Hilfen für Opfer von Gewalt

Das steht Ihnen zu - Opfer von Gewalttaten leiden oft für den Rest ihres Lebens unter schwersten psychischen und physischen Einschr?nkungen. Bei der Behandlung dieser Leiden setzen die Kassen leider oft enge Grenzen. Vielfach ist nicht bekannt, dass den Betroffenen durch das Opferentsch?digungsgesetz umfangreiche finanzielle Unterstützungen zustehen.     

Product bundling strategies in Swedish markets: links to business orientation and perceived effects on consumer influence

Product bundling is an increasingly important marketing strategy within many industries, and consumer influence on companies' ranges of product bundles is, thus, becoming an important issue. The aim of this study was to investigate product bundling strategies consumers are exposed to by some selected companies in the Swedish automobile, travel and banking industries. Bundling strategies were considered in relation to business orientation as well as the consumer's potential to influence the product bundles offered by these companies. Fourteen qualitative telephone interviews were conducted with senior representatives from the three sectors. Interview respondents were selected in cooperation with their respective companies. Results underwent interpretative analysis, and the findings indicated that business orientation is linked to product bundling techniques and to the type of customer influence on product bundling. Consumers were exposed to mixed and complementary bundling strategies, and customers of companies that apply a market orientation were found to have greater opportunities to influence product bundles directly, whereas companies that apply a production‐oriented approach were less able to respond to their customers' wishes. Consumer influence on the product bundles of production‐oriented companies was found to be of a more indirect nature.     

Regional Mc parity: do common pricing points reduce deviations from the law of one price?

This paper analyses price differences of McDonald’s products in four different countries. I show that pricing at pricing points in different currencies may contribute to explaining deviations from the law of one price. Observing strictly equal prices is more probable if prices are set at psychological and fractional pricing points in a common currency. The latter is also found to reduce the size of price deviations. Additionally, price differences increase as transaction costs increase. Based on this data set there is no evidence that the euro has reduced price deviations.     

Multinational corporations,inter-organizational networks and subsidiary charter removals

This paper provides insights into the dynamics of a charter removal at a Hungarian subsidiary of the Siemens telecommunication switching division. By using inter-organizational network theory, we investigate how host-country factor endowments, the resource position of a subsidiary and the density of network exchange relationships within the organizational network influence the removal of a multinational corporate subsidiary's charter. The dispersion of resources in a multinational corporation drives intra-firm competition, which will typically lead to the removal of a subsidiary's charter if the subsidiary lacks specialized resources – typically an outcome of host country comparative disadvantages – and simultaneously holds a position on the periphery of the organizational network.     

Managing increasing environmental risks through agrobiodiversity and agrienvironmental policies

Agrobiodiversity can provide natural insurance to risk‐averse farmers by reducing the variance of crop yield, and to society at large by reducing the uncertainty in the provision of public‐good ecosystem services, for example, CO₂ storage. We analyze the choice of agrobiodiversity by risk‐averse farmers who have access to financial insurance, and study the implications for agrienvironmental policy design when on‐farm agrobiodiversity generates a positive risk externality. While increasing environmental risk leads private farmers to increase their level of on‐farm agrobiodiversity, the level of agrobiodiversity in the laissez‐faire equilibrium remains inefficiently low. We show how either one of the two agrienvironmental policy instruments can cure this risk‐related market failure: an ex ante Pigouvian subsidy on on‐farm agrobiodiversity and an ex post payment‐by‐result for the actual provision of public environmental benefits. In the absence of regulation, welfare may increase rather than decrease with increasing environmental risk, if the agroecosystem is characterized by a high natural insurance function, low costs, and large external benefits of agrobiodiversity.     

Sequential vs. simultaneous contributions to public goods: Experimental evidence

We report an experiment comparing sequential and simultaneous contributions to a public good in a quasi-linear two-person setting. In one parameterization we find that overall provision is lower under sequential than simultaneous contributions, as predicted, but the distribution of contributions is not as extreme as predicted and first movers do not attain their predicted first-mover advantage. In another parameterization we again find that the distribution of contributions is not as predicted when the first mover is predicted to free ride, but we find strong support for equilibrium predictions when the second mover is predicted to free ride. These results can be explained by second movers' willingness to punish first movers who free ride, and unwillingness to reward first movers who contribute.     

Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz—Statistician,Economist and a European Intellectual

Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (1868–1931) was a European statistician. His scientific work covered theoretical economics, stochastics, mathematical statistics and radiology; today, we would call him a cross‐disciplinary scientist. With his clear views on mathematical principles with their applications in these fields, he stood in conflict with the mainstream economic schools in Germany at the dawn of the 20th century. He had many prominent students (Gumbel, Leontief and Freudenberg among them), and he carved out the path of modern statistical thinking. He was a true European intellectual with a career path from St. Petersburg via Göttingen to Straßburg and finally the Berliner Universität, now Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin. He is known for the precise calibration of insurance claims applying the—at that time hardly known—Poisson distribution to Prussian horse kick and child suicide data. He proposed a simple solution to the Marxian transformation problem and wrote numerous articles and books on the mathematical treatment of statistical (including radiological physical) data. In this article, we sketch his life and work and point out the prominent role that he has in today's statistical thinking.