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be under-represented in household surveys, we integrate big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto distribution, and impute the missing rich. In addition to the Forbes list, we rely on national rich lists since they represent a broader base of the big fortunes in those countries. As a result, the top 1% wealth share increases notably for the three selected countries after imputing the top wealth. We find that national rich lists can improve the estimation of the Pareto coefficient in particular when the list of national USD billionaires is short.
Corporate Citizenship
(2020)
Corporate citizenship, which is firms’ societal engagement beyond customer and shareholder interests, is a prominent topic in management practice and has led to extensive research. This increased interest resulted in a complex and fragmented scholarly literature. In order to structure and map the field quantitatively, we conducted a temporal analysis of publications and citations, an analysis of the productivity of involved disciplines, an analysis of the productivity of publication forms including journal impact factors, an author productivity and citation analysis, a co-author analysis, an article citation analysis, an article co-citation analysis, and a keyword co-occurrence analysis. Results of these bibliometric analyses show that corporate citizenship research seems to have been in a phase of stagnation since 2014 and shows a rather low degree of interdisciplinarity. Papers are predominantly published in high impact journals. Authors show little collaboration with other researchers. Current research relates to other business ethics topics, addresses philosophical foundations, and starts to relate to human resource management and organization studies.
Several scholars concerned with global policy-making have recently pointed to a reconfiguration of authority in the area of climate politics. They have shown that various new carbon governance arrangements have emerged, which operate simultaneously at different governmental levels. However, despite the numerous descriptions and mapping exercises of these governance arrangements, we have little systematic knowledge on their workings within national jurisdictions, let alone about their impact on public-administrative systems in developing countries. Therefore, this article opens the black box of the nation-state and explores how and to what extent two different arrangements, that is, Transnational City Networks and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, generate changes in the distribution of public authority in nation-states and their administrations. Building upon conceptual assumptions that the former is likely to lead to more decentralized, and the latter to more centralized policy-making, we provide insights from case studies in Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and India. In a nutshell, our analysis underscores that Transnational City Networks strengthen climate-related actions taken by cities without ultimately decentralizing climate policy-making. On the other hand, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation tends to reinforce the competencies of central governments, but apparently does not generate a recentralization of the forestry sector at large.
Anti-Consumption
(2019)
Transcending the conventional debate around efficiency in sustainable consumption, anti-consumption patterns leading to decreased levels of material consumption have been gaining importance. Change agents are crucial for the promotion of such patterns, so there may be lessons for governance interventions that can be learnt from the every-day experiences of those who actively implement and promote sustainability in the field of anti-consumption. Eighteen social innovation pioneers, who engage in and diffuse practices of voluntary simplicity and collaborative consumption as sustainable options of anti-consumption share their knowledge and personal insights in expert interviews for this research. Our qualitative content analysis reveals drivers, barriers, and governance strategies to strengthen anti-consumption patterns, which are negotiated between the market, the state, and civil society. Recommendations derived from the interviews concern entrepreneurship, municipal infrastructures in support of local grassroots projects, regulative policy measures, more positive communication to strengthen the visibility of initiatives and emphasize individual benefits, establishing a sense of community, anti-consumer activism, and education. We argue for complementary action between top-down strategies, bottom-up initiatives, corporate activities, and consumer behavior. The results are valuable to researchers, activists, marketers, and policymakers who seek to enhance their understanding of materially reduced consumption patterns based on the real-life experiences of active pioneers in the field.
Organizations increasingly use social media and especially social networking sites (SNS) to support their marketing agenda, enhance collaboration, and develop new capabilities. However, the success of SNS initiatives is largely dependent on sustainable user participation. In this study, we argue that the continuance intentions of users may be gender sensitive. To theorize and investigate gender differences in the determinants of continuance intentions, this study draws on the expectation-confirmation model, the uses and gratification theory, as well as the self-construal theory and its extensions. Our survey of 488 users shows that while both men and women are motivated by the ability to self enhance, there are some gender differences. Specifically, while women are mainly driven by relational uses, such as maintaining close ties and getting access to social information on close and distant networks, men base their continuance intentions on their ability to gain information of a general nature. Our research makes several contributions to the discourse in strategic information systems literature concerning the use of social media by individuals and organizations. Theoretically, it expands the understanding of the phenomenon of continuance intentions and specifically the role of the gender differences in its determinants. On a practical level, it delivers insights for SNS providers and marketers into how satisfaction and continuance intentions of male and female SNS users can be differentially promoted. Furthermore, as organizations increasingly rely on corporate social networks to foster collaboration and innovation, our insights deliver initial recommendations on how organizational social media initiatives can be supported with regard to gender-based differences.
