Warum Kunden in Online-Communities innovieren: Ergebnisse einer Motivanalyse

For companies, online communities (OCs) have become a potent means of rapidly and easily identifying user needs as a result of the social and technological changes within the Web 2.0. Some OCs even are suited ideally for integration into NPD as they frequently have innovative members. Despite their growing relevance, however, user innovation activities within OCs still are underexplored. The members’ motivations to innovate and contribute to OCs in particular are part of a young line of research requiring further investigation. This research provides an in-depth netnographic analysis of innovative, privately operated OCs dedicated to tangible consumer products. Most fundamentally, we differentiate 1) motives to join OCs, 2) motives to innovate, and 3) motives to publish innovations in OCs. This is the first study to categorize the motives of innovative OC members depending on the stages of their membership as well as situational factors. Our results support companies in understanding and classifying the members’ motives in independent customer OCs. This is a precondition for the development of specific incentives that stimulate innovative user activities in OCs and contribute to customer integration.     

Inter-generational effects of disability benefits: evidence from Canadian social assistance programs

Individuals with disabilities face greater challenges in the labor market than able-bodied individuals, and a growing body of research is finding that their children also tend to have more developmental problems than the children of able-bodied parents. Can transfer payments help reduce this gap? In this paper, we present the first evidence on how parental disability benefits affect the well-being of children. Using changes in real benefits under ten disability benefit programs in Canada as an identification strategy and Statistics Canada’s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) as the data source on child outcomes, we find strong evidence that higher benefits lead to improvements in children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development, as measured by math scores in standardized tests, hyperactive symptoms, and emotional anxiety behavior. The effect is larger on children with a disabled mother than on those with a disabled father.     

Stress,Coping, and Mood Among Latino Adolescents: A Daily Diary Study

The current study examines whether daily coping moderates the effects of daily stress on same‐day mood and next‐day mood among 58 Latino adolescents (M_age = 13.31; 53% male). The daily diary design capitalized on repeated measurements, boosting power to detect effects and allowing for a robust understanding of the day‐to‐day experiences of Latino adolescents. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that on days when youth reported higher levels of peer and academic stress, they also reported more negative moods. However, only poverty‐related stress predicted mood the following day. Engagement coping buffered the effect of poverty‐related stress on next‐day negative and positive mood, while disengagement exacerbated the effects of academic and peer stress. The need for interventions promoting balanced coping repertoires is discussed.     

Free triples,large indifference classes and the majority rule

We study classes of voting situations where agents may exhibit a systematic inability to distinguish between the elements of certain sets of alternatives. These sets of alternatives may differ from voter to voter, thus resulting in personalized families of preferences. We study the properties of the majority relation when defined on restricted domains that are the cartesian product of preference families, each one reflecting the corresponding agent’s objective indifferences, and otherwise allowing for all possible (strict) preference relations among alternatives. We present necessary and sufficient conditions on the preference domains of this type, guaranteeing that majority rule is quasi-transitive and thus the existence of Condorcet winners at any profile in the domain, and for any finite subset of alternatives. Finally, we compare our proposed restrictions with others in the literature, to conclude that they are independent of any previously discussed domain restriction.     

Perspectives on determinants of social welfare: introduction

In this commentary we discuss and elaborate on a number of topics that have been raised in the articles in this issue. The first topic treated is causality. All scientists are aware of the difficulties of making causal inferences in non‐experimental settings, and in many cases arguments are forwarded that support the causal interpretation of the reported relationships. Questions of bi‐directional causality, nonlinear relationships and the importance of omitted variables are discussed, as is the supporting evidence that in some cases comes from experimental studies. The second topic is the level of analysis employed in the empirical analyses and the difficulty of interpreting findings at a different level of aggregation than the level applied in these analyses. In this context, the importance of applying a person‐orientation is pointed out to ensure that the findings are interpretable at the level of the single individual. Even in individual‐level analyses, this can be problematic if one relies on group statistics produced within a variable‐oriented framework. The third topic concerns how to handle interactions and nonlinear relationships. The fourth topic concerns the importance of improving measurements so that a good correspondence is achieved between them and the theoretical conceptualisations. The fifth and last topic is concerned with the argument that different ways of investigating the generalisability of the results to different populations should be tried.     

Probabilistic allocation rules and single-dipped preferences

We consider the problem of allocating an infinitely divisible endowment among a group of agents with single-dipped preferences. A probabilistic allocation rule assigns a probability distribution over the set of possible allocations to every preference profile. We discuss characterizations of the classes of Pareto-optimal and strategy-proof probabilistic rules which satisfy in addition replacement-domination or no-envy. Interestingly, these results also apply to problems of allocating finitely many identical indivisible objects – to probabilistic and to deterministic allocation. Received: 23 November 1998/Accepted: 20 October 2000     

Social Protection and Health: Experiences in Uganda

There is an interesting and continuing debate on the nature and role of social protection in poverty reduction. Within the health sector, discussion has focussed on the drawbacks associated with fee exemption schemes and community‐based health insurance, with much less attention paid to the policy option of abolishing user fees. This paper reviews empirical evidence on the impact of the Government of Uganda's decision in 2001 to abolish user fees for health services. The paper finds that this policy intervention has had a significant positive impact on health‐seeking behaviour in Uganda and concludes that this policy measure can make an important contribution towards a more ‘promotional’ policy approach to social protection.     

'Doing Motherhood': some experiences of mothers with physical disabilities

In this paper, we discuss the experiences of physically disabled mothers. We interviewed 30 women in the age group 28-49 with medical diagnoses such as: multiple sclerosis, neuromuscular diseases, cerebral palsy and spinal cord injury Becoming a mother implied for many 'capturing' a gender or 'recapturing' a lost gender. They women felt they had to go to great lengths to 'present' themselves and their children as managing 'normally' in order to be accepted as 'ordinary' mothers. Eventually, they feared that their children might be taken away from them if they did not live up to other people's expectations. One possible explanation for what they experienced as other people's scepticism might be that disabled people on the whole are primarily still looked upon as being dependent on other people's help and care. In short, they are often looked upon by professionals and lay people as receivers, and not as carers.     

the Impact of Personality and Social Support on Mental Health for Female Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis

The relationship between personality traits, social support and mental health problems was studied in 138 female patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Structural equation modelling showed that instrumental support was uncorrelated with mental health problems. The effect of emotional support on mental health was spurious and due to personality traits. Companionship had a direct effect on mental health in addition to partially mediating the effects of both extra-version and neuroticism. However, the total effect of social support was moderate compared to a strong influence of neuroticism. The therapeutical implications are discussed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.