Shaping the Next Incarnation of Business Intelligence

The body of knowledge generated by Business Intelligence (BI) research is constantly extended by a stream of heterogeneous technological and organizational innovations. This paper shows how these can be bundled to a new vision for BI that is aligned with new requirements coming from socio-technical macro trends. The building blocks of the vision come from five research strings that have been extracted from an extensive literature review: BI and Business Process Management, BI across enterprise borders, new approaches of dealing with unstructured data, agile and user-driven BI, and new concepts for BI governance. The macro trend of the diffusion of cyber-physical systems is used to illustrate the argumentation. The realization of this vision comes with an array of open research questions and requires the coordination of research initiatives from a variety of disciplines. Due to the embedded nature of the addressed topics within general research areas of the Information Systems (IS) discipline and the linking pins that come with the underlying Dynamic Capabilities Approach such research provides a contribution to IS.     

The unbalanced growth hypothesis and the role of the state: The case of China's state-owned enterprises

Albert Hirschman's unbalanced growth hypothesis suggests that a developing economy can promote economic growth by initially investing in industries with high backward and forward linkages. In the case of Chinese economic policy today, one application would be the continued presence of the state in high-linkage sectors and the strategic withdrawal of the state from low-linkage sectors. The evidence shows that while the degree of linkage plays an important role in generating economic growth in China, province-specific withdrawal strategies for the state sector have no effect on economic growth.     

Dollarization in Latin America: seigniorage costs and policy implications

This paper examines the seigniorage costs of official dollarization in 15 Latin American countries. We show that the total costs can be decomposed into two components: seigniorage transferred to the U.S. and seigniorage lost due to greater financial stability in the dollarized country. Results indicate that seigniorage costs and their components are significant, yet differ considerably across countries. A cluster analysis is performed to sort countries into homogenous sub-groups. At a stage with five sub-groups we find groups with increasing seigniorage burdens. At a stage with two sub-groups we can identify candidates for possible seigniorage revenue-sharing agreements with the U.S.     

Attending to the Reasons for Attribute Non-attendance in Choice Experiments

This paper focuses on behavioural reasons underlying stated attribute non-attendance in choice experiments. In order to identify and incorporate procedures for dealing with heterogeneous attribute processing strategies, we ask respondents follow-up questions regarding their reasons for ignoring attributes. Based on these statements, we conclude that the standard way of assigning a zero impact of ignored attributes on the likelihood is inappropriate. We find that some respondents act in accordance with the passive bounded rationality assumption since they ignore an attribute simply because it does not affect their utility. Excluding these genuine zero preferences, as the standard approach essentially does, might bias results. Other respondents claim to have ignored attributes to simplify choices. However, we find that these respondents have actually not completely ignored attributes. We argue along the rationally adaptive behavioural model that valid preference information may indeed be elicited in these cases, and we illustrate how recoding of non-attendance statements conditional on stated reasons may be a more appropriate solution than the current standard way of taking stated non-attendance into account.     

Project Aid or Budget Aid? The Interests of Governments and Financial Institutions

The paper compares different aid policy instruments and their effect on the target group. Starting from a situation where interest groups compete for the resources of the government, international financial institutions aim to change the policy outcome. They can either directly support one group or condition their financial help to the government on its policy. Apart from a normative analysis which policy is more adequate to help one group, the paper asks what happens if the aid agency is driven by bureaucratic self‐interest.     

Technology Sourcing and Strategic Foreign Direct Investment

Empirical evidence suggests that technological spillovers are limited by distance. The present paper investigates the implications of this observation for the investment decisions of a technologically leading and lagging firm, located in different countries. Technological spillovers may induce “technology sourcing” foreign direct investment by the less advanced firm, as it seeks to upgrade its technology. Our main result, however, is that there may be strong incentives for the leading firm to undertake strategic investment abroad in order to prevent technology sourcing by the lagging firm. We analyze how trade costs, the technology gap between firms, technological spillovers, and the ability of a firm to transfer technology between plants affect the two firms’ entry decisions.     

The Polish exchange rate system: A unit root and cointegration analysis

In October 1991 Poland has established a crawling peg regime in which the zloty is tied to a currency basket and devalued with a monthly rate of crawl. If the monetary authorities are successful in defending the crawling peg the basket rate measured in Polish zloty is supposed to be stationary. Furthermore, a stable long-run relationship between the zloty-U.S. dollar rate and the basket's value expressed in U.S. dollar is expected to exist. The results of the unit root and cointegration analysis indicate that the monetary authorities have been able to defend the crawling peg for the sample periods under study, although it seems that not all requirements of the exchange rate regime have been met. The foreign exchange markets, however, have not supported the relationships derived from the crawling peg system after the introduction of the free floating system in April 2000.The final version of this paper has been prepared while I was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute. I would like to thank the EUI for the award of the Fellowship and its hospitality. Moreover, I am grateful to Helmut Lütkepohl, Anja Schulz, Ralf Brüggemann, and two anonymous referees for many helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 373, for financial support.