Patent pools,litigation, and innovation

This article analyzes patent pools and their effects on litigation incentives, overall royalty rates, and social welfare when patent rights are probabilistic and can be invalidated in court. With probabilistic patents, the license fees reflect the strength of the patents. We show that patent pools of complementary patents can be used to discourage infringement by depriving potential licensees of the ability to selectively challenge patents and making them committed to a proposition of all‐or‐nothing in patent litigation. If patents are sufficiently weak, patent pools with complementary patents reduce social welfare as they charge higher licensing fees and chill subsequent innovation incentives.     

E-satisfaction: a re-examination

E-satisfaction as a construct has gained increasing importance in the marketing literature in recent times. The examination of consumer satisfaction in an online context follows the growing consensus that in Internet retailing, as in traditional retailing, consumer satisfaction is not only a critical performance outcome, but also a primary predictor of customer loyalty and thus, the Internet retailer's endurance and success. The current study replicates the initial examination of e-satisfaction within the U.S. by [Szymanski, David M., & Richard T. Hise (2000). E-satisfaction: An initial examination. Journal of Retailing, 76(3), 309-322] among a sample of online consumers drawn from Germany. The replication was extended to two contexts—consumer satisfaction with Internet retail shopping and consumer satisfaction with Internet financial services sites. The results yield rich insights into the validity of extending the measurement and predictors of e-satisfaction to a trans-national context.     

Rising Income Inequality: Do Not Draw the Obvious Conclusions

Inequality is dominating the political debate in various countries still characterised by sluggish economic recovery and high unemployment. The drivers of higher income inequality since 1995 have been globalisation, technological change and migration. At the same time, these factors have had an undeniably positive impact on aggregate income. While populist parties advocate more nationalistic-oriented approaches, we argue that the appropriate policy response to this dilemma is to alleviate the social costs of globalisation rather than rejecting the aggregate economic benefit.     

The Changing Face of Entrepreneurship in Germany

This paper explains individual start-up activities on the basis of both person-related characteristics and the regional context. The analysis is based upon micro data from the GEM adult population survey. Both individual and regional variables have an influence on the decision to become self-employed. There are considerable differences between nascent opportunity entrepreneurship and nascent necessity entrepreneurship. Whereas the results for opportunity entrepreneurship are in line with theoretical predictions the factors influencing necessity entrepreneurship are far more difficult to determine. The most significant change between 2001 and 2003/2004 is the reversal of the influence of a change in the regional rate of unemployment on nascent entrepreneurship activities.      

Adjustment to changing international conditions

The structural changes in the world economy have made themselves increasingly felt in the Federal Republic of Germany over the past few years. For the first time since 1965 there is again a current account deficit, since merchandise trade is no longer able, due to the worsened terms of trade, to finance the traditional deficits on services and transfers. What policy should the Federal Government follow in order to help German industry adjust to these changes?     

Young tourists visiting strip clubs and paying for sex

Little is known about young adults’ use of strip clubs and prostitution during their holidays abroad. This study examined this issue with a sample of 1125 Danish tourists between the ages of 16 and 34, and sought data about the frequency with which they paid for sex and attended strip clubs while they were on holiday. The tourists were surveyed at a Bulgarian airport before their return trip home. The incidence of strip-club patronage during holiday was 48% for men and 8% for women. Of the men, 12.5% reported paying for sex during their holiday. Among the men paying for sex, 47% reported having done it for the first time. Among the men who attended strip clubs, 32% reported having done it for the first time. Strip-club patronage and paying for sex were both associated with higher levels of drinking, use of Viagra^®, and with having done the same thing before the holiday. Paying for sex was uniquely associated with non-use of condoms with one or more sexual partners. The results of this study can be interpreted as part of a wider culture of commodified debauchery, which predominates many nightlife resorts.     

Context-Sensitive Semantic Synchronization Enablement in Electronic Negotiations

When integrating electronic negotiations into real-world business processes, an important problem arising is the magnitude of e-business standards in use. In order to support electronic negotiations when negotiation partners use and need to integrate terms named and formatted according to different document standards, taxonomies or similar standards, references between those standards are needed. In this paper, we present a framework for a negotiation support meta-tool which is designed to maintain and dynamically evolve a collection of such references. To deal with semantic ambiguities in different contexts, it provides users with context-sensitive references. The framework uses technologies from ontological engineering and machine learning, its services can be integrated into existing negotiation applications via web services. Furthermore, it allows parameterzation for the actual domain of use.     

Pflegeinformatik, was ist das?

Informationstechnologie in der Pflege - Prozessoptimierung, Darstellung pflegerischer Leistungen – ohne IT l?uft im Pflegealltag nichts mehr. Doch wie k?nnen Pflegende mit dieser Entwicklung Schritt halten? Welche Weiterbildungen gibt es, damit „Kollege“ Computer die Arbeit auch wirklich erleichtert?