Reaching the Sustainable Development Goals requires a fundamental socio-economic transformation accompanied by substantial investment in low-carbon infrastructure. Such a sustainability transition represents a non-marginal change, driven by behavioral factors and systemic interactions. However, typical economic models used to assess a sustainability transition focus on marginal changes around a local optimum, whichby constructionlead to negative effects. Thus, these models do not allow evaluating a sustainability transition that might have substantial positive effects. This paper examines which mechanisms need to be included in a standard computable general equilibrium model to overcome these limitations and to give a more comprehensive view of the effects of climate change mitigation. Simulation results show that, given an ambitious greenhouse gas emission constraint and a price of carbon, positive economic effects are possible if (1) technical progress results (partly) endogenously from the model and (2) a policy intervention triggering an increase of investment is introduced. Additionally, if (3) the investment behavior of firms is influenced by their sales expectations, the effects are amplified. The results provide suggestions for policy-makers, because the outcome indicates that investment-oriented climate policies can lead to more desirable outcomes in economic, social and environmental terms.
Reliable information on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is rare and costly for financial intermediaries. Therefore relationship banking is often considered as the appropriate lending technique. In this paper we offer a theoretical model to analyze relationship banking and the pricing behavior of banks in a Bertrand competition framework with monitoring costs. We show that the lack of reliable information leads to comparable high interest rates even if a long-term relationship between borrower and bank exists. The paper offers a theoretical explanation why SMEs often are faced with borrowing constraints.
The substantial booms and busts in agricultural prices marked by extreme events across commodities lead to heated debates about the effects of speculative trading on commodity price fluctuations. This study proposes a new approach to understanding extreme events and boom-bust processes in agricultural markets. Using weekly futures data for twelve indexed agricultural commodities during 2006 to 2016, we find that extreme price changes, located in the 10% tails of the distribution, cluster across agricultural markets. We then implement a multinomial logit model to investigate which factors are associated with the propagation of extreme events. Specifically, we disentangle three transmission conduits. (1) The macroeconomic conduit captures the possibility that the synchronized extreme price events are generated by business-cycle driven demand shifts mainly in emerging economies. (2) The financial conduit refers to potential links between extreme returns and the increasing flow of money from financial participants into agricultural futures markets. (3) Finally, the energy conduit accounts for possible spillover effects due to oil price shocks. Our results indicate an important role of managed money positions and oil prices while the real demand channel remains mostly insignificant. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Ecosystem services and sustainability have become prominent concepts in international policy and research agendas. However, a common conceptual ground between these concepts is currently underdeveloped. In particular, a vision is missing on how to align ecosystem services with overarching sustainability goals. Originally, the ecosystem service concept focused on sustaining human well-being through biodiversity conservation. Nevertheless, studies within the field also consider appropriation beyond carrying capacities, and natural resource management that involves environmentally damaging inputs as ecosystem service provision. This brings the ecosystem service concept into conflict with the core goal of sustainability, i.e. achieving justice within ecological limits over the long term. Here, we link the ecosystem service concept to sustainability outcomes operationalized in terms of justice. Our framing positions sustainability as an overarching goal which can be achieved through seven key strategies: equitable (1) intergenerational and (2) intragenerational distribution, (3) interspecies distribution, (4) fair procedures, recognition and participation, (5) sufficiency, (6) efficiency, and (7) persistence. Applying these strategies has the potential to re-focus the ecosystem service concept towards the normative goal of sustainability. We identify research needs for each strategy and further discuss questions regarding operationalization of the strategies. (C) 2017 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.
Based on large representative German household survey data, we compare incomes of the self-employed with those of paid employees. We find that the entrepreneurial income gap is largest for those holding a tertiary degree, but in two directions: positive for employers (self-employed with further employees) and negative for solo entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs holding a tertiary degree also face the greatest income variation. However, some solo self-employed earn more than their employed counterparts, in particular those with a university entrance degree as the highest level of education.
