Ground handling services at European hub airports: Development of a performance measurement system for benchmarking

The liberalization of ground handling in Europe forces airports to assess their performance relative to their competitors in order to remain competitive and sustain long-term competitive advantage. Together with main EU hub airports, action research was conducted for one year to develop a holistic performance measurement system (PMS) for ramp services. The resulting PMS entails a process-based perspective and reflects the supply chain of airport logistics. As the findings of an ex-post validation suggest, the system represents a suitable basis for competitive benchmarking activities.     

Bestimmungsfaktoren der Preisfairness von Lebensmitteldiscountern

Der folgende Beitrag untersucht, welche Faktoren die wahrgenommene Preisfairness von Lebensmitteldiscountern beeinflussen. Auf Basis theoretischer überlegungen und Befunden einer qualitativen Studie werden verschiedene Bestimmungsfaktoren der Preisfairness im Lebensmittelhandel identifiziert. Am Beispiel von zwei Warengruppen aus dem Frischebereich wird gezeigt, dass alle Bestimmungsfaktoren zumindest in bestimmten Segmenten die wahrgenommene Preisfairness von Discountern beeinflussen, jedoch in unterschiedlicher St?rke.     

EU agriculture: Reduced protection from exchange rate instability

In the past, the protection of agriculture in the EU from exchange rate instability was accomplished at the cost of confusing regulations, welfare losses and the discrimination of other sectors. Will the 1993 reform of the Agri-Monetary System, combined with wide 15% European Monetary System margins and the recent GATT agreement, lead to more efficiency in European agriculture?     

Export promotion in the context of technical cooperation

A large number of developing countries have introduced trade policy reforms in recent years. These have been supported by export promotion projects in the context of bilateral and multilateral development cooperation. The results of the advisory approach so far adopted have been disappointing on the whole, so a reorientation is now taking place in the design of export promotion. This article describes an alternative advisory approach by taking the Indo-German Export Promotion Project (IGEP) as an illustration.     

The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists

Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.     

Heterogeneous returns to personality: the role of occupational choice

We analyze the role of personality in occupational choice and wages using data from Germany for the years 1992 to 2009. Characterizing personality by use of seven complementary measures (Big Five personality traits, locus of control, and a measure of reciprocity), the empirical findings show that personal characteristics are important determinants of occupational choice. Associated with that, identical personality traits are differently rewarded across occupations. Hence, breaking down the analysis on the level of occupational groups provides more detailed results of returns to personality. By evaluating different personality profiles, we additionally estimate the influence of personality as a whole. The estimates establish occupation-specific patterns of significant returns to particular personality profiles. These findings underline the importance to consider the occupational distribution when analyzing returns to personality due to its heterogeneous valuation.     

Vor der Europawahl: Wie lässt sich die demokratische Legitimität verbessern?

The EU suffers from a democratic deficit that arises not first and foremost from a lack of institutional competencies, but rather from the double weakness of politics vis-à-vis economics and law at the European level. This “functional democratic deficit” renders the existing mechanisms of democratic control increasingly ineffective. Especially for its citizens, a politically integrated Europen Union might be difficult to grasp, and it may only be reached gradually through a continuous process of dynamic development; however, “United in Diversity” seems to be the better alternative, and not only for historical reasons. The direct elections for the European Parliament, although not denying deficits of democratic legitimacy and participation at the Union level, should not be underestimated in their legitimising influence for the Union as an associated structure of members without obvious hierarchies.     

Conceptualizing and validating organizational networking as a second-order formative construct

Based on an existing conceptualization in the literature, this study operationalizes the construct of organizational networking, through a rigorous two-stage scale construction and validation process. Organizational networking refers to firm behaviors, i.e. the activities/routines/practices, which enable an organization to make sense of and capitalize on their networks of direct and indirect business relationships. We conceptualize the measurement model as a second-order formative construct with four first-order reflective constructs based on a four-dimensional view of organizational networking comprising information acquisition, opportunity enabling, strong-tie resource mobilization and weak-tie resource mobilization. The scale validation was undertaken at the first- and second-order levels. The result confirms the four distinct first-order measurement models. At the second-order level, a MIMIC (multiple indicators and multiple causes) model was employed to assess the validity of the formative measurement model. The results suggest that all four components significantly contribute to the overarching construct of organizational networking, with strong-tie resource mobilization being the most important contributor. Thus, our operationalization confirms the uniqueness of the different dimensions of organizational networking that should be configured as a strategy of sensing and seizing opportunities in the network. The organizational networking scale will provide future research with a basis to explore different strategic patterns of networking behaviors in varying contexts, and its role in relation to other organizational behaviors and outcome variables, such as firm performance.