Ist mehr Innovativität im Marketing besser? Achtung,nicht-lineare Effekte!

Wie innovativ sollten Unternehmen ihr Marketing gestalten? Ist mehr Innovativit?t immer sinnvoll? Antworten auf diese Fragen gibt dieser Beitrag. Ausgew?hlte Fallstudien und eine empirische Studie belegen, dass zus?tzliche Innovationsanstrengungen ab einem bestimmten Ma? negativ wirken k?nnen.     

Attitudes Towards Foreign Products and Welfare with Capital Mobility

We develop a model of trade with imperfect competition to study the welfare implications in developing and developed countries of the asymmetry in attitudes towards foreign products. In the developed country, consumers benefit from a better perception of foreign products while the rental rate of capital declines as long as the location of capital remains unchanged. However, when capital is mobile, the developing country hosts more and more capital at the expense of the developed country as perception of varieties produced in the developed country improves and the surplus of consumers in the developed country can decrease.     

Linking Ethics and Risk Management in Taxation: Evidence from an Exploratory Study in Ireland and the UK

Ethical dilemmas involving tax issues were identified by members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants as posing the most difficult ethical problem for them (Finn et al., Journal of Business Ethics 7(8), pp. 607–609, 1988). The KPMG tax shelter fraud case proves that the tax profession has not gone untainted in the age of numerous accounting and corporate scandals, such as the Enron débacle (Sikka and Hampton, Accounting Forum 29(3), 325–343, 2005). High-profile scandals serve to highlight the problems caused by differences in ethical judgement among accountants and tax practitioners and the issue of ethics has been brought publicly to the forefront of the profession. Nevertheless, the nature and dimension of ethical issues in tax practice have been largely unexplored (Erard, Journal of Public Economics 52(2), 163–197, 1993; Marshall et al., Journal of Business Ethics 17(12), 1265–1279, 1998; Frecknall Hughes, Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Leeds, 2002). This research aims to contribute to the debate on ethics in tax practice by reporting interview data on tax practitioners’ perceptions of ethics in the jurisdictions of Ireland and the United Kingdom and exploring the link or equation of ethics with risk management.     

Enterprise Mashup Systems as Platform for Situational Applications

Currently, several Enterprise 2.0 platforms are beginning to emerge. This paper introduces Enterprise Mashup technology as a means to improve IT alignment of individual work processes and changing business needs. Enterprise Mashups enable users to create customized applications to easily find and transform business information and functionalities, as well as collaboratively share pre-built Mashup applications. Therefore, the concept of Enterprise Mashups integrates Web 2.0 technologies and principles with well-established paradigms such as Enterprise Information Integration, Business Intelligence, and Business Process Management. Involved organizational key drivers, technical challenges and inhibitors are discussed to assess the potential business value and explain the emerging expansion of Mashup platforms in companies.     

The effects of (incentivized) belief elicitation in public goods experiments

Belief elicitation is an important methodological issue for experimental economists. There are two generic questions: 1) Do incentives increase belief accuracy? 2) Are there interaction effects of beliefs and decisions? We investigate these questions in the case of finitely repeated public goods experiments. We find that belief accuracy is significantly higher when beliefs are incentivized. The relationship between contributions and beliefs is slightly steeper under incentives. However, we find that incentivized beliefs tend to lead to higher contribution levels than either non-incentivized beliefs or no beliefs at all. We discuss the implications of our results for the design of public good experiments.     

Sustainability,Social Discount Rates and the Selection of Project Procurement Method

The notion of sustainability has lead to the evaluation of public projects in terms of wider socio-economic and environmental benefits. The Cost Benefit Analysis and its respective, Social Discount Rate (SDR), is of crucial importance, especially when the advantages of private financing are to be demonstrated in comparison with the alternative traditional procurement of works and services. The SDR seen as a measure of a country’s value of future costs and benefits is related to the notion of promoted sustainability. The impact of smaller and declining SDRs on project selection is investigated, and a conceptual formulation concerning the selection of the project procurement method is presented. The modelled formulation will assist central and local governments in assessing projects and the potential benefit of private financing.     

Relevance of the EU Banking Sector to Economic Growth

Using panel estimates and a sample including all 28 European Union (EU) countries, this paper seeks to improve upon the existing literature with empirical evidence on the role that banking institutions can play in promoting economic growth. Banking sector performance is proxied by relevant operational, capital, liquidity and asset quality financial ratios. Economic growth is represented by the annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate. The estimations take into account the recent international financial crisis and consider three panels: one for the time period 1998–2012, a second one for the years before the crisis (1998–2006) and another for the subinterval 2007–2012. The results allow us to draw conclusions not only about the importance of the various financial ratios to economic growth but also regarding reactions to the recent crisis.     

国际开发合作中的能力发展理论——以世界银行能力发展理论为例

能力发展是指在国际开发合作中受援国政府增强规划能力和提升实现经济社会发展目标的能力的动态完善过程。本文回顾了国际金融组织关于能力发展理念的演进过程;阐述了国际金融组织关于能力发展的结果导向管理模型、波纹模型、结果映射模型和系统思考模型;分析了世行关于能力发展的制度规则创新、组织机构强化以及人力资源开发的三维分析框架。     

Happiness,income and poverty

There is considerable evidence from a variety of sources to suggest that well-being is a function of relative income. These findings have been used to explain the Easterlin Paradox, whereby a rise in income for all does not lead to a rise in average happiness in a country (even though the cross section relationship between income and happiness is positive). This relativity of utility has led to calls for policy to focus away from GDP. I here first discuss some of the evidence that well-being is indeed relative in income, but then consider two relatively little-analysed issues to suggest that there may continue to be a role for GDP per capita in happiness-based policy: the inequality of subjective well-being, and the specific case of those in income poverty.