It is widely accepted that modern pigs were domesticated independently at least twice, and Chinese native pigs are deemed as direct descendants of the first domesticated pigs in the corresponding domestication centers. By analyzing mitochondrial DNA sequences of an extensive sample set spanning 10,000 years, we find that the earliest pigs from the middle Yellow River region already carried the maternal lineages that are dominant in both younger archaeological populations and modern Chinese pigs. Our data set also supports early Neolithic pig utilization and a long-term in situ origin for northeastern Chinese pigs during 8,000-3,500 BP, suggesting a possibly independent domestication in northeast China. Additionally, we observe a genetic replacement in ancient northeast Chinese pigs since 3,500 BP. The results not only provide increasing evidence for pig origin in the middle Yellow River region but also depict an outline for the process of early pig domestication in northeast China.
Research suggests a positive link between critical thinking and creativity. However, this relationship has not been measured in an empirical study. This study aims to explore whether critical thinking can serve to enhance creativity and whether creativity positively mediates the relationship between critical thinking and business performance. In this study, we analyse these relationships within the entrepreneurial context of a web-based business start-up simulation. We examined data from 26 teams of three to four senior business students and found partial support for our hypotheses. Critical thinking positively influenced creativity, measured as the total number of unique product designs. Creativity (unique product designs) also positively mediated the link between critical thinking and performance. This effect, however, did not exist when creativity was assessed through advertisement designs. This research contributes to entrepreneurship and innovation management by demonstrating the importance of critical thinking as a basis for creativity and testing this relationship in a business start-up simulation context.
This article discusses the challenges for providers of local public services to adapt to increasing marketization and competition in the public sector. Based on some empirical evidence from local government in Germany, the article describes different adaptive measures in the past and shows the legal restrictions to strengthening performance and particularly competitiveness. Furthermore, the article presents some findings from good practice cases of local service providers in Germany who have successfully exposed themselves to market mechanisms. Finally, the article discusses observed results of increased competitiveness in the local government sector, with special regard to quality, efficiency and public employment. The article concludes with describing necessary elements of a competitive regime for public services and with some general reflections about the role of competition in the public sector.
This article is a response to calls in prior research that we need more longitudinal analyses to better understand the foundations of PSM and related prosocial values. There is wide agreement that it is crucial for theory building but also for tailoring hiring practices and human resource development programs to sort out whether PSM-related values are stable or developable. The article summarizes existent theoretical expectations, which turn out to be partially conflicting, and tests them against multiple waves of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study which covers a time period of 16 years. It finds that PSM-related values of public employees are stable rather than dynamic but tend to increase with age and decrease with organizational membership. The article also examines cohort effects, which have been neglected in prior work, and finds moderate evidence that there are differences between those born during the Second World War and later generations.
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.
Background: Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. However, shifting sensitive medical records to third-party cloud providers could create an adoption hurdle because of security and privacy concerns. Methods: We empirically investigate our research question by a survey with over 260 full responses. For the setting with a high confidentiality assurance, we base on a recent multi-cloud architecture which provides very high confidentiality assurance through a secret-sharing mechanism: Health information is cryptographically encoded and distributed in a way that no single and no small group of cloud providers is able to decode it.
Public organizations involved in marine management are increasingly confronted with coordination challenges in marine governance. This study examines why and how the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research (IMR) reorganized its formal coordination structures between the areas of fisheries management and marine environmental management The findings indicate that organizing efficient and, at the same time, legitimate coordination structures between different areas of marine governance is a "wicked" organizational problem with no ultimate and single optimal solution. In contrast to the assumptions of classical organization and management theory, the study finds that the reorganization of formal coordination structures is not necessarily driven for reasons of efficiency and perceived coordination problems. Instead, public marine management organizations also change their organizational structures to live up to external expectations to adopt modern management concepts, such as the Ecosystem Approach to Management (EAM). However, the study indicates that the adoption of the EAM has stimulated coordination and integration efforts in the research and advisory activities of the IMR. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. 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.
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.
