Household Adoption of Water-Efficient Equipment: The Role of Socio-Economic Factors,Environmental Attitudes and Policy

Using survey data of around 10,000 households from 10 OECD countries, we identify the driving factors of household adoption of water-efficient equipment by estimating Probit models of a household’s probability to invest in such equipment. The results indicate that environmental attitudes and ownership status are strong predictors of adoption of water-efficient equipment. In terms of policy, we find that households that were both metered and charged for their water individually had a much higher probability to invest in water-efficient equipment compared to households that paid a flat fee.     

Attitude Sophistication and Effective Teaching in Economics

Little attention has been given to the measurement of changes in attitudes and beliefs resulting from instruction in economics. This deficiency is met by Mann and Fusfeld who relate attitude changes to growth in students' knowledge (cognition) and to characteristics of both students and instructors. The findings from this research suggest a conflict among the goals of instruction. They also imply greater persistence of changes in attitude than of changes in knowledge.     

Raising Capital in an Insurance Oligopoly Market

We consider an oligopoly market where firms offer insurance coverage against a risk characterised by aggregate uncertainty. Firms behave as if they were risk averse for a standard reason of costly external finance. The model consists in a two-stage game where firms choose their internal capital level at stage one and compete on price at stage two. We characterise the subgame perfect Nash equilibria of this game and focus attention on the strategic impact of insurers capital choice. We discuss the model with regard to the insurance industry specificities and regulation.     

IMF Bank-Restructuring Efficiency Outcomes: Evidence from East Asia

We report new findings on bank efficiency in East Asian countries for the pre- and post-IMF restructuring periods. We find that bank efficiency has improved, but only to the pre-IMF intervention level, and that restructured banks are not more efficient than their unrestructured counterparts. Different restructuring measures have different effects. Bank closures are economically justified, but mergers show short-term efficiency losses. Recapitalization and reprivatization of badly performing banks lead to efficiency improvement, but also increase government ownership. Ease of entry that has allowed for more foreign bank participation results in slightly improved performance of badly performing banks.

Optimal dividend policy and growth option

We analyse the interaction between the dividend policy and the decision on investment in a growth opportunity of a liquidity constrained firm. This leads us to study a mixed singular control/optimal stopping problem for a diffusion that we solve quasi-explicitly by establishing a connection with an optimal stopping problem. We characterize situations where it is optimal to postpone the distribution of dividends in order to invest at a subsequent date in the growth opportunity. We show that uncertainty and liquidity shocks have an ambiguous effect on the investment decision.      

Co-creation of value — towards an expanded paradigm of value creation

Co-creation is the process by which products, services, and experiences are developed jointly by companies and their stakeholders, opening up a whole new world of value. Firms must stop thinking of individuals as mere passive recipients of value, to whom they have traditionally delivered goods, services, and experiences. Instead, firms must seek to engage people as active co-creators of value everywhere in the system.     

Teaming up to Innovate: The Importance of a Joint Knowledge Base

Companies are increasingly discovering the potential of collaborating with others to create innovative products — often across industries — by combining their specializations in a unique way. A pre-condition for the success of these ventures is to build a common knowledge base, usually by duplicating selected parts of the partner’s knowledge. In this article, a case study and a quantitative study seek to elaborate on the unanswered question: Which building blocks constitute a common knowledge base?     

Countering Service Information Challenges in the Internet of Services

Business Webs apply the idea of value networks to the WWW. The underlying delivery platform is commonly referred to as the Internet of Services and will certainly have to deal with a great variety and amount of information about services along several service information dimensions. As soon as brokerage, discovery, or community feedback parts are decentralized, there emerge a number of service information challenges (modeling the information in a holistic way, documentation, interlinkage, tool interoperability, distributed querying, inconsistent information, and cooperation of different stakeholders). In this paper, we propose to counter such service information challenges by two artifacts. First, we contribute a Service Ontology based on a sound and rigid foundational ontology. The Service Ontology provides a holistic and consistent way of capturing service information. We apply the recommendations of the W3C Semantic Web Activity whose recent standardization has already opened new possibilities for tool interoperability, interlinkage of information, and distributed querying on the web. However, building and prescribing an ontology in standardized languages is not enough to address all service information challenges. Therefore, as a second contribution, we provide a method around the ontology including a governance framework, guidelines for applying the W3C Semantic Web recommendations, a lifecycle-spanning tool chain, and different levels of applicability. We label our method Semantic Business Web approach, since we build on W3C Semantic Web standards, use and extend them in the Business Web setting. Both artifacts are constructed in an interdisciplinary way by experts participating in the German lighthouse project THESEUS/TEXO. The project’s scenario also serves as a proof of concept evaluation of the artifacts.