Ökonomie und Glück – zurück zu den Wurzeln?

Die wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Forschung wendet sich nach langen Jahren der Besch?ftigung mit dem Wachstum als Ziel des Wirtschaftens wieder dem Thema Nutzen oder Glück zu. Mit welchen Methoden arbeitet die Lebenszufriedenheitsforschung? Welche Implikationen sind aus ihren Ergebnissen für die ?konomische Theorie und ihre Annahmen zu ziehen? Welche Konsequenzen haben sie für die Wirtschaftspolitik? Steffen R?tzel, 27, Dipl.-Volkswirt, ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Fakult?t für Wirtschaftswissenschaft der Otto-von-Guericke-Universit?t Magdeburg.     

Trust,Commitment, and Older Women: Exploring Brand Attachment Differences in the Elderly Segment

Understanding older adults’ product consumption behavior is of high importance to consumer and marketing research. Prior studies have mainly focused on older adults’ cognitive decline and compared their behavior to that of younger consumers. A neglected area of research has been older consumers’ brand attachment that is associated with potential differences between consumers in their fifties and in their seventies. In this article, the authors provide insights into the under‐researched field of elderly women's brand attachment. Drawing on socioemotional selectivity theory, a shift toward emotional aspects in brand relationships is proposed. A model involving trust and commitment processes is developed and empirically tested in a survey among 341 older women. Moderator analyses reveal significant differences between the “younger elderly” and the “older elderly” in relationships among self‐concept connection, partner quality, trust, and commitment. For the younger elderly, how a brand is (based on trust judgments) seems to be more important. For the older elderly, what a brand does in its role as relationship partner becomes more relevant.     

Do Information Rents in Loan Spreads Persist over the Business Cycles?

In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for information rents in loan spreads by analyzing a sample of UK syndicated loan contracts for the period from 1996 to 2005. We use various measures for borrower opaqueness and control for bank, borrower and loan characteristics and we find that undercapitalized banks charge approximately 34 bps higher loan spreads for loans to opaque borrowers. We further analyze whether this effect persists throughout the business cycle and find that this effect prevails only during recessions. However, we do not find evidence that banks exploit their information monopolies during expansion phases.     

The effect of personal portfolio reporting on private investors

Information search is costly for private households, especially in relation to their wealth. This paper investigates how retail customers react to free portfolio reporting—and thus reduced search costs—in a unique experimental setting. A large German direct bank sends portfolio reports to 10,000 customers while maintaining a control group of equal size and structure that receives no reports. Analyzing demographics as well as detailed portfolio and trade data, we find that gender, wealth, trade frequency, risk tolerance, and diversification drive the interest in portfolio information. Reading a portfolio report also triggers trading actions; thus, investors seem to appreciate the reduced information costs and act on the information. In addition to contributing to the financial literature on households’ information acquisition, this study derives valuable implications for financial institutions regarding communications and services for their customers.     

The impact of different fibre access network technologies on cost,competition and welfare

Using a novel approach to the evaluation of new network technologies that combines an engineering cost model with a differentiated multi-player oligopoly model with wholesale access regulation this article evaluates the choice among different Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) architectures. The cost modelling relies upon an engineering bottom-up approach that feeds into a competition model. For addressing competition the pyramid model was chosen, which is an extension of the Hotelling model to multiple firms/services. The paper solves for price setting Nash equilibria between an incumbent, wholesale-access-based entrants and cable as an additional fully integrated network competitor. Welfare tradeoffs are highlighted with respect to cost differences and QoS differences between the various FTTH architectures and between the modes of regulation. According to the analysis architectures that can be unbundled (and that allow for greater speeds) outperform, from a social welfare perspective, architectures that (realistically) allow only for bitstream access.     

Simultaneous Parameter Estimation in Exploratory Factor Analysis: An Expository Review

The classical exploratory factor analysis (EFA) finds estimates for the factor loadings matrix and the matrix of unique factor variances which give the best fit to the sample correlation matrix with respect to some goodness-of-fit criterion. Common factor scores can be obtained as a function of these estimates and the data. Alternatively to the classical EFA, the EFA model can be fitted directly to the data which yields factor loadings and common factor scores simultaneously. Recently, new algorithms were introduced for the simultaneous least squares estimation of all EFA model unknowns. The new methods are based on the numerical procedure for singular value decomposition of matrices and work equally well when the number of variables exceeds the number of observations. This paper provides an account that is intended as an expository review of methods for simultaneous parameter estimation in EFA. The methods are illustrated on Harman's five socio-economic variables data and a high-dimensional data set from genome research.     

Sponsorship of the FIFA world cup,shareholder wealth,and the impact of corruption

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association's World Cup (FIFA WC) is one of the most popular sporting events in the world in general and Europe in particular, and famous for the extraordinary amount of sponsorship fees it attracts. To create value for the stockholders of FIFA’s respective commercial affiliates, these sponsorship expenses should be exceeded by (discounted) future cash flows in order to make this investment profitable. This study analyses return effects for stockholders of FIFA WC Commercial Affiliates, while distinguishing between several image scenarios pertaining to FIFA and applying several models for calculating abnormal returns. We find weak evidence for significant positive abnormal returns of announced FIFA sponsorships in case of a stable FIFA image across different return models. In contrast, we find negative abnormal returns when the latest corruption scandals around FIFA became public. We also detect negative price effects when Gianni Infantino was announced as new FIFA president. The image-related price effects become less pronounced for FIFA Partners and initially closed sponsorship contracts. Finally, we do not find any image-related spillover effects for main competitors of firms sponsoring FIFA.     

Should uniform pricing constraints be imposed on entrants?

This paper analyzes uniform pricing, coverage constraints and price caps in markets newly opened to competition, e.g. broadband services. We show that the requirement of uniform pricing has strong repercussions on coverage decisions. Imposed on incumbents only it may distort their coverage decision downward to avoid duopoly entry. If also imposed on entrants it increases the likelihood that entry leads to independent monopolies rather than competition. A sufficiently large coverage constraint on incumbents reestablishes incentives for duopoly entry, but may lead to higher prices.