Moral and Instrumental Norms in Food Risk Communication

The major normative recommendations in the literature on food risk communication can be summarized in the form of seven practical principles for such communication: (1) Be honest and open. (2) Disclose incentives and conflicts of interest. (3) Take all available relevant knowledge into consideration. (4) When possible, quantify risks. (5) Describe and explain uncertainties. (6) Take all the public’s concerns into account. (7) Take the rights of individuals and groups seriously. We show that each of these proposed principles can be justified both in terms of more fundamental ethical principles and instrumentally in terms of the communicating agent’s self-interest. The mechanisms of this concordance of justifications are discussed. It is argued that the concordance is specific for areas such as food risks in which agents such as companies and public authorities are highly dependent on the public’s trust and confidence. The implications of these findings both for moral philosophy and for practical food risk communication are discussed.     

Chasing Success: Health Sector Aid and Mortality

As many cases studies show, successful public health measures are being implemented in many places around the globe, and country-level mortality has fallen significantly in recent decades in all but a few countries. Are the two linked? Does development assistance for health (DAH) improve, on balance, recipient countries’ mortality trajectory? Using a new data source containing DAH on 96 high mortality countries, the regression analysis shows no effect of DAH on mortality. Other types of aid, including water development, also have no effect. Economic growth, on the other hand, has a strong negative effect on mortality. These findings confirm and build upon recent work by Williamson (2008) and are shown to be robust to a variety of sensitivity analyses and alternative model specifications and estimation methods.This analysis also shows that the effectiveness of DAH has not increased over time, even as the level of that funding has increased fourfold, though spending on infectious diseases and family planning may have caused small reductions in mortality. Furthermore, even though it is encouraging that DAH has tended to go where the need is highest, it also goes to states that have experienced the greatest mortality reductions in the recent past. In other words, DAH appears to be following success, rather than causing it.     

Going Public — Effekte der Börsen-notierung auf das Marketing

Zusammenfassung  Wenn sich Marketingexperten in der Vergangenheit an der Schnittstelle zwischen Marketing und Finance bewegten, standen h?ufig die Effekte bestimmter Marketingmassnahmen auf den B?rsenkurs im Mittelpunkt. Wie sich jedoch die B?rsennotierung und damit eine stringente Orientierung am Shareholder Value auf das Marketingmanagement auswirkt, wurde bislang kaum untersucht. Eine explorative Studie erforscht die wesentlichen Auswirkungen der zunehmenden Shareholder Value-Orientierung auf die spezifischen Bedingungen des Marketings. M.A. Lydia Ebersbach Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Kompetenzzentrum „Marketing Performance Management“ am Institut für Marketing und Handel an der Universit?t St. Gallen Prof. Dr. Sven Reinecke Dozent für Betriebswirtschaftslehre an der Universit?t St. Gallen und Leiter des Kompetenzzentrums „Marketing Performance Management“ am dortigen Institut für Marketing und Handel.     

Organizing and integrating marketing and purchasing in business markets: An introduction to the special issue, issues and implications

The article is the introductory paper to the special issue on “Organizing and Integrating Marketing and Purchasing in Business markets”. It analyses the different organizational issues in the marketing and purchasing interfaces by an extensive analysis of the literature. It introduces the different contributions to the special issue and draw some reflections on further research steps.     

Fare Thee Well? An Analysis of Buyout Funds’ Exit Strategies

This paper analyzes exit strategies of buyout funds in portfolio companies following initial public offerings (IPOs). We use a data set of 222 buyout‐backed IPOs in the United States from 1999 to 2008, including hand‐collected data about each exit process, to draw a detailed roadmap of buyout investors’ divestment processes. Using this data, we document the timing and aggressiveness of the exit strategies, and analyze to which degree a multitude of possible determinants influence the choice of a given exit strategy. Our results indicate that buyout funds remain invested in their portfolio companies for a substantial period of time after the IPO, and that the choice of a given exit strategy depends not only upon the characteristics of each respective portfolio company, but also on the financial success of the deal from the perspective of the buyout investor.     

Bringing the brand to life: Structural conditions of brand-consistent employee behavior

Continuous brand success can be realized only if the brand promise that is communicated through mass media campaigns is lived up to by customer contact employees. In fact, discrepancies in brand experience may lead to customer confusion and dissatisfaction. However, what does that mean to brand managers? A survey among marketing managers shows that a reorganization of brand management routines is needed in order to bring the brand to life: informal management techniques and employee empowerment are required instead of formal management activities. In this article, we elaborate first steps for the implementation and maintenance of behavioral branding considering findings of our survey as well as implications from management focus groups and best practice examples.     

Das Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz und die Industriestrompreise

Die herrschende Meinung geht davon aus, dass durch die Umlage der F?rderung nach dem Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG) auf die Letztverbraucher die Strombezugskosten der Unternehmen steigen und ihre Wettbewerbsf?higkeit sinkt. Wie setzt sich der Strompreis zusammen und wovon ist die Strompreisbildung abh?ngig? Welche Wirkung hat das EEG auf den Gro?handelsstrompreis?     

The Climate Policy of the European Union

There is now almost universal agreement that climate change, with potentially disastrous consequences, is happening and that it is contributed to by human activities. This Forum is dedicated to the discussion of various aspects of the European Union's climate policy, e.g. the EU's future role in the global effort to combat global warming, the efficiency of its climate strategy, the design of a new rule for sharing the corresponding burdens fairly among member states, and the interrelationships between the Union's climate policies, on the one hand, and its energy and transport policies, on the other. * and member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). The author wishes to thank Helen Bicknell (Mainz University of Applied Sciences), Oliver Deke (WBGU) and Jürgen Schmid (ISET, Department of Efficient Energy Conversion at the University of Kassel) for their helpful comments. ** This contribution is based on a Jean Monnet Lecture held at Aarhus University on 19 March 2007. The author would like to thank Harri Kalimo for valuable comments.