Designing <Emphasis Type="Italic">interaction</Emphasis>: How do interaction design students address interaction?

Interaction design is usually described as being concerned with interactions with and through artifacts but independent of a specific implementation. Design work has been characterized as a conversation between the designer and the situation and this conversation poses a particular challenge for interaction design as interactions can be elusive and difficult to describe. Moreover, current trends in interaction design introduce physical materials to a higher degree resulting in even more complex design situations. There is a lack of knowledge about how interaction designers, and especially students, address the very phenomenon of interaction. This study contributes by describing how interaction design students attempt to address aspects of interaction and by presenting an in-depth analysis in the context of an interactionary-type design exercise. The quantitative and qualitative findings showed that (1) the design students brought up aspects of interactivity and dynamics through talk and gestures but (2) a comprehensive design idea about interaction did not guide the design work and they were to a little degree engaged in planning sequences of interactions or interaction on a longer time scale, (3) using physical materials disrupted interaction design, and, (4) there was a lack of continuity when addressing interaction compared to how proposals about artifacts were pursued. As interaction is the core of interaction design, the findings are discussed in terms of how the immaterial design materials may “talk back” to designers. Practical strategies for how the observed phenomena could be constructively addressed within interaction design education are suggested.     

Internal Embeddedness,Headquarters Involvement,and Innovation Importance in Multinational Enterprises

In this paper we apply a business network perspective to investigate the effects of internal embeddedness and headquarters involvement on subsidiaries' innovation‐related competencies, and on the perceived importance of innovation in multinational enterprises. A model framed in the innovation context is developed and six hypotheses are tested on 85 innovation projects in 23 multinational enterprises using partial least squares based structural equation modelling. The results suggest that, contrary to predictions of the business network perspective, headquarters involvement in the innovation development process improves subsidiary competencies while internal embeddedness does not. Headquarters involvement, driven by subsidiary internal embeddedness, enhances the innovation impact on the subsidiary, which in turn influences innovation importance at corporate level. Thus, the business network perspective is challenged but at the same time expanded in terms of highlighting the role of, and interplay between, different internal corporate actors, particularly the role of headquarters, in developing competencies and creating competitive advantage.     

The effectiveness of personalized marketing in online banking: A comparison between search and experience offerings

This study reports the results of personalized online promotions in a context where personalization has not been researched before – in online banking. Genuine online bank customers were shown personalized banner advertisements when they logged in to their online bank account. Three financial offerings consisting of different search and experience attributes were promoted to three groups of customers. We examined the attention, elaboration and choice measures, and compared the effectiveness of personalized banners to default banners, and the online promotions to direct-mail promotions. Despite the goal-directed routines that reflect the dominant customer behaviour in online banking, personalized banners attracted more attention than default banners. Furthermore, messages that promote fairly simple search-type offerings that are easy to apply and are linked to the context in which the promotion occurs are more effective than messages that do not fulfil these criteria. The results offer implications both for research and practice.     

Fatal occupational accidents in Danish fishing vessels 1989-2005

The purpose of the study was to study the circumstances and incidence rates of fatal accidents in inspection obligated and non-inspection obligated Danish fishing vessels to identify areas for prevention. Information about the fatalities came from maritime authority reports, including vessel disaster reports, post mortem reports, maritime inquiries and police reports. The person- and vessel years at risk came from the Danish Directorate of Fisheries. During the period 1989-2005, 114 fatalities occurred. Sixty-one of the fatalities occurred in 36 vessel disasters mainly caused by foundering/capsizing due to stability changes in rough weather and collisions; 39 fatal occupational accidents mainly occurred on the larger inspection obligated trawlers during fishing. In the remaining 14 other fatal accidents, the main causal factors were difficult embarking/disembarking conditions by darkness in foreign ports and alcohol intoxication. In the period 1995-2005, the overall incidence rate was 10 per 10,000 fishermen per year with no down-going trend during that period. The fatal accident rates are still too high, despite the efforts to reduce the risk. Increased focus on regular and repeated safety training for all fishermen and improved safety measures are needed, especially in the underscored areas of sea disasters concerning small vessels and occupational accidents on big vessels. Better registration of time at risk for fishermen is needed to validate the effect of the safety measures.     