This article introduces the concept of sustainability-rooted anticonsumption (SRAC), which refers to consumers' anticonsumption practices of voluntary simplicity in living and, on a smaller level, collaborative consumption and boycotting with the goal of supporting sustainable economic development. The SRAC measurement approach is validated based on three empirical studies. Results of a representative German sample (Study 2) reveal that SRAC is predominantly negatively linked to consumer overconsumption dispositions. Exemplary, voluntary simplification and boycott intention may result in declining levels of indebtedness. Study 3 shows that psychosocial well-being is positively related to SRAC and overconsumption. However, a simplified lifestyle and a greater willingness to boycott are not necessarily associated with psychosocial well-being. This article provides insights for practitioners and policymakers to leverage existing SRAC values via “new” business models (sharing offers) or to influence the existing level of consciousness to effectively pave the way for solid progress in the sustainability movement.
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.
The 2008-2010 food crisis might have been a harbinger of fundamental climate-induced food crises with geopolitical implications. Heat-wave-induced yield losses in Russia and resulting export restrictions led to increases in market prices for wheat across the Middle East, likely contributing to the Arab Spring. With ongoing climate change, temperatures and temperature variability will rise, leading to higher uncertainty in yields for major nutritional crops. Here we investigate which countries are most vulnerable to teleconnected supply-shocks, i.e. where diets strongly rely on the import of wheat, maize, or rice, and where a large share of the population is living in poverty. We find that the Middle East is most sensitive to teleconnected supply shocks in wheat, Central America to supply shocks in maize, and Western Africa to supply shocks in rice. Weighing with poverty levels, Sub-Saharan Africa is most affected. Altogether, a simultaneous 10% reduction in exports of wheat, rice, and maize would reduce caloric intake of 55 million people living in poverty by about 5%. Export bans in major producing regions would put up to 200 million people below the poverty line at risk, 90% of which live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results suggest that a region-specific combination of national increases in agricultural productivity and diversification of trade partners and diets can effectively decrease future food security risks.
We compare dictator and impunity games. In impunity games, responders can reject offers but to no payoff consequence to proposers. Because proposers act under impunity, we should expect the same behavior across games, but experimentally observed behavior varies. Responders indeed exercise the rejection option. This threat psychologically influences proposers. Some proposers avoid rejection by offering nothing. Others raise offers, but only when they receive feedback from responders. Responders lose this influence in the absence of feedback. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The positive aspects of open innovation projects are widely discussed in innovation management research and practice by means of case studies and best practices. However, enterprises, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) also face miscellaneous challenges in open innovation practice, leading to uncertainty and even renunciation of open innovation project participation. Thus, it is essential for SMEs to find the right balance between possible positive effects and negative consequences - the latter being the less studied "dark sides" of open innovation. However, appropriate methods of finding this balance are still lacking. In this article, we discuss the assessment of open innovation project participation by presenting a weighing and decision process framework as a conceivable solution approach. The framework includes an internal, external, and integrated analysis as well as a recommendation and decision phase. Piece by piece, we investigate the current situation and the innovation goals of the enterprise as an initial point for a decision for or against engaging in open innovation. Furthermore, we discuss the development of a software tool that automatically applies this framework and allows self-assessment by SMEs.
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.
