Medienberichterstattung über Medienkonzentration

Taking into account the ongoing political debate on self-regulating and self-observing media and the increasing media concentration, the study explores journalists’ strategies of manufacturing credibility in self-referential media communication. How do journalists try to construct a »normal distance« between their public functions on the one hand and the economic stakes of the media conglomerates they work for and the media industry on the other. Based on a qualitative content analysis, the case study on the coverage of the AOL-Time Warner merger reveals significant differences in the tendencies of coverage and the strategies used to solve this dilemma: Independent media such as 〉die tageszeitung〈 tend to report more intensely and to comment more critically, also considering the frameworks of media politics and media ethics. A comparison of 〉Newsweek〈 and 〉Time Magazine〈 shows that increasing self-referentiality goes along with an increasing use and complexity of all three strategies: distancing, revealing, and concealing. 〉Newsweek〈 provides a much more pluralistic and more critical view of the merger than the AOL-Time Warner owned 〉Time Magazine〈, its direct competitor.     

Because Effort Matters!

Project effort is critical for the success of software development projects. It has a major impact on whether constraints in time and budget can be complied with. But although requirements affect project effort, requirements engineering (RE) methods are not capable of assessing project effort.     

The Pelagian Controversy: An Economic Analysis

A bstract .   In recent years economic theory has been used to analyze the introduction of new religious doctrines as innovations that further the objectives of religious organizations and their leaders. The present study analyzes the decision of church authorities in the early fifth century to reject the doctrine advanced by Pelagius in favor of the position taken by Augustine. Accounts of the controversy reveal two self-interested motives for the church hierarchy to reject the Pelagian doctrine: (1) the Pelagian view would have undermined the authority of the church hierarchy; and (2) by making greater demands for moral conduct, it would have raised the "cost" of being a Christian and thereby discouraged growth in church membership, particularly among the Roman upper class.     

Competition,regulation and bribery

Bribery of government officials is commonly used to obtain contracts in many foreign countries. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) made it illegal for US firms to pay bribes, even in the absence of regulation on the bribe-taking side of the transaction. Opponents of the law claimed it would put US firms at a competitive disadvantage relative to foreign suppliers who were not subject to the same regulation. This paper models the effects of two types of anti-bribery regulation. In general, regulation of bribe takers reduces the disciplinary effect of competition and is ineffective in deterring bribery unless the penalties exceed the gains. The impact of regulation of bribe payers (i.e. suppliers) depends on whether the law is applicable to all bribe payers, firms' costs and the existence of contract price constraints on the purchasing side of the transaction. The results lead to empirically testable hypotheses about US exports to bribery-prone countries.     

The Social Welfare Loss from Egg and Poultry Marketing Boards, Revisited

Continuing conflict over supply management warrants another look at its costs. The authors' model combines the traditional welfare triangle with the social welfare loss created when farmers bear the investment risk associated with possible termination of quota protection. The annual net social welfare loss from egg and poultry marketing boards likely exceeds $100 million, with consumers losing more than $500 million. Half the net social welfare loss is the cost of risk bearing. Quota prices imply that farmers expect quota lives to be relatively short. Therefore, changing to short fixed terms might halve the social welfare loss without imposing capital losses on farmers and might facilitate a return to a free market or auctioning new fixed term quotas.     

The Ethical Judgment of Private Club Senior Executives

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate effects of working experience and organization size on ethical judgments on ethical issues among senior private club executives. Senior club executives at small and large private clubs were given five vignettes, representing ethical dilemmas in five categories of ethical behavior identified by previous researchers. They were asked to determine whether each issue was a question of ethics or not (N = 413). The multivariate analysis of variance results indicate that senior executives working in the large-sized club with more than 20 years’ hospitality working experience tend to make higher ethical judgments on ethical issues.