Measuring overconfidence: Methodological problems and statistical artifacts

Psychological studies are frequently cited in the business and finance literature to bolster claims that various kinds of economic disasters, from the large proportion of start-ups that quickly go out of business to the exaggerated confidence of financial investors, can be attributed to overconfidence. This article reviews some of the problems associated with concluding that people overestimate the accuracy of their judgments based on observed overconfidence measured as the difference between mean subjective probability and proportion correct. Methodological and statistical artifacts, such as regression, can explain many of the observed instances of apparent overconfidence.     

Regulating a Polluting Firm Under Asymmetric Information

This paper reinterprets the Laffont-Tirole model of regulation under asymmetric information to cover the case of pollution control. The asymmetry of information concerns the firm's cost of lowering its pollution. The regulator has three objectives: Ensuring an efficient abatement level, generating 'green taxes' and securing the survival of the firm. We show that when optimal abatement is important relative to tax generation, the regulator cannot use the policy of offering the firm a set of linear tax schemes from which to choose. By contrast, this policy is optimal in the Laffont-Tirole model under certain not very restrictive assumptions. We proceed to establish a simple rule for when to shut-down inefficient types. In an example with specific functional forms, we derive the optimal tax function both analytically and graphically. We show the effect on the optimal tax system of a change in a technological parameter.     

Unternehmenskultur und Unternehmenserfolg: Stand der empirischen Forschung und Konsequenzen für die Entwicklung eines Messkonzeptes

Im Rahmen einer übergreifenden Analyse empirischer Arbeiten wird der State-of-the-Art der Forschung zum Zusammenhang von Unternehmenskultur und Unternehmenserfolg dargelegt. Neben der inhaltlichen Analyse des Zusammenhangs liegt der Schwerpunkt des nachfolgenden Beitrags auf einem Review der Messung von Unternehmenskultur und Unternehmenserfolg, wie sie sich in den betrachteten Zusammenhangsanalysen zeigt. Aufbauend hierauf werden die Grundzüge je eines Konzeptes zur Messung der Unternehmenskultur und des Unternehmenserfolges entwickelt, welche als Ausgangsbasis verstanden werden k?nnen, um in weiterführenden Untersuchungen den Zusammenhang von Unternehmenskultur und Unternehmenserfolg für die unterschiedlichsten Unternehmen zu bestimmen.     

LRN 2016 SPECIAL – high capacity vehicles and modal shift from rail to road: combining macro and micro analyses

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses a road transport policy of allowing high capacity vehicles (HCVs) on the roads. The purpose is to examine the effect reduced road transport costs from HCVs can have on a modal shift. Two studies of HCV implementation in Sweden were combined. A micro-based case study modelled the distribution network of a major retailer in scenarios based on actual cost and flow data. A macro analysis was conducted of the cross-elasticity between rail and road combined with detailed price changes for lorries considering the product characteristics in different industries. The results show the long-term effects of HCVs on the modal shift for heavier, and heavier and longer vehicles. The combined approach triangulates the results and highlights the effects of logistics decision-making, transport network characteristics, and time. It emphasises linkages between modal shift and road transport efficiency, price reductions, geographical characteristics, product types, train organisation, and the capacity of HCVs.     

