Estimation of a linear model under microaggregation by individual ranking

Summary Microaggregation by individual ranking is one of themost commonly applied disclosure control techniques for continuous microdata. The paper studies the effect of microaggregation by individual ranking on the least squares estimation of a multiple linear regression model. It is shown that the traditional least squares estimates are asymptotically unbiased. Moreover, the least squares estimates asymptotically have the same variances as the least squares estimates based on the original (non-aggregated) data. Thus, asymptotically, microaggregation by individual ranking does not result in a loss of efficiency in the least squares estimation of a multiple linear regression model. I thank Hans Schneeweiss for very helpful discussions and comments. Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Science Foundation) is gratefully acknowledged.     

Sustainability—a theoretical idea or a practical recipe?

In this paper, the notion of sustainability as a general regulative idea is distinguished from sustainable development as a more concrete concept leading to practical actions. After that, different economic meanings of sustainable development are discussed, and a concept of critical sustainability is proposed especially with respect to the problem of climate change. Maintaining critical crash barriers and bottlenecks presupposes, however, demanding, continuous improvements in energy efficiency. After discussing problems of decision theory in cases of uncertainty, which is constitutive for climate change, the links between intragenerational and intergenerational justice are analyzed, and by using Barry's notion of justice and Goodin's concept of vulnerability, two possible positions of the general idea of fairness inherent in sustainable development are presented. We conclude by shortly sketching the notion of sufficiency as an additional supplementary sustainability strategy in cases where efficiency improvements based on innovation are less than sufficient for securing the (energetic) fundaments of economic activity and human life.     

Testing noninferiority in three‐armed clinical trials based on likelihood ratio statistics

Clinical noninferiority trials with at least three groups have received much attention recently, perhaps due to the fact that regulatory agencies often require that a placebo group be evaluated along with a new experimental drug and an active control. The authors discuss likelihood ratio tests for binary endpoints and various noninferiority hypotheses. They find that, depending on the particular hypothesis, the test reduces asymptotically either to the intersection‐union test or to a test which follows asymptotically a mixture of generalized chi‐squared distributions. They investigate the performance of this asymptotic test and provide an exact modification. They show that this test considerably outperforms multiple testing methods such as the Bonferroni adjustment with respect to power. They illustrate their methods with a cancer study to compare antiemetic agents. Finally, they discuss the extension of the results to other settings, such as Gaussian endpoints.     

A Tale of Integration? The Migrant Wealth Gap in Austria

European Journal of Population - We investigate how previous generations of migrants and their children integrated into Austrian society, as measured by their wealth ownership. Using...     

Social Entrepreneurship: An exploratory citation analysis

Research on Social Entrepreneurship became a growing field of interest during the past decades. However, as the heterogeneity of investigated topics is rather large the purpose of this contribution is to provide an overview of the current state of research on Social Entrepreneurship. In doing so previous research is structured to identify major contributions and thereby key discussion lines within this field. Based on a bibliometric citation analysis of 129 core papers and 5,228 cited references, five topic clusters are identified within the field of Social Entrepreneurship: 1) Definitions and conceptual approaches, 2) Impetus, 3) Personality, 4) Impact and performance, and 5) Future research agenda. By reflecting the literature of each discussion line, a framework for the advancement of Social Entrepreneurship research is provided.     

Voluntary agreements between competitors: trick or truth?

Voluntary agreements in which competitors commit to common goals are important tools for corporate social responsibility. After entering into a commitment, however, competitors often have incentives to behave opportunistically. This is possible because voluntary agreements are not enforced by external sanctions. We present the results of an exploratory laboratory experiment that investigates the behavior of competitors engaging in commitments and consequently the effectiveness of such measures. We find that introducing a publicly visible commitment device that is implemented with a low probability mitigated conflict between competitors substantially. Our results show that subjects’ inclination to defect one another after competition was mainly driven by the opponents’ refusal to enter into a commitment. In our experiment, a commitment was not used to trick the competitor into a false sense of security but rather to convey the truth about subjects’ moral behavior. We conclude that the efforts of (non-)governmental institutions to reinforce trust between competitors may be of substantial value.     

On the integration of due date setting and order release control

This paper calls for a paradigm shift in the production control literature away from assuming due date setting and order release are two independent decision levels. When order release is controlled, jobs do not enter the shop floor directly but are retained in a pre-shop pool and released to meet certain performance targets. This makes the setting of accurate planned release dates – the point at which jobs transition from the pool to the shop floor – a key consideration when setting due dates. We develop a new approach to estimating planned release dates to be embedded in the Workload Control (WLC) concept. Our approach is unique as it anticipates the release decision as part of the due date setting procedure. This makes a second independent release decision superfluous and avoids a major cause of tardiness – deviations between (i) the planned release date used when calculating the delivery time allowance and (ii) the actual, realised release date. Simulation is used to compare the performance of WLC using two decision levels with the new single-level approach where the release decision is anticipated when setting the due date. Performance improvements are shown to be robust to uncertainty in processing time estimates.