Die informative Warenkennzeichnung. Eine Übersicht über den Stand der Praxis und der Literatur

Zusammenfassung Der Artikel gibt zunächst einen Überblick über vier vorgefundene Warenkennzeichnungssysteme: die bundesdeutschen RAL-Testate, die österreichische Produktdeklaration sowie die schwedischen VDN-Fakta und Möbel-Fakta. Die Reaktion der Verbraucher auf die vorgefundenen Warenkennzeichnungssysteme war bisher jedoch sehr schwach. Der zweite Teil des Artikels knüpft an diese negativen Erfahrungen an und beschäftigt sich mit der grundsätzlichen Problematik. Der Autor beschreibt die Bedingungen, die bei der Konzeption informativer Warenkennzeichnungen erfüllt sein müssen, vor allem in bezug auf die Auswahl und die Darstellung der Informationen, und geht abschließend auf zu erwartende Reaktionen der Anbieter ein.

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Informative product labeling

The aim of informative product labeling is to make manifest to the consumers the supply of product alternatives that are available in the market place and enable them to make accurate buying decisions. Since the information that is given on informative labels is available at the point of purchase, informative labeling can be regarded as an ideal instrument for consumer information policy. The article reviews four informative labeling systems: the German RAL-Testate, the Austrian Produktdeklaration and the Swedish VDN-Fakta and Möbel-Fakta. However, the observed consumer reaction to these labeling systems is very weak.The article then deals with the conditions that must be satisfied if informative labeling is to lead to a positive consumer reaction, i. e. as (1) the selection of that information which meets the consumers' needs and takes the buyers' information-processing capacity into consideration, and (2) the presentation of the information in a way that is intelligible to the consumers and easy to handle.Finally indirect effects on producer and retailer behavior are discussed.

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Adrian Weser promoviert über Probleme der vergleichenden Warenkennzeichnung und wohnt in D-2000 Hamburg 13, Rutschbahn 39.     

大规模用户化尚待时日

"大规模用户化"(Mass customization)一词听起来就让人感到矛盾:一方面是大规模的生产,而另一方面每一产品又要适应不同用户的不同口味.这种冲突正在告诉人们这样一个事实,那就是大规模用户化的实现和管理是十分困难的,尽管近年来关于大规模用户化的大肆鼓吹不绝于耳,但是它要被生产商和零售商广泛采用还需要很长的一段时间,比预计所需要的时间要长得多.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Social Enterprise

In this article, we contend that due to their size and emphasis upon addressing external social concerns, the corporate relationship between social enterprises, social awareness and action is more complex than whether or not these organisations engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR). This includes organisations that place less emphasis on CSR as well as other organisations that may be very proficient in CSR initiatives, but are less successful in recording practices. In this context, we identify a number of internal CSR markers that may be applied to measuring the extent to which internal CSR practices are being observed. These considerations may be contrasted with the evidence that community based CSR activities is often well developed in private sector small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) (Observatory of European SMEs, 2002), a situation which may be replicated in social enterprises especially those that have grown from micro-enterprises embedded in local communities. We place particular emphasis upon the implications for employee management. Underpinning our position is the Aristotelian-informed capabilities approach, a theory of human development and quality of life, developed by Sen (1992; 1999) and Nussbaum (1999) which has been developed further, in an organisational context, (e.g., Cornelius, 2002); Cornelius and Gagnon, 2004; Gagnon and Cornelius, 1999; Vogt, 2005. We contend that the capabilities approach offers additional insights into CSR in social enterprises in general and internal CSR activity in particular. Our article concludes with proposals for future research initiatives and reflections upon social enterprise development from a capabilities perspective.     

Estimated burden of cardiovascular disease and value-based price range for evolocumab in a high-risk,secondary-prevention population in the US payer context

Aim: To estimate real-world cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden and value-based price range of evolocumab for a US-context, high-risk, secondary-prevention population.

Materials and methods: Burden of CVD was assessed using the UK-based Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) in order to capture complete CV burden including CV mortality. Patients on standard of care (SOC; high-intensity statins) in CPRD were selected based on eligibility criteria of FOURIER, a phase 3 CV outcomes trial of evolocumab, and categorized into four cohorts: high-risk prevalent atherosclerotic CVD (ASCVD) cohort (n?=?1448), acute coronary syndrome (ACS) (n?=?602), ischemic stroke (IS) (n?=?151), and heart failure (HF) (n?=?291) incident cohorts. The value-based price range for evolocumab was assessed using a previously published economic model. The model incorporated CPRD CV event rates and considered CV event reduction rate ratios per 1?mmol/L reduction in low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) from a meta-analysis of statin trials by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists Collaboration (CTTC), i.e. CTTC relationship.

