Rezensionen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Trust in Scientific Publishing

Trust is an important phenomenon to reduce organisational complexity and uncertainty. In the literature many types of trust are distinguished. An important framework to understand the variety and development of trust in organisations is provided by Zucker. She distinguishes three types of trust: process-based trust institutional-based trust characteristic-based trustIn this article we will add a fourth type: values-based trust.Similarly, it is customary in scientific communication to distinguish four main communication functions: registration archiving certification awareness.These types of trust and the communication functions offer somewhat similar classification schemes. In this paper we will elaborate on these classification schemes with the aim to analyse possible similarities or even mapping. Such similarities will allow drawing conclusions on the development of trust in a (virtual) organisation in general and the process of scientific communication as a special kind of a (virtual) organisation in particular.     

The Evolution of the World Bank's Land Policy: Principles, Experience, and Future Challenges

This article examines the evolution of policy recommendationsconcerning rural land issues since the formulation of the WorldBank's "Land Reform Policy Paper" in 1975. That paper set outthree guiding principles: the desirability of owner-operatedfamily farms; the need for markets to permit land to be transferredto more productive users; and the importance of an egalitarianasset distribution. In the 25 years since that paper was published,these guiding principles have remained the same, but it is nowrecognized that communal tenure systems can be more cost-effectivethan formal title, that titling programs should be judged ontheir equity as well as their efficiency, that the potentialof land rental markets has often been severely underestimated,that land-sale markets enhance efficiency only if they are integratedinto a broader effort at developing rural factor markets, andthat land reform is more likely to result in a reduction ofpoverty if it harnesses (rather than undermines) the operationof land markets and is implemented in a decentralized fashion.Achieving land policies that incorporate these elements requiresa coherent legal and institutional framework together with greaterreliance on pilot programs to examine the applicability of interventionsunder local conditions.      

Estimating the Impact of Displays and Other Merchandising Support on Retail Brand Sales: Partial Pooling with Examples

With the advent of scanning data, methodological issues have arisen, in particular as they relate to the reliability of parameter estimates in regression models. This study deals with the reliability of the coefficients of promotion-type dummy variables (e.g., display, leaflet, bonus pack,). Due to a lack of passthrough of trade deals to the end consumer, those coefficients can be typically unidentified or unstable when estimated at the store level and even at the chain level. Assuming that the individual-level coefficients of the dummy variables are draws from a common but arbitrary distribution, the authors suggest to "pool" the data for those variables (partial "pooling") across stores and across chains. They show with three real-life examples the increased reliability (with a correct sign) of the "pooled" coefficients as compared with the store-level or chain-level individual coefficients.     

International dissemination of new drugs: A comparative study of six countries

The times at which new drugs were licensed since 1960 have been compared for Sweden and five other countries, and the differences in licensing time between these countries have been evaluated statistically. Also, the time required for the Swedish authorities to process the licence applications has been studied and compared with the small number of similar studies available from other countries. A relationship between the delay in licensing and the processing time is discussed.     

POVERTY IN EUROPE1

In this paper a definition of poverty in terms of welfare is given. A method is developed to derive poverty lines from an individual welfare function of income. The model is extended to analyse the effect of several socio-economic characteristics on the level of the poverty line. An empirical application of the method is given based on data from a survey in eight European countries in 1979. Differences in the poverty lines both between countries and between socio-economic groups within each country are considered. Finally the number of people below these poverty lines is estimated for all countries in the group.