Management und Marketing ferngesteuerter Dienstleistungen: Konzeptionelle Verortung, betriebswirtschaftliche Herausforderungen und k??nftige Forschungsaufgaben

The possibilities of service delivery have expanded vastly over the last years, mainly due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies. Modern forms of data transmission enable a technologically mediated delivery of a broad spectrum of services over great distances. These ??remote services?? gain more and more importance in business, yet have only attracted little attention in academic research so far. This overview article captures the state-of-the-art of research in this field and starts laying the groundwork for a thorough discussion of economically relevant aspects of remote services. Based on a definition and conceptualization of this new service type that considers current service typology, this article identifies specific challenges for management and marketing of remote services and deduces an agenda for future research.     

Adaptive graph‐based multiple testing procedures

Multiple testing procedures defined by directed, weighted graphs have recently been proposed as an intuitive visual tool for constructing multiple testing strategies that reflect the often complex contextual relations between hypotheses in clinical trials. Many well‐known sequentially rejective tests, such as (parallel) gatekeeping tests or hierarchical testing procedures are special cases of the graph based tests. We generalize these graph‐based multiple testing procedures to adaptive trial designs with an interim analysis. These designs permit mid‐trial design modifications based on unblinded interim data as well as external information, while providing strong family wise error rate control. To maintain the familywise error rate, it is not required to prespecify the adaption rule in detail. Because the adaptive test does not require knowledge of the multivariate distribution of test statistics, it is applicable in a wide range of scenarios including trials with multiple treatment comparisons, endpoints or subgroups, or combinations thereof. Examples of adaptations are dropping of treatment arms, selection of subpopulations, and sample size reassessment. If, in the interim analysis, it is decided to continue the trial as planned, the adaptive test reduces to the originally planned multiple testing procedure. Only if adaptations are actually implemented, an adjusted test needs to be applied. The procedure is illustrated with a case study and its operating characteristics are investigated by simulations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Die Wirkung ausländischer Direktinvestitionen auf die Beschäftigung im Heimatmarkt: Eine empirische Analyse des deutschen Mittelstands

Outbound FDI of German SMEs is often assumed to have a negative impact on domestic employment due to job replacement into low wage countries. In this context research often disregards, that FDI can be of horizontal or vertical nature and therefore has different effects on domestic employment. We analyze domestic employment effects using a sample of 1.106 German SMEs. The results show, that a differentiated view is appropriate and necessary to generate a more complete picture of the effects of FDI on job development in the domestic market. Whereas horizontal FDI has complementary effects on domestic employment, vertical FDI is linked to substitutional employment effects.     

Testing for intercept‐scale switch in linear autoregression

Autoregressive models with switching regime are a frequently used class of nonlinear time series models, which are popular in finance, engineering, and other fields. We consider linear switching autoregressions in which the intercept and variance possibly switch simultaneously, while the autoregressive parameters are structural and hence the same in all states, and we propose quasi‐likelihood‐based tests for a regime switch in this class of models. Our motivation is from financial time series, where one expects states with high volatility and low mean together with states with low volatility and higher mean. We investigate the performance of our tests in a simulation study, and give an application to a series of IBM monthly stock returns. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 40: 427–446; 2012 © 2012 Statistical Society of Canada     

The transition to tertiary education and parental background over time

We analyze the role of parental background for transitions to tertiary education in Germany and answer three questions: (a) does the relevance of parental background shift from short-term (contemporary income) to long factors (ability, parental education) at higher levels of education? (b) Did the impact of parental background on participation in tertiary education change over time? (c) Are there different patterns by sex and region? Parental income significantly affects transitions to tertiary education. Its impact seems to have lost magnitude over time. We find no clear differences by sex and larger parental income effects in West than in East Germany.     

Citizenship and postmodernity

Citizenship has to be taught in the UK as a new strand in the school curriculum. This citizenship initiative is intended to replace a general feeling of political apathy among the young, yet the initiative itself is leading to concern about what citizenship is and how it can be taught. Citizenship teaching may fail if there is too great a dissonance between the sincerity of citizenship and postmodern scepticism. Hermeneutical philosophy can provide an antidote to doubt and connect the various levels of meaning in our lives: the personal, the local and the global. Citizenship with a global component can succeed by enabling us to compare ourselves with countries where postmodern doubt is not prevalent, as shown in a collaborative project with the Department for International Development.     

Who “They” Are Matters: Immigrant Stereotypes and Assessments of the Impact of Immigration

We investigate the relationship between stereotypes of immigrants and assessments of the impact of immigration on U.S. society. Our analysis exploits a split‐ballot survey of registered voters in Ohio, who were asked to evaluate both the characteristics of one of four randomly assigned immigrant groups and perceived impacts of immigration. We find that associations between impact assessments and stereotypes of Middle Eastern, Asian, and European immigrants are weak and fully attenuated by control covariates. By contrast, this relationship for Latin American immigrants is strong and robust to controls, particularly in the areas of unemployment, schools, and crime. Our findings suggest that public views of the impacts of immigration are strongly connected to beliefs about the traits of Latin American immigrants in particular.