Career patterns of top management team members in five countries: an optimal matching analysis

This paper introduces optimal matching analysis (OMA) to the field of top management research. With this method, we develop six career patterns of top management team (TMT) members from five countries based on their international experience, organizational tenure and professional experience. The results provide strong support for the significance of these patterns, since each country (Denmark, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) shows one to four predominant career patterns of their managers and the occurrence of these patterns also differs significantly between the fields of activity within the TMT (chairperson, head of a division, primary activities and support activities).     

The Narrow and Broad Approaches to Evolutionary Modeling in Economics

Some models in evolutionary economics rely on direct analogies to genetic evolution, assuming a population of firms with routines, technologies, and strategies on which forces of diversity generation and selection act. This narrow conception can build upon previous findings from evolutionary biology. Broader concepts of evolution allow many or just one adaptive entity, instead of necessarily requiring a population. Thus, an institution or a society can also be understood as an evolutionary entity. Both the narrow and broad approaches have been extensively used in the literature, albeit in different literature traditions. I provide an overview of the conception and development of both approaches to evolutionary modeling, and argue that a generalization is needed to realize the full potential of evolutionary modeling.     

II. Allgemeine und angewandte Statistik

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Einflussfaktoren auf die Bereitschaft von Privatkunden, Ökostrom nachzufragen

The present study investigates impacts of attitudinal and perceptual characteristics of residential electricity consumers on their intention to use a green power tariff/supplier in the future. The work rests on a standardized telephone survey of 267 household electricity consumers of a German power supplier. Multivariate Partial Least Squares analysis indicates that, regardless of a person’s level of actual power consumption in the recent past, the intention to use green electricity is significantly higher among customers who have a positive general attitude towards environmental protection measures and who report an endorsing valuation of green power by their close social contacts. In a subsample of participants with a low actual electricity consumption in the year preceding the survey the intention to use green energy is significantly positively affected by the weight an individual attaches to electricity prices in one’s own supplier selection decisions and the person’s belief that one’s present power company takes over social responsibility. In contrast, in the subgroup of respondents with a high actual electricity consumption customers’ intention to use green energy is significantly enhanced by the degree of perceived dissimilarity among power company offerings. The findings are used to derive suggestions for green energy marketing measures of power companies and future energy consumer research.     

Privatisierung der Autobahnen—Soll der Bund sein Tafelsilber verkaufen?

Gegenw?rtig wird der Verkauf des deutschen Autobahnnetzes diskutiert. Mit den Privatisierungserl?sen k?nnte ein erheblicher Teil der Verschuldung des Bundes abgebaut werden. Ist die traditionelle staatliche Bereitstellung noch gerechtfertigt? Wie weit sollte eine Autobahnprivatisierung gehen? Henrik Armbrecht, 30, Dipl.-Volkswirt, Sebastian Badura, 27, Dipl.-Verkehrswirtschaftler, und Torsten Marner, 34, Dipl.-Volkswirt, sind wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter am Institut für Verkehrswissenschaft an der Universit?t Münster.     

Forecasting real estate prices in Germany: the role of consumer confidence

The aim of the paper is to analyse the forecasting ability of various potential predictors for real estate prices in Germany over the short term. In the wake of the financial crisis, real estate prices in Germany started to increase markedly and still did so by the end of 2013. Despite a number of fundamental reasons, e.g. favourable lending conditions and Germany’s rapid return to economic growth, this provoked a discussion on whether consumers have too gloomy expectations regarding real estate prices in future. To capture the role of expectations for predicting real estate prices, in our forecast evaluation, we put special emphasis on various components of consumer confidence. Using single indicator models, we find that households’ perceived financial situations as well as their intended consumption/saving plans serve as valuable real estate price predictors.     

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Risiken aus kommerzieller Nutzung des Internet — Möglichkeiten der Schadenverhütung und Versicherung

Due to the increasing importance of the Internet and its commercial use a new risk category has emerged, opening up interesting business opportunities for insurance companies. — Besides insurance, loss prevention measures must be considered key aspects in this context, particularly since without contract clauses regarding loss prevention and extensive assessment of an insured’s activities in this field, insurance may not be available in many cases. After a short classification and explanation of Internet risks, this paper firstly deals with loss prevention, concentrating on the technical measures such as cryptology or firewall concepts, which are specific for the risks in question. These measures allow for a significant increase in the security of data transfer and the security of individual networks’ connections to the Internet. A complete elimination of risk, however, is usually not an economically reasonable goal. The question, to what extent the remaining risk can be covered by insurance, is addressed in the following section of this paper, in which we analyze problems of insurability and how these problems could probably be solved through product design.     

II. Allgemeine und angewandte statistik

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