Linking Human Development and the Financial Responsibility of Regions: Combined Index Proposals Using Methods from Data Envelopment Analysis

Social Indicators Research - Several indicators on human development and capabilities have been introduced in recent decades that measure the absolute level of deprivations and freedoms of people....     

The sociology of intellectuals in the 20th and 21st century

Sociologists have treated intellectuals and their ideas for a long time as mere products of external social structures. Recently, however, researchers shifted their focus to cultural explanations, appreciating more fully the role cultural structures play in shaping their biographical trajectories and success. At the same time, I argue that these theories do not fully integrate the insight of performance theories and focus usually on textual self‐presentation of intellectuals. Although such an approach is valuable, I propose that sociologists should pay attention also to the processes of meaning‐making that make up intellectual appeal on stage. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the sociology of intellectuals has been for too long obsessed with questions of success and prestige, and I propose that sociologists should shift their attention to the underappreciated and marginalised among intellectuals.     

Innovationsverhalten in Familienunternehmen

Family businesses are publicly believed to be highly innovative and to be the “Hidden Champions” of the German industry. In recent times scholars have begun to examine this thesis and have come to starkly opposing results. On the one hand family businesses are attested to have a special ?entrepreneurial “spirit” which makes them highly innovative. On the other hand the lack of separation of ownership and control and insufficient diversification of family-investors are said to lead to less innovation activity. In this study we investigate the innovation activity of 384 German manufacturing firms differing in legal structure, size, age, industry, and—most importantly—in the degree of family ownership, family management and family control. The results of our analysis reveals differentiated results. Fundamentally, family ownership and family management are detrimental to firm innovation, at the same time family control has a positive impact on innovation activities. Our Results point to the fact that owner-managed businesses tend to innovate less due to risk aversion while a focus on controlling instead of managing a corporation by the owning family lead to an increase in innovations.     

The interplay between psychometric and sociometric data and the willingness to adopt innovations

Due to high failure rates of new products, marketers are seeking ways to actively manage the diffusion of innovations. It is well accepted that individuals, who exert a remarkably strong influence on others and are usually called opinion leaders, play an important role in the diffusion process. In marketing, such opinion leaders are typically identified by self-designation, which can be biased. A second option to identify opinion leaders is the use of sociometric data which becomes increasingly available. In this paper we examine the effect of social position on the perceived opinion leadership and the resulting behavioral intention in terms of adoption behavior. In an empirical study, we examine the adoption of a new drug called “Byetta” and find that sociometric opinion leadership is an antecedent of the psychometric characteristic. Our results also confirm that such opinion leaders are more likely to adopt innovations. We also find that opinion seekers, individuals who often sought information or opinions from interpersonal sources, can be more easily identified with psychometric data. They are more restrictive in terms of adoption. Interestingly, both types are active as market mavens and thus may either advocate the adoption of the innovation or may be frankly conservative regarding the new product adoption. If opinion seekers can, however, be persuaded to adopt the innovation, they may also serve as an important multiplier. This has several implications for pharmaceutical firms that try to optimize their sales force—influencing opinion leaders may indeed start and fasten the adoption process of innovative products. But it is also necessary to allay opinion seekers’ doubts since they might slow down the adoption process. The identification of opinion leaders might not only be based on difficult to obtain psychometric data, but also on sociometric data from social networks, which is becoming more and more available.     

On k-th record times,record values and their moments

We give new formula for moments of k-th record values in terms of Stirling numbers of the first kind. In particular, the formulae allow to derive the explicit formulae for moments of k-th lower record values from exponential distribution which have not been known yet. Moreover, some interesting identities involving harmonic numbers are also obtained as corollaries to presented results.     

On the complete convergence for randomly indexed partial sums and the limit behaviour of a sequence of quantiles

This note contains result on the complete convergence of randomly indexed partial sums of independent non-identically distributed random variables. We use them to investigate the limit behaviour of quantiles of a sample with a random numbers of items.     

A nonparametric test for a constant correlation matrix

We propose a nonparametric procedure to test for changes in correlation matrices at an unknown point in time. The new test requires constant expectations and variances, but only mild assumptions on the serial dependence structure, and has considerable power in finite samples. We derive the asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis of no change as well as local power results and apply the test to stock returns.     

Optimal replacement strategies in network infrastructures under quality penalties

As a consequence of liberalization, electric utilities have developed different asset management strategies with the aim of reducing total maintenance costs by prolonging replacement cycles. A cost-minimizing network operator has to optimize the trade-off between costs for early replacement and quality penalties he faces in the case of outages (due to a resulting higher number of failures). The basic purpose of this paper is to identify the optimal decisions for a network operator under output-based quality regulation and to determine the main drivers for his decisions. In order to derive general insights, an analytical framework is chosen for this paper. This work builds on the foundations of optimal maintenance and replacement strategies as developed across Operations Research, Production Economics and Engineering Production Theory. As main results we are able to analytically derive optimal replacement strategies for network components depending on the characteristics of their failure distributions linked to the equipment’s cost, respective replacement cost, and quality penalties.