AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF SUPPLY CHAIN PERFORMANCE ALONG SEVERAL DIMENSIONS OF RISK

This research operationalizes several supply chain risk sources and investigates their relationships with supply chain performance. The responses of 760 executives from firms operating in Germany reveal that demand side and supply side risks do have a negative impact on performance whereas regulatory, legal and bureaucratic risks, infrastructure risks, as well as catastrophic risks do not. The analysis and results augment previous research regarding the impact of supply chain risks on the operational performance of firms and shareholder value and provide a detailed analysis of supply chain risk sources as contextual variables in strategic decision‐making.     

Towards an identity-based brand equity model

In the context of increasingly interchangeable product and service offerings, brands are crucial drivers for product purchasing and usage decisions. Thus, they constitute a substantial intangible asset for most companies. In order to maximize this asset, current research has developed various brand equity models. However, the majority of these base their approach on an outside-in perspective by focusing on buyer perceptions of the brand and their related buying behavior. An integrated approach including for example employees as an important internal source of brand equity, has so far received little attention. The following paper aims to close this gap by developing a new integrated brand equity model. This research explores the sources of brand equity from both internal and external perspectives at the behavioral and financial level in order to achieve a more accurate and sustainable brand equity measurement approach.     

The taste for variety: A hedonic analysis

This paper derives a hedonic price function for a household's consumption bundle. In a panel-data analysis for households' expenditures on 182 different soft drinks we find that consumers have a preference for variety in food consumption, ceteris paribus.     

The German economy in the Autumn of 1993

The German economy in the Autumn of 1993     

Telecommunications in West Germany : The transformation of the technical and political framework

The most recognizable characteristic of the West German telecommunication infrastructure is the far-reaching isolation of networks, transmission services and terminal equipment. The completion plans of the West German PTT intend to end this separation. Using the telephone network as a base, all services will be integrated so that they are available from the telephone socket, acting as a communication socket for all transmission purposes. Concerning the political and legal framework, the main characteristic of the West German telecommunication sector is its high degree of regulation. This pattern of regulation is likely to change in 1988/89 with a new telecommunication law. The draft of this law proposes the deregulation of all transmission services (except the voice transmission service) and all terminal equipment markets. Networks shall continue to be owned by the West German PTT.     

Evaluating the joint efficiency of German trade forecasts - a nonparametric multivariate approach

ABSTRACT

I analyse the joint efficiency of export and import forecasts by leading economic research institutes for the years 1970 to 2017 for Germany in a multivariate setting. To this end, I compute, in a first step, multivariate random forests in order to model links between forecast errors and a forecaster’s information set, consisting of several trade and other macroeconomic predictor variables. I use the Mahalanobis distance as performance criterion and, in a second step, permutation tests to check whether the Mahalanobis distance between the predicted forecast errors for the trade forecasts and actual forecast errors is significantly smaller than under the null hypothesis of forecast efficiency. I find evidence for joint forecast inefficiency for two forecasters, however, for one forecaster I cannot reject joint forecast efficiency. For the other forecasters, joint forecast efficiency depends on the examined forecast horizon. I find evidence that real macroeconomic variables as opposed to trade variables are inefficiently included in the analysed trade forecasts. Finally, I compile a joint efficiency ranking of the forecasters.     

When Product Development Performance Makes a Difference: A Statistical Analysis in the Electronics Industry

Throughout the pages of JPIM and other publications, researchers and practitioners devote considerable effort to identifying the dimensions of new-product development (NPD) performance that relate most closely to business success. Although we may hope to unveil a set of universal truths about the relationship between NPD performance and business success, the relevant NPD performance measures appear to depend on the industry in which a firm competes. In fact, Christian Terwiesch, Christoph Loch, and Martin Niederkofler suggest that the overall relevance of NPD performance to business success depends on the firm's competitive market environment. In a study of 86 business units operating in 12 different electronics industries worldwide, they develop a market contingency framework for understanding the impact of NPD performance on a firm's profitability. Their study uses data from the “Excellence in Electronics” project, a joint research effort by Stanford University, the University of Augsburg, and McKinsey & Co. They describe market context in terms of three dimensions: market share, market growth, and external stability—that is, the average product life cycle duration in the market. Looking at all 86 business units in the study, they find that industry membership accounts for 23% of the variance in profits, with 18 percent of the variance determined by industry profitability and 5% by the three dimensions of market context. For the firms in the study, development performance has the most significant effect in slow-growth markets and in markets with long product life cycles. In these stable industries, low development intensity, product line freshness, and technical product performance increase profitability. The results indicate that NPD performance plays a much more important role for explaining the profitability of dominant firms than that of the low-market-share firms in the study. NPD performance explains 30% of the profitability variance among the high-market-share business units in the study, but none of the variance for the low-market-share business units. Although the profitability of the smaller firms in the study is driven primarily by the industry environment, these firms can compete on the basis of superior technical performance.     

Was ist die Funktion von Tod und Sterben in medialer Unterhaltung?

Why do death and dying occur so frequently in fictional media entertainment, although our rather hedonistic contemporary society seems to marginalize the subject otherwise? Searching for answers to this question, the paper first reflects possible explanations from entertainment theory. Displaying death is very reliable in terms of facilitating affective responses by the audience and thus serves as a safe technique to generate entertainment experiences. Subsequently, the paper discusses the perspective of terror management theory from social psychology to approach the subject of death in media entertainment, followed by an even more abstract reflection on religiosity, coping with death and secularized societies. The conclusion is that media entertainment has begun to take over parts of the coping support that was traditionally offered by the religions, thus contributing to the audience’s search for meaning in life and dealing with one’s own mortality.     

Die Balance zwischen Eigenverantwortung und gemeinschaftlichem Handeln für ein starkes Europa

The newly elected French president Macron now faces the challenge of reforming the French economy by increasing its competitiveness in order to decrease unemployment and to open new perspectives for a more prosperous economic future. The success of this endeavour is also of the utmost importance for Germany. The best support that Germany can offer to support French reforms consists of promoting the European integration process based on the subsidiarity principle. This can only be achieved by maintaining a balance between national responsibility and joint action and by choosing the right sequence of reform steps.