This paper studies the effectiveness of building height limits as a policy to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It shows that building height limits lead to urban sprawl and higher emissions from commuting. On the other hand, aggregate housing consumption may decrease, which reduces emissions from residential energy use. A numerical model is used to evaluate whether total GHG emissions may be lower under building height restrictions. Welfare is not concave in the strictness of building height limits, so either no limit or a very strict one (depending on the strength of the externality) might maximize welfare. The paper discusses several extensions, such as congestion, endogenous transport mode choice, migration, and urban heat island effect. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
We analyze the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity in MSMEs with a special focus on micro firms with fewer than 10 employees; usually constituting the majority of firms in industrialized economies. Using the German KfW SME-panel, we examine to what extent micro firms are different from other firms in terms of innovativeness. We find that while firms engage in innovative activities with smaller probability, the smaller they are, for those firms that do make such investment, R&D intensity is larger the smaller firms are. For all MSMEs, the predicted R&D intensity is positively correlated with the probability of reporting innovation, with a larger effect size for product than for process innovations. Moreover, micro firms benefit in a comparable way from innovation processes as larger firms, as they are similarly able to increase their labor productivity. Overall, the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity in micro firms does not largely differ from their larger counterparts. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Many countries support business start-ups to spur economic growth and reduce unemployment with different programmes. Evaluation studies of such programmes commonly rely on the conditional independence assumption (CIA), allowing a causal interpretation of the results only if all relevant variables affecting participation and success are accounted for. While the entrepreneurship literature has emphasised the important role of personality traits as predictors for start-up decisions and business success, these variables were neglected in evaluation studies so far due to data limitations. In this paper, we evaluate a new start-up subsidy for unemployed individuals in Germany using propensity score matching under the CIA. Having access to rich administrative-survey data allows us to incorporate usually unobserved personality measures in the evaluation and investigate their impact on the estimated effects. We find strong positive effects on labour market reintegration and earned income for the new programme. Most importantly, results including and excluding individuals׳ personalities do not differ significantly, implying that concerns about potential overestimation of programme effects in the absence of personality measures might be less justified if the set of other control variables is rich enough.
Situated at the intersection of the literatures on speculative storage and non-renewable commodity scarcity, this paper considers whether changes in persistence have occurred in long-run U.S. prices of the energy commodities crude oil, natural gas and bituminous coal. We allow for a structural break when testing for a break in persistence to avoid a change in the stochastic properties of prices being confounded by an unaccounted-for deterministic shift in the price series. We find that coal prices are trend stationary throughout their evolution and that oil prices change from stationarity to non-stationarity in the decade between the late 1960s to late 1970s. The result on gas prices is ambiguous. Our results demonstrate the importance of accounting for a possible structural shift when testing for breaks in persistence, while being robust to the exact date of the structural break. Based on our analysis we caution against viewing long-run energy commodity prices as being non-stationary and conclude in favor of modeling commodity market fundamentals as stationary, meaning that speculative storage will tend to have a dampening effect on prices. We also cannot reject that long-run prices of coal and, with some hesitation, gas follow a Hotelling-type rule. In contrast, we reject the Hotelling rule for oil prices since the late 1960s/early 1970s. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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.
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).
Die Prozesse kultureller Transformation in den gegenwärtigen Demokratien lassen sich mit den traditionellen Ansätzen der politischen Kulturforschung, bei denen vor allem politische Präferenzen untersucht werden, nicht mehr adäquat erfassen. Um die Wirksamkeit kultureller Dispositionen der Wahrnehmung und Beurteilung des Politischen sowie politischen Entscheidens und Handelns heute verstehen und analysieren zu können, bedarf es neuer Konzepte. Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge mit Befunden aktueller Forschung zu den politischen Dimensionen von Kultur und den kulturellen Dimensionen von Politik sowie mit innovativen theoretischen, programmatischen und methodischen Ansätzen.
This paper challenges the solely rational view of the scenario technique as a strategy and foresight tool designed to cope with uncertainty by considering multiple possible future states. The paper employs an affordance-based view that allows for the identification and structuring of hidden, emergent attributes of the scenario technique beyond the intended ones. The suggested framework distinguishes between affordances (1) that are intended by the organization and relate to its goals, (2) that emergently generate organizational benefits, and (3) that do not relate to organizational but individual interests. Also, constraints in the use of scenarios are discussed. Affordance theory’s specific lens shows that the emergence of such attributes depends on the users’ specific intentions.
In this study, we analyze the forecast accuracy and profitability of buy recommendations published in five major German financial magazines for private households based on fundamental analysis. The results show a high average forecast accuracy but with a very high standard deviation, which indicates poor forecast accuracy with regard to individual stocks. The recommendation profitability slightly exceeds the performance of the MSCI World index. Considering the involved risk, which is represented by a high standard deviation, the excess returns appear to be insufficient.
