Immobiliencontrolling — Optimierung der immobilienbezogenen Kosten durch Gründung einer Generalmietgesellschaft

Ohne Zusammenfassung Dipl.-Ing. (univ.) Michael Belau ist Director und Head of Rental Management Dipl.-Wirtschaftsing. (FH) Michael Schildger ist Vice President und Head of Finance Dr. Verena Sturm ist Manager Corporate Real Estate Services     

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE: A PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITIQUE OF ARGYRIS AND SCHON'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO ORGANIZATION THEORY AND INTERVENTION

The purpose of this essay is to examine psychoanalytically Argyris and Schon's contributions to organization theory and intervention. The author focuses his attention on the problem of individual and organizational resistance to change in the light of Argyris and Schon's cognitive psychological assumptions about learning, reasoning, and effectiveness.     

Intraday Returns and the Frequency of Trading at the Ask on the Sydney Futures Exchange: A Research Note

This article documents and provides explanations for intraday patterns in returns for the Share Price Index (SPI) futures contract traded on the Sydney Futures Exchange (SFE). Consistent with overseas futures markets research, a positive and significant overnight return is documented. Unlike overseas futures markets, we find little evidence of an end of day price rise. Our evidence suggests that overnight returns for the SPI contract are largely driven by the way returns are typically measured, which ignores the fact that there is a significantly greater frequency of sellers at the market close and buyers at the start of the day. These patterns are consistent with hedging behaviour by futures traders with long positions in the underlying stock.     

Henry George and Europe

A bstract . The basic ideas of Henry George , 19th century American economist and social philosopher, were not novel in Denmark , which had a tradition of land value taxation and free trade. But they had special appeal for its smallholder farmers. They demanded that George's principles be applied more fully, getting all tax revenues from the land 's unimproved value, so that taxes on buildings, personal property and wages could be abolished. Viggo Ullman 's Danish-Norwegian translation of Progress and Poverty won the commitment of folk school movement leaders and the intelligentsia. In 1903 large landowners gained control of the Liberal Party and proceeded to abolish the traditional land tax, producer of up to 50 percent of State revenues. The Radical Liberals split and took over, to some extent carrying out George's taxation principles. In 1919 a Georgist party, the "Retsforbundet" was founded; it won the balance of power in 1957. But lack of finances and organizing ability and growing voter apathy ended its progress.     

Data Fixation and the Use of Traditional Versus Activity-Based Costing Systems

An important debate in the contemporary accounting literature relates to the relative merits of activity-based versus volume-based product costing methodologies. Traditional volume-based costing systems are said to be flawed and may seriously mislead strategic decision making. Such arguments assume that decision makers use such information in an unproblematic way. This article reports on an experiment designed to investigate whether decision makers are able to overcome data fixation in a setting involving the use of product cost information. In response to criticisms of previous accounting studies of data fixation, subjects received some feedback after each decision, and were rewarded based on performance. The experiment involved subjects making a series of production output decisions based on detailed case information of a hypothetical firm facing different market conditions for each decision. A between-subjects design was utilized with two cost system treatments: activity-based costing (ABC) and traditional costing (TC). It was hypothesized that the group provided with ABC cost data would make 'optimal' decisions and the group provided with TC cost data would overcome fixation. The results of the experiment indicated that there was, in general, evidence of data fixation among TC subjects, but a small number of subjects did adjust to ABC costs. These results are discussed in the light of previous research and some future directions are outlined.     

Issues in the estimation and application of latent structure models of choice

Our paper provides a brief review and summary of issues and advances in the use of latent structure and other finite mixture models in the analysis of choice data. Focus is directed to three primary areas: (1) estimation and computational issues, (2) specification and interpretation issues, and (3) future research issues. We comment on what latent structure models have promised, what has been, to date, delivered, and what we should look forward to in the future.     

Identifying New Product Successes in China

To examine the generalizability of the work of Cooper regarding the correlates of new product success and failure, Mark Parry and Michael Song surveyed new product development managers at 129 state-owned enterprises in the People's Republic of China. Their analysis of 258 reported product successes and failures indicated that relative product advantage and the acquisition of marketing information were highly correlated with new product success, just as in Canada. In addition, several factors not significantly correlated with success in Canadian firms emerged as significant correlates of success in the PRC. These included the level of competitive activity, the timing of the product launch, and the level of proficiency in executing activities in the early stages of the product development process.     

Australian Audit Committees — Do They Meet Best Practice Guidelines?

The paper reports the results of a study of Australia's largest 250 companies' audit committees in two years (1998 and 2001). The audit committees were scrutinised on the bases of audit committee independence and the frequency of meetings. Australia's audit committees did not score highly on either criterion and most companies fell short of best practice guidelines. Further, it was puzzling and of concern that Australian audit committees appear to have deteriorated in terms of independence and frequency of meetings between 1998 and 2001.     

Wage and price controls in the equilibrium sequential search model

In this paper, we study the effects of wage and price controls on employment, output, and welfare in a simplified version of the Bénabou (J. Econom. Theory 60 (1993) 140) equilibrium sequential search model with bilateral heterogeneity. We show that a price ceiling increases output but the change in welfare depends on three effects: the reduction in aggregate search costs, the increase in surplus due to increased output, and the transfer of production to the least efficient firm. The model is formally identical to a standard equilibrium search model of the labor market so analogous results hold for the minimum wage.