Navigating Rough Waters: Global Shipping and Challenges for the North Range Ports

Intereconomics - Ports and shipping have been in the spotlight in 2021 with surging demand, skyrocketing freight rates and week-long queues. This development stands against the background of the...     

Commemorating the 50‐Year Anniversary of Ball and Brown (1968): The Evolution of Capital Market Research over the Past 50 Years

We commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ball and Brown [1968] by chronicling its impact on capital market research in accounting. We trace the evolution of various research paths that post–Ball and Brown [1968] researchers took as they sought to build on the foundation laid by Ball and Brown [1968] to create a body of research on the usefulness, timeliness, and other properties of accounting numbers. We discuss how those paths often link back to the groundwork laid and questions originally posed in Ball and Brown [1968].     

The European Green Deal — More Than Climate Neutrality

Intereconomics - The European Green Deal aims at climate neutrality for Europe by 2050, implying a significant acceleration of emission reductions. To gain the necessary support, it needs to reduce...     

Competition versus cooperation: How technology-facilitated social interdependence initiates the self-improvement chain

Consumers are increasingly using technologies such as wearables or mobile apps to achieve their self-improvement goals. Such technologies often contain features that enable social interdependence (competition or cooperation) among users to support them in improving their engagement, performance, and well-being (life satisfaction and personal growth). However, the critical question remains: does competition or cooperation best serve users in attaining these self-improvement goals? Evidence from an online experiment and a field study reveals that competition is more effective in driving performance and personal growth, while cooperation is superior in terms of behavioral engagement and life satisfaction. Furthermore, the results indicate that the effects are mediated by strive for success and fear of failure, two counteracting psychological processes. While competition is the stronger trigger for both pathways, downstream effects vary depending on the self-improvement goal considered. This research thus provides insights into whether and how users can best realize their self-improvement goals using technologies that include social features.     

Collaborative Decision-Making in Non-formal Planning Settings

Planning initiatives outside the formal planning system can constitute a favourable environment for implementing and analysing collaborative decision-making processes. The conceptualisation of the decision-making context in the light of the Policy Network analysis helps to better understand the underlining conditions, as well as their influence in the outcomes. In the case under analysis, were the decision-making conditions were of co-responsibility and power-sharing, the challenge has been to warrant the effectiveness of the decisions, which lies, as is argued, in the reliability of the framework for decision-making and in the ability to translate the collaborative participation outputs into actions at different time-frames. Moreover, as the case-study deals with strategic spatial planning, a future oriented approach is needed to warrant the flexibility and robustness of the plan in addressing the uncertainty associated with long term objectives. Those are the critical issues to be handled in the multi-criteria analysis (MCA) framework which sustains the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) that was used to support the decision-making process.