Results: Multiple-event rates of composite CV events (ACS, IS, or coronary revascularization) per 100 patient-years were 12.3 for the high-risk prevalent ASCVD cohort, and 25.7, 13.3, and 23.3, respectively, for incident ACS, IS, and HF cohorts. Approximately one-half (42%) of the high-risk ASCVD patients with a new CV event during follow-up had a subsequent CV event. Combining these real-world event rates and the CTTC relationship in the economic model, the value-based price range (credible interval) under a willingness-to-pay threshold of $150,000/quality-adjusted life-year gained for evolocumab was $11,990 ($9,341–$14,833) to $16,856 ($12,903–$20,678) in ASCVD patients with baseline LDL-C levels ≥70?mg/dL and ≥100?mg/dL, respectively.

Conclusion: Real-world CVD burden is substantial. Using the observed CVD burden in CPRD and the CTTC relationship, the cost-effectiveness analysis showed that, accounting for uncertainties, the expected value-based price for evolocumab is higher than its current annual cost, as long as the payer discount off list price is greater than 20%.     

How has the Relevance of Institutional Brokerage Changed?

Institutional brokerage rates have been in decline. We investigate whether this reduction has coincided with a fall in benefits provided by brokers to institutional asset managers. We use trade packages from both active and passive equity funds from 1995 to 2001 and active equity funds from 2002 to 2010. We find that later period active funds recoup a combined 1.75 basis point benefit (from price impact cost recovery and short‐term alpha) per basis point of brokerage cost. Later period active investors saw improved trade price impact and shorter‐term alpha net benefits, relative to earlier period active investors. These results are robust after controlling for trade characteristics and cross‐sectional variation over time. Our findings suggest that brokers innovate to provide valuable services in the subsequent, lower brokerage environment.     

Policy capacity and evidence-based policy in the public service

Governments in many jurisdictions have called for an increase in ‘evidence-based’ policy-making. However, the international evidence-based policy movement has so far shown little progress in transforming the way that public policy is formulated and implemented. Much research on evidence-based policy has focused on political interference and contextual frames of reference as barriers to the uptake of research evidence. With the support of data from a survey of over 2,000 Australian public servants, we argue that individual and organizational deficits can leave the public service structurally unprepared for an engagement with diverse forms of evidence, including academic research in particular.     

A model of emulation funds

Emulation funds are a potentially cost‐effective way for multimanager funds to improve their investment performance by delaying and netting trade signals from underlying managers. We develop a model to represent the expected sources of differential performance in an emulation fund relative to its underlying multimanager portfolio. The model formalises the expected interaction between potential savings and opportunity costs and allows us to observe complexities in the emulation process that are hidden without a benchmark. Finally, the functional representation of the model allows sensitivity analysis of the emulation fund to key parameters and enables us to determine theoretically optimal lag periods.     

MLP ensembles improve long term prediction accuracy over single networks

This work describes an award winning approach for solving the NN3 Forecasting Competition problem, focusing on the sound experimental validation of its main innovative feature. The NN3 forecasting task consisted of predicting 18 future values of 111 short monthly time series. The main feature of the approach was the use of the median for combining the forecasts of an ensemble of 15 MLPs to predict each time series. Experimental comparison to a single MLP shows that the ensemble increases the performance accuracy for multiple-step ahead forecasting. This system performed well on the withheld data, having finished as the second best solution of the competition with an SMAPE of 16.17%.     

EFFICIENT HEDGING OF EUROPEAN OPTIONS WITH ROBUST CONVEX LOSS FUNCTIONALS: A DUAL‐REPRESENTATION FORMULA

Motivated by numerical representations of robust utility functionals, due to Maccheroni et al., we study the problem of partially hedging a European option H when a hedging strategy is selected through a robust convex loss functional L(·) involving a penalization term γ(·) and a class of absolutely continuous probability measures . We present three results. An optimization problem is defined in a space of stochastic integrals with value function EH(·) . Extending the method of Föllmer and Leukerte, it is shown how to construct an optimal strategy. The optimization problem EH(·) as criterion to select a hedge, is of a “minimax” type. In the second, and main result of this paper, a dual‐representation formula for this value is presented, which is of a “maxmax” type. This leads us to a dual optimization problem. In the third result of this paper, we apply some key arguments in the robust convex‐duality theory developed by Schied to construct optimal solutions to the dual problem, if the loss functional L(·) has an associated convex risk measure ρ^L(·) which is continuous from below, and if the European option H is essentially bounded.