Wissensmanagement
(2019)
Öffentliches Rechnungswesen
(2019)
Personalmanagement
(2019)
Organisationsreformen
(2019)
Neo-Weberianischer Staat
(2019)
Neues Steuerungsmodell
(2019)
This chapter outlines the strategy of the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) and reflects on some of its key strengths, and how these may equip the European community of scholars and practitioners of public administration (PA) to contribute to the development of the field. The chapter reviews the key trait of the EGPA organisational model: the Permanent Study Groups, which are communities of scholars centred on the key areas of the administrative sciences in Europe. It also discusses the partnerships that EGPA has developed with key institutions in Europe and beyond, and highlights the significance of the EGPA policy papers on European governance. Finally, it discusses the strategic, forward-looking project European Perspectives on Public Administration, which aims to reflect on the future of the research and teaching of public administration.
With the aim to improve the quality of public administration (PA) programmes in Europe, EGPA established in 1999—together with the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee)—the European Association for Public Administration Accreditation (EAPAA). This chapter presents the development of EAPAA in the last two decades and the experiences made with voluntary accreditation of academic PA programmes in Europe. The authors illustrate the basic accreditation concept of EAPAA, its integration into the European quality assurance institutions and the scope of accreditation missions over time. Finally, the effects of accreditation measures in the educational field of PA are discussed.
Kuhlmann, Laffin and Wayenberg point out three main strands of subnational changes that have significantly dominated the research field and focus of Permanent Study Group 5. Elaborating upon the Study Group’s contributions, the chapter overviews relevant research questions, approaches and findings that have been touched upon concerning local and regional government systems, subnational reforms and their evaluation in a multi-level governance setting. The chapter concludes with zooming in on austerity as a main driver of future developments upon and amongst all levels of government.
The contribution summarises the scientific discussion and research activities of the EGPA Permanent Study Group 4 (PSG 4) “Local Governance and Local Democracy”, founded in 2005. The impetus for proposing this specific PSG was the growing importance of the local level within the multi-level governance system in the European Union and most of its member states. The PSG 4 acts as a European network of research activities inside and outside EGPA, producing joint publications and organising scientific debates on many problems of the development of municipalities and local authorities. Our focus was on discussing both how to improve democracy by increased participation and deliberation, and how to secure provision of services in an efficient way in developed welfare societies. This includes analysing several forms of administrative changes and reforms at the local level and research of representative, direct and cooperative democracy at local level in a cross-European comparison.
The chapter aims at addressing collaboration between the two main professional organizations in the field of Public Administration in Europe—the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA) and the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee)—in their contribution to understanding, creating and institutionalizing the European Administrative Space. While the chapter gives an overview of both informal collaboration between Eastern and Western European scholars, and a joint accreditation initiative (EAPAA), its main focus is on Trans-European Dialogue (TED). The chapter outlines the challenges for the future of TED and proposes other potential ways of EGPA-NISPAcee collaboration.
This chapter highlights the role and contribution of EGPA in educating and socializing the next generation of young researchers into the interdisciplinary community of public administration, management and policy scholars in Europe. In doing so, it also provides an overview of the current state of the art in doctoral education in the field of public administration in Europe. Against this background, the chapter presents the annual “EGPA Workshop for PhDs and Young Researchers” (or for short: the EGPA PhD project) in the context of changing institutional settings and academic markets of PhD education in Europe. Consequently, EGPA carries an important responsibility as a representative of the public administration community in shaping the course of PhD education in our field in Europe.
Cooperation is — despite not being predicted by game theory — a widely documented aspect of human behaviour in Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) situations. This article presents a comparison between subjects restricted to playing pure strategies and subjects allowed to play mixed strategies in a one-shot symmetric PD laboratory experiment. Subjects interact with 10 other subjects and take their decisions all at once. Because subjects in the mixed-strategy treatment group are allowed to condition their level of cooperation more precisely on their beliefs about their counterparts’ level of cooperation, we predicted the cooperation rate in the mixed-strategy treatment group to be higher than in the pure-strategy control group. The results of our experiment reject our prediction: even after controlling for beliefs about the other subjects’ level of cooperation, we find that cooperation in the mixed-strategy group is lower than in the pure-strategy group. We also find, however, that subjects in the mixedstrategy group condition their cooperative behaviour more closely on their beliefs than in the pure-strategy group. In the mixed-strategy group, most subjects choose intermediate levels of cooperation.
Industrie 4.0
(2018)
Manufacturing Analytics
(2018)
Robotik II
(2018)