Bestimmung von Kapitalkosten in diversifizierten Unternehmungen: Verfahrensvergleiche und Anwendungsempfehlungen

Die Notwendigkeit zur wertorientierten Führung und Steuerung von Unternehmungen gewinnt durch die zunehmende Professionalisierung der Kapitalmarktteilnehmer, die Basel-II-Richtlinien für Banken sowie die Neuregelung zum Goodwill Impairment weiter an Dynamik. Innerhalb der Wertkonzepte nehmen Kapitalkosten als zentraler „value driver“ eine herausragende Bedeutung ein. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden die unterschiedlichen Verfahren zur Ermittlung von Kapitalkosten, darunter auch das erst kürzlich vorgestellte Market-derived Capital Pricing Model, diskutiert und mittels eines zu entwickelnden Kriterienrasters systematisch miteinander verglichen. Schlie?lich entwickelt der Beitrag aus den Erkenntnissen des Verfahrensvergleichs sowie einer Expertenbefragung praktische Anwendungsempfehlungen.     

Simon's and Siegel's responses to the 'mixed strategy anomaly': a missed case in the sensitivity of economics to empirical evidence

In some of their papers published in the 1950s, Herbert Simonand Sidney Siegel responded to the so-called mixed strategyanomaly in ways which deserve more attention. They producednot only (i) immediate defences of the economic theory of theirown time, but also (ii) ideas and solutions that have laterturned out to be significant contributions to the developmentof the economic theory of choice and decision-making and theseparation of experimental economics from experimental psychology.These observations suggest that economics can be more responsiveto empirical anomalies than has been assumed. Furthermore, knowledgeof the desirable responsiveness to anomalies can provide meansof avoiding the non-desirable immunity to anomalies.     

Does truth win when teams reason strategically?

We study behavior in the race game with the aim of assessing whether teams can create synergies. The race game has the advantage that the optimal strategy depends neither on beliefs about other players nor on distributional or efficiency concerns. Our results reveal that teams not only outperform individuals but that they can also beat the “truth-wins” benchmark. In particular, varying the length of the race game we find that the team advantage increases with the complexity of the game.     

Supply Disruptions and Regional Price Effects in a Spatial Oligopoly—An Application to the Global Gas Market

Supply shocks in the global gas market may affect countries differently, as the market is regionally interlinked but not perfectly integrated. Additionally, high supply‐side concentration may expose countries to market power in different ways. To evaluate the strategic position of importing countries with regard to gas supplies, we disentangle the import price into different components and characterize each component as price increasing or price decreasing. Because of the complexity of the interrelations in the global gas market, we use an equilibrium model programmed as a mixed complementarity problem (MCP) and simulate the blockage of liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows through the Strait of Hormuz. This enables us to account for the oligopolistic nature and the asymmetry of the gas supply. We find that Japan faces the most severe price increases, as the Japanese gas demand completely relies on LNG supply. In contrast, European countries such as the UK benefit from good interconnection to the continental pipeline system and domestic price taking production, both of which help to mitigate an increase in physical costs of supply as well as in the exercise of market power.     

Willingness to Pay for Voluntary Climate Action and Its Determinants: Field-Experimental Evidence

The determinants of individual, voluntary climate action (VCA) in combating climate change and its potential scale are frequently debated in public but largely underresearched. We provide estimates of the willingness to individually reduce EU greenhouse gas emissions by one ton, using the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. Estimates are derived from an online field experiment with a large, highly heterogenous, and Internet-representative sample of voting-aged Germans. Jointly estimating willingness to pay (WTP), non-indifference to VCA, and prior knowledge, we uncover important determinants of preferences for VCA, such as education, the information structure among the population, and exogenous environmental conditions.     

