Bedarfsgerechte Steuerung der Gesundheitsversorgung — Chancen und Hindernisse

On 2 July 2018, the German Council of Health Experts handed over its current report entitled, “Demand-oriented health care management” to the Federal Ministry of Health. The pronounced separation of outpatient and inpatient care, and distinction between private and public health insurance, is typical of the German system. Experts’ recommendations include improved coordination of outpatient and inpatient services, monistic hospital financing and family doctor-centred patient care. The main criticism of the report is that it lacks a regulatory concept with competitive management structures.     

Customer satisfaction with socially responsible investing initiatives: The influence of perceived financial and non-financial quality

During the last decade, socially responsible investment (SRI) initiatives have grown to become a mainstream financial service in many countries. However, to date, only a few studies focus on understanding the final investor of such initiatives. This article focuses on one particularly overlooked aspect of SRI behavior; that of customer post-purchase satisfaction. A theoretical model of satisfaction with SRI-profiled mutual funds is developed and tested. The results indicate that perceived financial performance of the SRI-profiled mutual fund is the most important predictor of customer satisfaction. However, perceived environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance also had a positive impact on satisfaction for the SRI mutual fund. On the basis of these results, it is argued that although ESG quality is important to customers, marketers of SRI initiatives should primarily focus on the conventional quality attributes such as financial performance, as a good ESG record alone is unlikely to generate customer satisfaction.     

Do ethical investors want purity or effectiveness? An exploratory study on the ethical preferences of mutual fund investors

This article relates the result of an exploratory survey aimed at better understanding the ethical preferences of individuals invested in so-called ethical or socially responsible investment (SRI) profiled mutual funds. In order to get an insight into the moral preferences of investors, a range of questions and dilemmas were formulated to determine respondents’ agreement with one of two more stringent philosophical perspectives: the moral purity and moral effectiveness perspectives. Our results indicate that investors support both perspectives but have difficulties in choosing between them in ethical dilemmas. For financial services providers, this confusion among investors represents a major challenge in setting up and managing an ethical or socially responsible investment service. In essence, providers are faced with the task of deciding which strategies and methods that should be used in the ethical investment service, even though many customers may not know which ones they prefer.     

Economies of scale in the Swedish sawmill industry

In this study, scale elasticity and optimal size of the Swedish sawmill industry is investigated. An input distance function is used to compute scale elasticity. The result of the study shows that the average scale elasticity is above 1, indicating existence of economies of scale in the industry. By comparing the size of the average input - output vectors with the inefficiency adjusted input vector and the output vector for scale efficient units, we could see that, in general, there are gains to be made by expansion. However, some units may gain from becoming smaller.