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In countries such as Germany, where municipalities have planning sovereignty, problems of urban sprawl often arise. As the dynamics of land development have not substantially subsided over the last years, the national government decided to test the instrument of ‘Tradable Planning Permits’ (TPP) in a nationwide field experiment with 87 municipalities involved. The field experiment was able to implement the key features of a TPP system in a laboratory setting with approximated real socioeconomic and planning conditions. In a TPP system allocated planning permits must be used by municipalities for developing land. The permits can be traded between local jurisdictions, so that they have flexibility in deciding how to comply with the regulation. In order to evaluate the performance of such a system, specific field data about future building areas and their impact on community budgets for the period 2014–2028 were collected. The field experiment contains several sessions with representatives of the municipalities and with students. The participants were confronted with two (municipalities) and four (students) schemes. The results show that a trading system can curb down land development in an effective and also efficient manner. However, depending on the regulatory framework, the trading schemes show different price developments and distributional effects. The unexperienced representatives of the local authorities can easily handle with the permits in the administration and in the established market. A trading scheme sets very high incentives to save open space and to direct development activities to areas within existing planning boundaries. It is therefore a promising instrument for Germany and also other regions or countries with an established land-use planning system.
Mature economies which are driven mainly by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly becoming dependent on material imports. Global material consumption is ever increasing, mainly driven by population increases. Decoupling of material consumption from economic growth is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Within this paper available methods for the assessment of material efficiency on different economic scales are investigated and those detected that are particulary suitable for the use in SMEs. Recommendations for further improvements of the selected tools and an outlook concerning planned research activities in the field of material efficiency in enterprises, supply chains and circular economy aspects are given.
This article explores current debate on the use of soft power in international higher education, highlighting existing tensions between competing political and academic discourses. It draws on examples from practice and relevant insights in soft power scholarship to capture varying paradoxes and dilemmas that emerge as nations try to leverage the power of international tertiary education to enhance their brand and attract foreign audiences in the name of public diplomacy. Whilst exposing cases of hubris and hidden agendas, this study also addresses issues of inequality and responds to a growing call for knowledge diplomacy aimed at tackling common global problems.
Customer foresight is a relatively new research field. We introduce the customer foresight territory by discussing it localization between customer research and foresight research. For this purposse, we look at a variety of methods that help to understand customers and future realities. On this basis we provide an overwiew of customer foresight methods and outline an ideal-typical research journey.
The Commitment of Traders report (CoT) has been around for over 30 years, consistently revealing the futures positions of key market players. This study's primary aim is to use the comprehensive data from the Commitment of Traders reports to develop a short-term reversal trading strategy. Against the benchmark, a S&P 500 buy-and-hold approach with a Sharpe ratio of 1.07, the CoT long only strategy generated significant results in six individual markets. Extending the strategy to long-and-short, two markets outperformed the benchmark significantly. However, a scenario analysis indicated underperformance of the CoT strategy when traded in a portfolio, confirming that the chosen strategy parameters could not generate excess Sharpe ratios. Our results indicate that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, more specifically the CoT report, contributed to efficient derivatives market.
Computers are increasingly used in teams in various contexts, for example in negotiations. Especially when using computer-support for decision making processes, it is an important question whether active collaboration within the team - for example via audio-conference - has additional benefits beyond the supply of full task-relevant information via computer. In team negotiations, team representatives are only able to represent the whole team, if diverse preferences of the team members are aligned prior to the negotiation. In an experimental study with 150 participants, we provided team members with the complete information about each other's preferences during an either collaboratively (computer-mediated) or seperately conducted computer-supported negotiation preparation and subsequently asked them for their priorities as representatives of the team. Our results showed that providing complete task-relevant information via computer is insufficient to compensate for the absence of active collaboration within the team.
We analyze economics PhDs’ collaborations in peer-reviewed journals from 1990 to 2014 and investigate such collaborations’ quality in relation to each co-author’s research quality, field and specialization. We find that a greater overlap between co-authors’ previous research fields is significantly related to a greater publication success of co-authors’ joint work and this is robust to alternative specifications. Co-authors that engage in a distant collaboration are significantly more likely to have a large research overlap, but this significance is lost when co-authors’ social networks are accounted for. High quality collaboration is more likely to emerge as a result of an interaction between specialists and generalists with overlapping fields of expertise. Regarding interactions across subfields of economics (interdisciplinarity), it is more likely conducted by co- authors who already have interdisciplinary portfolios, than by co-authors who are specialized or starred in different subfields.
As businesses grow and diversify, they almost inevitably make their range of offerings more complex. Complexity brings costs - but smart use of today’s digital technologies can help companies finesse the trade-offs between complexity´s costs and benefits. Imagine a retailer that has 10 million products and hundreds of variations for each product yet keeps it simple for customers to make a choice. Impossible? Not today. Amazon.com Inc. creates value from its product complexity with simple customer-facing processes, such as search, ratings, reviews and suggestions. Now imagine a diversified high-tech company with locally differentiated products in 60 categories in more than 100 different countries. A mess of internal processes and systems? Not necessarily. Royal Philips creates value by providing locally relevant products to different markets, while keeping the vast majority of its processes standardized on digitized platforms. Until now, managing business complexity has usually involved a trade-off. This trade-off forced companies to compromise between creating value from complexity and benefiting from the efficiencies of simplicity. As businesses entered new geographies, developed new products, opened new channels and added more granular customer segments, they made their offerings more complex with the intention of adding value. But, as an almost inevitable consequence, companies also made it more difficult for customers to interact with the company and more unwieldy for employees to get things done. However, with today´s increased digitization, companies can finesse this trade-off; they can increase valueadding complexity in their product offerings while keeping processes for customers and employees simple. Our research suggests that companies operating in this "complexity sweet spot" outperform their competitors on profitability. In this article, we explain how companies achieve this breakthrough in the digital world.
In 2015, the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a collection of 17 global objectives to promote economic, social and ecological development in all parts of the world. While the academic discussion on the contribution of companies to the Sustainable Development Goals has recently gained momentum, the role of business-to-business (B2B) partnerships in reaching the SDGs is underexplored, particularly when it comes to North-South relationships. With our research, we aim to fill this gap in the literature by investigating sales partnerships between German manufacturers and their distributors in African markets. Based on a qualitative analysis of 28 interviews with managers of German and African companies, we show that long-term partnerships and job creation, technology transfer, training as well as high standards are significant contributions of companies to achieve the SDGs. While several SDGs such as goals 4,6,13,16 and 17 are addressed by B2B partnership, we also discuss approaches on how the firms’ engagement could be further leveraged and expanded.
Given the increasing internationalisation of higher education, universities compete more and more not only for national but even more for international students. Selecting the best candidates from the pool of international applicants is a challenge. In our study, we analysed which criteria are best to predict the academic performance of students coming from different countries with different education systems, using different grade point average (GPA) standards. Using an administrative data set from an International Business programme at a German university of applied sciences, we explored the predictive power of adjusted high school GPA, IQ test result, interview score and first year grades in English, maths, and statistics.