Transformationen einer Marketing- und Vertriebsorganisation

Die Dynamik und Wettbewerbsintensit?t im Medizintechnik-Markt der Ultraschallsysteme zwingt Hersteller permanent zur Anpassung ihrer Strategien und Unternehmensstrukturen. Der vorliegende Praxisbericht zeigt, warum und wie Siemens Medical Solutions seine Marketingorganisation für das Ultraschallgesch?ft in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) von einer eher reaktiven Supportfunktion zu einer proaktiven und gesch?ftsentwickelnden Funktion transformiert hat und nach welchen Prinzipien diese funktioniert.     

The Creation of Value Through Corporate Reputation

The relationship between social and financial performance (CSP – FP) has been a main objective in the literature on business management, as it would provide an economic justification for the social investment insofar as it contributes to the creation of value. This relationship has been empirically tested by several authors though without using a theoretical model that sustains this relationship. The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical model of the process of the creation of value from the reputation generated by companies, integrating the factors that have been shown to be more relevant in this process from previous research, in such a way that hypotheses are put forward regarding the existence of this relationship and the factors that determine it. Finally, an empirical test is performed using the 100 most prestigious companies operating in Spain during 2004.     

The effect of high fuel costs on liner service configuration in container shipping

For shipping activities, not least container shipping, bunker fuel is a considerable expense. In the last 5 years, bunker prices have risen considerably. An increasing bunker price in container shipping, especially in the short term, is only partially compensated through surcharges and will therefore affect earnings negatively. This paper deals with the impact of increasing bunker costs on the design of liner services on the Europe–Far East trade. The paper assesses how shipping lines have adapted their liner service schedules (in terms of commercial speed, number of vessels deployed per loop, etc.) to deal with increased bunker costs. The paper also includes a cost model to simulate the impact of bunker cost changes on the operational costs of liner services. The cost model demonstrates for a typical North Europe–East Asia loop that the current bunker prices have a significant impact on the costs per TEU even when using large post-panamax vessels. The model also shows shipping lines are reacting quite late to higher bunker costs. The reasons that explain the late adaptation of liner services relate to inertia, transit time concerns, increasing costs associated with fixing schedule integrity problems and fleet management issues.     

The complete incremental cost test for cross-subsidies with a sub-modular cost function

The complete Incremental Cost Test for cross-subsidies can be difficult to apply to a multi-product enterprise because every possible subset of products must be tested. However, this combinatorial problem can be avoided when the enterprise’s cost function is sub-modular by identifying the smallest subset of products causing the maximum cross-subsidy. This subset contains all of the products, and only those products, that are responsible for the cross-subsidies left by a stipulated set of prices. In addition, the subset can often be identified with a simple and efficient Myopic Algorithm. The algorithm should be particularly useful as a method for detecting cross-subsidies in regulated enterprises and networks because the cost functions for these industries are typically sub-modular.     

An experimental investigation of soft price caps in uniform price auction markets for wholesale electricity

This paper presents the results from an auction experiment using industry professionals and student participants who compete in a simulated wholesale market for electricity. Motivated by the intervention by FERC in response to the “meltdown” of the California spot market, we investigate the effect of including a “soft” price cap in a uniform price auction as a means of mitigating high prices. When prices are driven above the soft cap, offer curves become flat, in contrast to the hockey stick shape observed in a typical uniform price auction for electricity. This flat offer curve leads to market prices that are relatively insensitive to both generation costs and demand reductions.      

Allowing communities to trade in imperfectly competitive pollution-permit markets

Citizens and organizations representing them play an increasingly important role in markets for environmental quality, but much remains to be learned about how their participation affects these markets. We analyze the effects of allowing a community of citizens to trade pollution permits in an imperfectly competitive permit market. Allowing the community to trade directly reveals its preferences, which enhances welfare. However, community participation may also exacerbate distortions due to market power, even though the community itself trades competitively. Including the community in permit distribution may exacerbate market power distortions by affecting a dominant trader’s propensity to participate in the permit market. Second, the community’s demand/supply for permits may be more inelastic than other traders and worsen distortions due to market power. We illustrate in an example that these negative effects on competition can dominate the positive effect from preference revelation through the market place.      

The effects of air quality regulations on the location decisions of pollution-intensive manufacturing plants

This research examines the effects of the 1977 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) on the location decisions of pollution-intensive manufacturing plants. We develop a panel data set to analyze plant births of polluting manufacturers over time as a function county-level attainment status of the federal standard for ozone pollution. We find that more stringent county-level environmental regulations impact pollution-intensive capital flows through deterring new plant births. We also find that the impact of stricter regulations varies by pollution-intensity of manufacturers, with results suggesting that federal guidelines have a greater impact on high pollution intensive manufacturers than more moderate polluters.      

Re-Examining the Empirical Evidence for Stochastic Convergence of Two Air Pollutants with a Pair-Wise Approach

This paper examines the hypothesis of stochastic convergence for two air pollutants emissions (carbon dioxide [CO₂] and sulfur dioxide [SO₂]). The value-added of this paper lies in the use of a recent, alternative econometric method, a pair-wise approach that considers all the possible pairs of log per-capita pollutant emission gaps across all the countries in the sample. In this method, all emissions differences must be stationary around a constant mean. Empirical results support different conclusions on stochastic convergence in per capita CO₂ and SO₂ emissions depending on the choice of the unit root test. The use of specific critical values from the ADF-KPSS joint test overcomes these initial conflicting results and leads to small percentages of stationary pairs around a constant mean; which invalidate the hypothesis of stochastic convergence for per capita emissions of CO₂ and SO₂, even over the OECD sub-dataset.