The Biodiversity Bargaining Problem

We employ cooperative bargaining theory and Nash’s ‘rational threats’ idea to cast light on the biodiversity bargaining problem. The problem of global environmental negotiations is argued to be of the nature of a bargaining problem, in which bargainers must agree on the distribution of cooperative surplus in order to move to the bargaining frontier. We discuss the importance of both efficiency (bargaining frontier) and fairness (recognition of characteristics of bargainers) in the choice of the appropriate contract. We show that the incremental cost contract, used to resolve the biodiversity bargaining problem, is of the form of an extreme point contract that fails to recognise the contributions of the South to the production of cooperative surplus. A rational response to such a contract is the use of threats of biodiversity destruction. Contracts must evince both efficiency and fairness in order to represent lasting solutions.     

Spontaneous visualization and concept evaluation

This paper proposes that customers often respond to brand extension concepts by visualizing the product. We call this process spontaneous visualization and suggest that it precedes concept evaluations. In two studies, we show that spontaneous visualization is enhanced by the fit between the parent brand and the extension category and by the ease with which the product category can be imagined. The appeal of the visualized image in turn determines whether visualization enhances or decreases concept evaluations. In addition, we find a stronger link between product evaluations and delayed choice when evaluations are based on visualization; evaluations based on visualization hence appear to be more “valid” in the sense of predicting subsequent behavior. Implications of these findings and ideas for future research are discussed.

Realities and Double Standards in Relations with Japan

JAPANS ECONOMIC POLICY, by G. C. Allen TRADE PROBLEMS BETWEEN JAPAN AND WESTERN EUROPE, by Masamichi Hanabusa JAPAN'S ECONOMIC AID, by Alan Rix JAPAN'S OPTIONS FOR THE 1980s. by Radha Sinha ENERGY POLICY IN PERSPECTIVE: TODAY'S PROBLEMS, Y ESTERDAY'S SOLUTIONS BRITAIN IN EUROPE, edited by William Wallace HARMONISATION IN THE EEC, edited by Carol Cosgrove Twitchett MULTINATIONALS FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, edited by Krishna Kumar and Maxwell G. McLeod EUROPE UNDER STRESS, by Yao-su Hu BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY, by Lester R. Brown DEVELOPING COUNTRIES IN THE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY, by Sanjaya Lall BEYOND INDUSTRIALIZATION: ASCENDANCY OF THE GLOBAL SERVICE ECONOMY, by Ronald Kent Shelp INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTION AND THE MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISE, by John H. Dunning INSIDE THE MULTINATIONALS, by Alan M. Rugman FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL POLICY FOR THE 1980s, edited by D. Gale Johnson THE JAPANESE CHALLENGE TO US INDUSTRY, by Jack Baranson FLEXIBLE EXCHANGE RATES AND INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS, by John M. Blin, Stuart I. Greenbaum and Donald P Jacobs THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF IN- DUSTRIAL POLICY, by Wyn Grant US FOREIGN POLICY AND THE THIRD WORLD: AGENDA 1982, by Roger D. Hansen et al.     

Determining the economic gains from regulation at the extensive and intensive margins

Among the second-best approaches for the regulation of pollution,little attention has been paid to the distorting effect of intensivemargin policies on the extensive margin. This article shows,within a dynamic framework, that regulation of the intensivemargin has to be complemented by regulation of the extensivemargin. Depending on the elasticity of the pollution functionwith respect to nitrogen use, the appropriate regulation atthe extensive margin is zero, a tax or a subsidy. We show empiricallythat combining a nitrogen tax with land-use taxes is about 18per cent more cost efficient than a nitrogen tax alone and 58per cent more efficient than off-site abatement in the formof groundwater treatment.     

Experts,firms, consumers or even hard data? Forecasting employment in Germany

In this article, we forecast employment growth for Germany with data for the period from November 2008 to November 2015. Hutter and Weber (2015) introduced an innovative unemployment indicator and evaluated the performance of several leading indicators, including the Ifo Employment Barometer (IEB), to predict unemployment changes. Since the IEB focuses on employment growth instead of unemployment developments, we mirror the study by Hutter and Weber (2015). It turns out that in our case, and in contrast to their article, the IEB outperforms their newly developed indicator. Additionally, consumers’ unemployment expectations and hard data such as new orders exhibit a high forecasting accuracy.