Der Wert der Worte – Wie digitale Methoden helfen,Kommunikations- und Wirtschaftswissenschaft zu verknüpfen

The use of digital methods offers a chance to connect communication science with economics. In recent years, a growing body of research in economics has turned its attention to media content, assuming that journalistic coverage contains hitherto neglected information relevant for business cycles or financial market movements. Interestingly, these approaches largely ignore communication science’s established theories and empirical findings. This paper aims at building a bridge between the two disciplines. Its contribution is threefold: a) it provides an overview of the most important approaches in economics that incorporate media content; b) it operationalizes the concept of the “narrative”, as it is used in economics, and distinguishes it from the concept of the “frame”, essential in communication science; c) exemplifying our approach, we present a new Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) based on the topic modeling method Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), that enables us to isolate different factors of economic policy uncertainty contained in media coverage.Economic studies treat journalistic media content as a proxy for sentiment prevalent in society. Typically, they rely on frequency analyses of certain keywords, like “recession” or “inflation”. Even more sophisticated approaches, such as Shiller (2017), who calls for establishing a new branch of “narrative economics”, or Baker et al. (2016), who construct a comprehensive set of media-based indicators, make no or little reference to communication science. This neglect could be discounted as pure ignorance, but this misses the point. Being a predominantly empirical discipline today, economics relies on long time-series of data, that have not been available for media content, a gap rendering the two disciplines largely incompatible.The gap is also reflected in terminology. “Frame” is a major analytical concept in communication science, while the term “narrative” has become in vogue in economics. Although both concepts are closely connected, they are rarely properly distinguished from each other. “Frame” can be considered as a rather static concept that applies during a limited period of time. “Narrative”, in contrast, implies dynamic properties, i.?e., the sorting of events, causes and effects over time, that explain how the current state of the world has come about, as stressed by Tenenboim-Weinblatt et al. (2016).In this paper, we propose a synergetic concept. Following Entman (1993), a media frame contains four elements: a) a problem definition, b) a problem diagnosis, c) a moral judgement, and d) possible remedies. We augment this approach by adding two more elements. According to our definition, a media narrative comprises a frame, or several ones, plus e) one or several protagonists—persons, institutions, or social groupings (nations, classes, etc.)—, whose relationships are (often) antagonistic and may change over time; and f) events, that are chronologically integrated and that are (often) assumed to constitute causal relationships. To put it metaphorically: a frame is to a narrative what a still photo is to a movie. Both are valuable concepts; the still photo shows more details, while the movie provides a contextualization over time.Topic models like LDA are valuable tools for the measurement of media narratives. The probabilistic approach enables researchers to conduct what may be called “macro-content analyses”, an exercise that focuses on average reporting patterns in large text corpora and can be translated into numerical time-series, thereby facilitating compatibility with empirical economics. Based on a topic’s frequency analysis, its top words and top articles, “mean media narratives” can be formulated, that integrate certain events, protagonists and frames.In our case study, we exemplify this concept by applying it to an indicator that is currently popular in economics, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (Baker et al. 2016). The EPU aims at capturing political developments that are exogenous to economic models and therefore unpredictable. Essentially, the indicator is based on the counts of articles containing a set of search words, such as “uncertain”, “economic” as well as institutions like the European Central Bank. Using identical search words as the EPU for Germany, we construct a similar corpus for the years 1994 to 2017. By conducting an LDA-based analysis, we are able to extract additional relevant information from the data. In particular, the evolution of different uncertainty factors and their development over time can be detected.Our Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) contains six relevant news topics that are highly relevant for market developments: central banks, the national government, international politics, the business cycle, companies, and society. While the EPU merely shows how often uncertainty concerning economic policy is mentioned in the media, the UPI also indicates the origins of uncertainty. By grouping the six topics into three analytical categories—governments, markets, and society—we find a distinct break in the time-series. Before the financial crisis of 2008, the perception of uncertainty was rather balanced between the three factors. Since then, however, economic uncertainty has mainly been driven by political actors, most prominently by central banks. The corresponding narratives are a two-chapter story: in the first part, up to 2008, stable financial markets and smoothed business cycles prevailed, making central banking a rather straight-forward task. The second part is characterized by multiple crises, leaving central banks as dominant actors, that intervened with unconventional measures. Thereby, they became stabilizing forces, but at the same time sources of uncertainty with respect to the timing and the impact of these measures.