Neue Banken- und Fiskalarchitektur für Europa: Krisen vermeiden,statt sie nur zu bewältigen

In December 2013 agreement on the second pillar of the banking union was reached. The SRM sets up restructuring guidelines for banks, including a bank-paid resolution fund, fully operational in 2025. In the article we discuss how the current design of the banking union falls short of the goal of breaking the link between governments and their banks. We explain how an insolvency code for sovereigns is central to achieving this goal and evaluate alternative mechanisms to synchronise the business cycles of member states: 1) the coordination of national stabilisation policies; 2) the introduction of a cyclical shock insurance; and 3) the enlargement of the euro area budget, of which we consider the first alternative the most promising.     

How Ethical Leadership Shapes Employees’ Job Performance: The Mediating Roles of Goal Congruence and Psychological Capital

Drawing from research on ethical leadership, psychological capital, and social learning theory, this study investigated the mediating effects of goal congruence and psychological capital in the link between supervisors’ ethical leadership style and followers’ in-role job performance. Data captured from 171 employees and 24 supervisors showed that ethical leadership has a positive effect on followers’ in-role job performance, yet this effect is explained through the role of psychological capital and follower–leader goal congruence, providing evidence of mediation. These findings have significant implications for research and practice.     

(Un)expected Bidder Behavior in Spectrum Auctions: About Inconsistent Bidding and Its Impact on Efficiency in the Combinatorial Clock Auction

The combinatorial clock auction is a two-stage auction format, which has been used to sell spectrum licenses worldwide in the recent years. It draws on a number of elegant ideas inspired by economic theory. A revealed preference activity rule should provide incentives to bid straightforward, i.e., consistent with the bidders’ valuations on a payoff-maximizing package, in each round of the clock phase. A second-price rule should set incentives to bid truthfully in both phases. If bidders respond to these incentives and bid straightforward in the clock phase and truthful in the second sealed-bid stage, then the auction is fully efficient. Unfortunately, bidders might neither bid straightforward in the clock phase nor truthful on all packages in the second sealed-bid stage due to strategic reasons or practical limitations. We introduce metrics based on Afriat’s Efficiency Index to analyze straightforward bidding and report on empirical data from the lab and from the field in the British 4G auction in 2013 and the Canadian 700 MHz auction in 2014, where the bids were made public. The data provides evidence that bidders deviate significantly from straightforward bidding in the clock phase, which can restrict the bids they can submit in the supplementary phase. We show that such restrictions can have a significant negative impact on efficiency and revenue.     

Multiple Attribute Group Decision Making Method Based on Utility Theory Under Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Environment

In this paper, a kind of multiple attribute group decision making problem is studied, where there is no original information about the weights of importance of the attributes and the decision makers (DMs), and the attribute values are given in the form of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IVIFNs). To solve this problem, a new method is proposed based on utility theory. In the proposed method, the weights of importance of the DMs and the attributes are all determined by using the intuitionistic indexes of related IVIFNs. And then, the alternatives are compared by using their composite interval indexes which are generated based on utility theory. Finally, two numerical examples are proposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Altering the past to influence the future: the effect of mental unpacking on past evaluations and future preferences

Consumers use affective evaluations of past hedonic experiences in their future decision-making. However, past evaluations such as how enjoyable the experience was may be hard to retrieve, and consumers tend to recall what they did (i.e. the constituent activities of the prior experience) in order to reconstruct them. It is proposed here that recalling these constituent activities in a packed versus unpacked fashion will distort both the reconstruction process and its outcome. Results from two experiments show that mental unpacking interacted with experience enjoyment to alter past evaluations in two ways: if the enjoyment of the experience was high, unpacked recalls increased remembered enjoyment, but unpacking decreased remembered enjoyment if the experience enjoyment was low. Finally, mediation analysis indicated that the unpacking by enjoyment interaction distorted future preferences through the mediating role of remembered enjoyment.     

Developing new smart services using integrated morphological analysis: integration of the market-pull and technology-push approach

With the rise of smart services, new services are no longer generated via the traditional linear models of innovation. Rather, smart-service innovations require new frameworks to integrate the market-pull and technology-push models, which focus on both user-centric considerations and technological developments. However, current streams of research continue to merely suggest a conceptual framework. Therefore, it appears to be difficult to apply this framework into practice, due to a lack of systematic methodologies. In response, this study employs morphological analysis, a powerful tool for the systematic generation of ideas. Since the morphological analysis employs several dimensions for explaining new services and combines them to generate new ideas, it is easy to integrate the different approaches to innovations, such as market pull and technology push. A case study of smartphone application services is also conducted.     

Dealing with Donald Trump

The logic for multilateral cooperation in trade and beyond becomes stronger, not weaker. A new governance forum will emerge, where negotiating will take place in country clubs instead of among members at the WTO.However, by breaking protocol, the US president has gained substantial bargaining power, because he puts himself in a situation in which he actually has to implement his threats if the negotiation counterparts do not confirm in order to save face on the domestic and global stages.     

Common Thread: The Impact of Mission on Ethical Business Culture. A Case Study

What is the impact of mission on ethical business culture? This question was analyzed through a qualitative case study of a large nonprofit organization in the human services industry with a solid history of ethical business practices and consistent use of a values-based decision-making model. This research explored ethical decision making, ethical business culture, and congruence between enacted and espoused institutional values. Institutional values were identified, and the following pair of research questions was examined: To what extent were incongruent values found between espoused and enacted values? To what extent did incongruent values impact the ethical business culture? Incongruent enacted values were present in the culture, but negative impact was diminished by a larger number of congruent enacted values. Additional findings revealed that an intense commitment to the mission by all employees was the common thread that wound throughout the organization’s ethical business culture and essentially abrogated the undesirable effects of incongruent and negative values.     

The Influence of Native Versus Foreign Language on Chinese Subjects’ Aggressive Financial Reporting Judgments

Researchers have suggested that ethical judgments about “right” and “wrong” are the result of deep and thoughtful principles and should therefore be consistent and not influenced by factors, such as language (Costa et al. in PLoS ONE 9(4):e94842, 2014b, p. 1). As long as an ethical scenario is understood, individuals’ resolution should not depend on whether the ethical scenario is presented in their native language or in a foreign language. Given the forces of globalization and international convergence, an increasing number of accountants and accounting students are becoming proficient in more than one language, and they are required to interpret and apply complex ethical pronouncements issued by various global standard setters both in their native language and in English. There have been calls in the literature to examine whether subjects make systematically different ethical judgments in a foreign language than in their native language. We contribute to the literature by drawing on culture, linguistics, and psychology research to provide empirical evidence that Chinese subjects are more aggressive in interpreting the concept of control when providing their consolidation reporting recommendations in English than in Simplified Chinese. We applied a 2 × 2 within-subject and between-subject randomized experimental design using a sample of Chinese final year undergraduate accounting students at a leading Chinese university, where accounting courses are taught in both Simplified Chinese and English. Students in our study are proxy for entry-level accounting practitioners. Our findings have implications for the globalized business world and cross-cultural research by challenging the commonly held assumption that an individual’s ethical judgment is consistent in different languages. We suggest that systematically different ethical judgments in native and foreign languages needs to be recognized.