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The public encounter
(2019)
This thesis puts the citizen-state interaction at its center. Building on a comprehensive model incorporating various perspectives on this interaction, I derive selected research gaps. The three articles, comprising this thesis, tackle these gaps. A focal role plays the citizens’ administrative literacy, the relevant competences and knowledge necessary to successfully interact with public organizations. The first article elaborates on the different dimensions of administrative literacy and develops a survey instrument to assess these. The second study shows that public employees change their behavior according to the competences that citizens display during public encounters. They treat citizens preferentially that are well prepared and able to persuade them of their application’s potential. Thereby, they signal a higher success potential for bureaucratic success criteria which leads to the employees’ cream-skimming behavior. The third article examines the dynamics of employees’ communication strategies when recovering from a service failure. The study finds that different explanation strategies yield different effects on the client’s frustration. While accepting the responsibility and explaining the reasons for a failure alleviates the frustration and anger, refusing the responsibility leads to no or even reinforcing effects on the client’s frustration. The results emphasize the different dynamics that characterize the nature of citizen-state interactions and how they establish their short- and long-term outcomes.
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.
Keywords
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.
As digital media infiltrate an increasingly greater proportion of our lives, concern about the possibility of various forms of technology addictions has emerged. For technology addiction, researchers have developed a variety of self-reported scales in areas such as Internet, smartphones, videogames, social network sites (SNS) or television. However, no uniform criteria or definition exists for technology addiction. Utilized dimensions of technology addiction, to measure specific outcomes, lack a conceptual standard. Therefore, linkages between technology areas dimensions have not been examined in a broader way by the research community, in order to develop a uniform technology addiction scale.
In this regard, firstly, a theoretical model was developed in order to extract common technology dimensions. Secondly, a systematic literature review in the areas of Internet, smartphone, video games and SNS was conducted in order to extract the dimensions used. To identify relevant studies, nine databases (GoogleScholar, ScienceDirect, PubMed, EmeraldInsight, Wiley, SpringerLink, ACM, iEEE and JSTOR) were searched, producing 4698 results, and 50 studies met the inclusion criteria. Thirdly, the developed theoretical model was utilized in order to determine the dimension in each of the identified scales.
Based on analysis of the dimensional distributions, the findings suggest that there are common dimensions across areas of technology such as “compulsive use” and “negative outcomes” but also differences in dimensions across areas such as “social comfort” and “mood regulation”, which are more used in the area of SNS. Moreover, new dimensions such as “cognitive absorption” or “utility and function loss" for technology addiction were extracted, which should be considered as these have not yet been researched in a broader way. In addition, no gold standard for the conceptual criteria or definition for technology addiction has been developed yet.
What Makes an Employer?
(2019)
As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP), we analyze what role individual characteristics of entrepreneurs play in sustainable job creation. While human and social capital variables positively influence the hiring decision and the survival as an employer in the same direction, we show that none of the personality traits affect the two outcomes in the same way. Some traits are only relevant for survival as an employer but do not influence the hiring decision, other traits even unfold a revolving door effect, in the sense that employers tend to fail due to the same characteristics that positively influenced their hiring decision.
The Collatz conjecture is a number theoretical problem, which has puzzled countless researchers using myriad approaches. Presently, there are scarcely any methodologies to describe and treat the problem from the perspective of the Algebraic Theory of Automata. Such an approach is promising with respect to facilitating the comprehension of the Collatz sequence’s "mechanics". The systematic technique of a state machine is both simpler and can fully be described by the use of algebraic means.
The current gap in research forms the motivation behind the present contribution. The present authors are convinced that exploring the Collatz conjecture in an algebraic manner, relying on findings and fundamentals of Graph Theory and Automata Theory, will simplify the problem as a whole.
From an active labor market policy perspective, start-up subsidies for unemployed individuals are very effective in improving long-term labor market outcomes for participants. From a business perspective, however, the assessment of these public programs is less clear since they might attract individuals with low entrepreneurial abilities and produce businesses with low survival rates and little contribution to job creation, economic growth, and innovation. In this paper, we use a rich data set to compare participants of a German start-up subsidy program for unemployed individuals to a group of regular founders who started from nonunemployment and did not receive the subsidy. The data allows us to analyze their business performance up until 40 months after business formation. We find that formerly subsidized founders lag behind not only in survival and job creation, but especially also in innovation activities. The gaps in these business outcomes are relatively constant or even widening over time. Hence, we do not see any indication of catching up in the longer run. While the gap in survival can be entirely explained by initial differences in observable start-up characteristics, the gap in business development remains and seems to be the result of restricted access to capital as well as differential business strategies and dynamics. Considering these conflicting results for the assessment of the subsidy program from an ALMP and business perspective, policy makers need to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of such a strategy to find the right policy mix.
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.
Entrepreneurial persistence is demonstrated by an entrepreneur’s continued positive maintenance of entrepreneurial motivation and constantly-renewed active engagement in a new business venture despite counter forces or enticing alternatives. It is thus a crucial factor for entrepreneurs when pursuing and exploiting their business opportunities and to realize potential economic gains and benefits. Using rich data on a representative sample of German business founders, we investigate the determinants of entrepreneurial persistence. Next to observed survival we also construct a hybrid persistence measure capturing also the motivational dimension of persistence. We analyze the influence of individual-level (human capital and personality) and business-related characteristics on both measures as well as their relative importance. We find that the two indicators emphasize different aspects of persistence. For the survival indicator, the predictive power is concentrated in business characteristics and human capital, while for hybrid persistence, the dominant factors are business characteristics and personality. Finally, we show that results are heterogeneous across subgroups. In particular, formerly-unemployed founders do not differ in survival chances, but they are more likely to lack a high psychological commitment to their business ventures.