III. Weltwirtschaft und wirtschaft einzlner länderund und gebiete

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

事半功倍：提高创新成功率

波士顿咨询公司曾帮助许多世界领先公司转型创新项目：加强研发和战略之间的关系、削减成本、加快投放市场的时间、以及最重要的是提高成功率。最近,我们的一家客户告诉我们他在一趟欧洲航班上与同行乘客的对话。我们的客户是一家全球汽车供应公司的CEO,乐于谈论公司创新项目的转型历程和其所带来的惊人成果。     

Cross-Industrial User Channel Preferences on the Path to Online Purchase: Homogeneous,Heterogeneous, or Mixed?

Though research literature addresses a broad range of advertising impact models, studies on the channel preferences of online purchasers have received little attention, regarding both multichannel settings and channel interplay in click sequences. To provide advertisers a method for better evaluating customer channel preference, this study investigates the path to purchase by building on four multichannel clickstream data sets from three industries, recorded with cookie-tracking technologies. Applying a Cox model and clustering techniques supports delineation of empirical generalizations and industry-specific findings on channel exposure, including their antecedents and distinct channel click sequences. Across data sets, online users show idiosyncratic channel preferences for a limited set of one or two channels rather than multiple online vehicles. Both channel homogeneous click sequences and combinations of two channels (including branded contacts) are effective as purchase predictors. Our study also presents industry-specific results regarding the influence of click sequences on purchase intent, thereby providing insights for advertising research, particularly as are suited to optimization of online advertising activities.     

Karl Marx — heute noch aktuell?

On the occasion of his 200th birthday, Karl Marx is very popular again. He seems to be quoted in newspapers more often than even Keynes and great liberal economists. The authors agree that he should be taken seriously as a classic author. There are some fundamental pillars of his thinking: He fought for individual freedom and was a pioneer of systemic thinking. Marx was a self-taught economist and a powerfully eloquent demagogue. But all attempts to modernise his economic theory ultimately fail because of their mistakes and contradictions. He analysed an economy whose labour market was characterised by unrestricted competition. His prediction of a final collapse of the capitalist system failed due to far-reaching institutional changes, especially in the labour market. Today Karl Marx must be seen rather as an extremely interesting figure in the intellectual history of the 19th century. His ideas are only of limited use for the analysis of the economic present. Bertram Schefold judges him less stringently, arguing he is topical not only as a historical figure, but also as a theoretical economist and originator of still valuable analytical ideas. Jürgen Kromphardt points out that apart from his dialectical approach, the distribution of income between classes and its consequences are a research area where Marx’s explanations and failures are actually still worthy of consideration.     

Employee Identities in Corporate Codes of Ethics: The Equal,Responsible, Subordinating,and Self‐Monitoring Employee

The article invites the reader to engage in a critical perspective. It emphasizes the role of language in formal corporate documents and the discursive practices of language use. It presents the results of a study that analyzes the corporate codes of ethics of the German Dax30‐companies. The study conceives codes of ethics as texts deploying discursive practices in order to position the various actors addressed in the documents. Four distinct identities have been elaborated: the equal, the responsible, the subordinating, and the self‐monitoring employee. This study demonstrates that codes of ethics propose various subject positions of the employee and through this positioning aim to regulate the identification processes. Copyright © 2011 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Domestic concentration,foreign trade and economic performance

In a competitive fringe model the impact of concentration on price-cost margins can be shown to be ambiguous. Therefore, looking at the relationship between rates of return and concentration ratios is not sufficient for perceiving collusive elements. In this paper a model is set up that permits discerning collusion more clearly. Additional evidence concerning collusion can be gained by analyzing the influence of exports and imports on price-cost margins. Applying this approach to West Germany yields the result that the collusiveness prevailing in domestic markets has not visibly decreased in spite of a substantial increase in foreign trade.     

Effort rewarding incentive mechanisms for public enterprise managers

Management incentive schemes leading to welfare optimal pricing and efficient production of public enterprises have so far been mainly concerned with the information advantages that public enterprise managers hold over their supervising government or central planning agency. Managers under these schemes are induced to improve their firm's performance in adjustment processes which in the limit lead to optimal firm decisions. Such managers are supposed to be income maximizers disregarding any personal effort which could influence their performance and utility. In this paper I show that two incentive schemes recently proposed by Tam (1981) and Finsinger and Vogelsang (1982) can also help to induce managers to provide an optimal level of effort. Here effort is assumed to reduce managers' utility and the firm's costs. The result depends crucially on myopic managerial utility maximization. Once managers maximize the discounted value of future utility levels they will deviate from the optimal behavior. Under Tam's scheme, this can hold independent of the optimal effort level. Under the Finsinger-Vogelsang performance index managers will always show suboptimal effort levels in a steady state equilibrium, because the index only rewards welfare improvements.Effort, however, has to be rewarded even with no improvement in behavior. An improved performance index, which provides cumulative rewards is shown to be strategy proof and lead to a welfare optimum. This reward structure basically treats managers as if they were private entrepreneurs. It looks extremely generous in that it gives managers the fruits of all costs reductions due to increases in effort. Suggestions are made to mitigate this income distributional impact.     

Exploring managerial intentionality

To enable a better understanding of individual and, as a logical extension, organizational behavior, we set forth a theoretical framework of managerial intentionality. At its core are the concepts of desire and belief, which together form intentions. We argue that it is these intentions that may substantially affect strategic choices and, by that, organizational change. Exploring managerial intentionality, we acknowledge a central building block of cognitive science, which contrary to representations and computations has, by and large, been neglected in the management and organization literatures. We use the framework to explore the intrapersonal and interpersonal role of managerial intentionality as well as its effectiveness in an organizational context. We also clarify the differences to related concepts and discuss implications for future research. In doing so, we contribute to the overall objective of increasing our understanding of managerial action and organizational behavior.     

An economic analysis of consumer class actions in regulated industries

Regulation and consumer class actions can complement, duplicate, or oppose each other, depending, among others, on the leanings of regulatory objective functions towards the industry or consumers. In particular, pro-consumer regulators would like to see consumers benefit from class actions while pro-industry regulators would like to prevent regulated firms from being harmed by them. However, because pro-consumer regulators are already doing their best for consumers and pro-industry regulators their best for firms, they are both usually constrained in their policies. The result is that class actions tend to be less efficient under pro-consumer regulators and more efficient under pro-industry regulators.