Fokus, Fokus, Fokus? Zur künftigen Rolle der au?eruniversit?ren Wirtschaftsforschungsinstitute

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Dealing with the White Death: Avalanche Risk Management for Traffic Routes

This article discusses mitigation strategies to protect traffic routes from snow avalanches. Up to now, mitigation of snow avalanches on many roads and railways in the Alps has relied on avalanche sheds, which require large initial investments resulting in high opportunity costs. Therefore, avalanche risk managers have increasingly adopted organizational mitigation measures such as warning systems and closure policies instead. The effectiveness of these measures is, however, greatly dependent on human decisions. In this article, we present a method for optimizing avalanche mitigation for traffic routes in terms of both their risk reduction impact and their net benefit to society. First, we introduce a generic framework for assessing avalanche risk and for quantifying the impact of mitigation. This allows for sound cost-benefit comparisons between alternative mitigation strategies. Second, we illustrate the framework with a case study from Switzerland. Our findings suggest that site-specific characteristics of avalanche paths, as well as the economic importance of a traffic route, are decisive for the choice of optimal mitigation strategies. On routes endangered by few avalanche paths with frequent avalanche occurrences, structural measures are most efficient, whereas reliance on organizational mitigation is often the most appropriate strategy on routes endangered by many paths with infrequent or fuzzy avalanche risk. Finally, keeping a traffic route open may be very important for tourism or the transport industry. Hence, local economic value may promote the use of a hybrid strategy that combines organizational and structural measures to optimize the resource allocation of avalanche risk mitigation.     

Ein „Piefke“ in Tirol – interkulturelle Unterschiede zwischen Nachbarn

The author describes his experiences as a German foreigner in Tyrol – as a “Piefke” in Austrian slang. Different typical characteristics and habits result in several ambiguities in the relationship of the Tyrolean towards the German foreigners. To know this mentality is a basic requirement to deal with it and to encounter the otherness of the others with respect. Therefore, the problems of intercultural communication become apparent also in this neighborhood between Austrians and Germans.     

Race, ethnicity, and depression in Canadian society

This study examines racial/ethnic differences in mental health using data from the 1996-97 National Population Health Survey. Three hypotheses are tested. First, a socioeconomic hypothesis tests if differences in family income, education, and low income explain racial/ethnic mental health variation. Second, a social resources hypothesis tests if differences in social support explain racial/ethnic mental health variation. Finally, an interaction hypothesis tests if mental health variation stems from specific interactions of race/ethnicity with economic and social factors. Although there are socioeconomic, social resource, and interaction effects, the analysis shows that they do not fully explain racial/ethnic mental health variation. Overall, our results suggest that East and Southeast Asian, Chinese, South Asian, and black Canadians have better mental health than English Canadians. Jewish Canadians have poorer mental health than English Canadians. All other racial/ethnic groupings have similar mental health as English Canadians.     

Homogeneity testing in a Weibull mixture model

The mixed Weibull distribution provides a flexible model to analyze random durations in a possibly heterogeneous population. To test for homogeneity against unobserved heterogeneity in a Weibull mixture model, a dispersion score test and a goodness-of-fit test are investigated. The empirical power of these tests is assessed and compared on a broad range of alternatives. It comes out that the dispersion score test, as it is based on a Weibull-to-exponential transformation, often breaks down. A simple new procedure is introduced for Weibull mixtures in scale, which combines the dispersion score test and the goodness-of-fit test. The new test is compared with several known procedures and shown to have a good overall power. To detect mixtures in shape and scale, a goodness-of-fit test is recommended. This research has been partially sponsored by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. We thank Lars Haferkamp for computational assistance and Wilfried Seidel and a referee for their remarks on alternative test procedures.     

Asymptotic Properties of Generalized Multivariate Rank Statistics

This article discusses generalization of the well-known multivariate rank statistics under right-censored data case. Empirical process representation used to get the generalization. The marginal distribution functions are estimated by Kaplan–Meier estimators. Sufficient conditions for asymptotic normality of the generalized multivariate rank statistics under independently right censored data are specified. Several auxiliary results on sup-norm convergence of Kaplan–Meier estimators in randomly exhausting regions are given too.