Wertschöpfungs- und Werteinforderungsnormen im Rahmen der „Plural Form Governance“: Ein empirischer Test in Key-Account- und Nicht-Key-Account-Dyaden

In order to secure against uncertainty in vertical business relationships, actors dispose of different mechanisms. This article focuses on the influence of contracts, specific investments, value-creating norms, value-claiming norms, and trust on customer satisfaction and commitment. An empirical study lead to the result that governance mechanisms have high explanatory power for the outcome variables. Value-creating norms and trust play a key role. In addition, the article differentiates between key account and non key account relationships. It shows that only value-creating norms contribute to the explanation of both outcome variables across both types of relationships.     

Coaching von etablierten Professor/innen

Coaching for professors is increasingly gaining in importance at German universities. Especially the more established professors are challenging to reach. This article identifies and analyzes the established professors as a target group for business coaching in academia. Unique requirements concerning their management tasks and professional role are presented. Basic reasons for coaching of established professors are demonstrated in three characteristic case studies from practical experience.     

Kunst und Preise

How are prices established in the market for contemporary art? Buyers in this market are confronted with fundamental uncertainty since “quality” is only difficult to determine and the development of prices is non-predictable. Since the emergence of a market for contemporary art presupposes at least the possibility for intentional rational decision-making, this uncertainty must be reduced. We argue that the value of a piece of art or an artist is established in an intersubjective process of granting reputation by experts and institutions in the field of art. This is achieved primarily through the institutions of the art market and the training of artists, i.e. through galleries, curators, critics, art dealers, journalists, collectors, and art schools. They participate jointly in the making of artistic reputation of the artist’s work that provides, in turn, the basis for the determination of its economic value. For testing this hypothesis we assembled and analyzed two datasets with data on the biographies of artists and prices for their works.     

Mortality in the two Germanies in 1986 and trends 1976–1986

By using the new analysis programme LIFETIME the mortality data of the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR are compared by age, sex and cause of death. The data submitted to the WHO were used for this purpose. Within the period from 1976 to 1986 life expectancy has risen in the Federal Republic of Germany, whereas in the GDR it increased to a minor extent only, so that the gap between the two parts of Germany has clearly enlarged. This enlarged gap in life expectancy largely depends on a higher mortality in the GDR due to diseases of the circular system and the respiratory organs, external influences and ‘other’ causes of death. The last-mentioned two groups also ‘contain’ the normally separatedly reported causes of death ‘cirrhosis of the liver’, ‘suicide’, ‘accidents’, and some diseases of the digestive system. These causes of death probably have gained a certain weight — like in other Eastern European countries — so that their evidence has been undesirable due to political reasons. In 1976 the GDR still reported these causes of death separately.     

Numerical estimation of a probability measure

An iterative solution to the problem of maximizing a concave functional ø defined on the set of all probability measures on a topological space is considered. Convergence of this procedure and a rapidly converging algorithm are studied. Computational aspects of this algorithm along with the ones developed earlier by Wynn, Fedorov, Atwood, Wu and others are provided. Examples discussed are taken from the area of mixture likehoods and optimal experimental design.     

From Linear to Semidefinite Programming: An Algorithm to Obtain Semidefinite Relaxations for Bivalent Quadratic Problems

In this paper, we present a simple algorithm to obtain mechanically SDP relaxations for any quadratic or linear program with bivalent variables, starting from an existing linear relaxation of the considered combinatorial problem. A significant advantage of our approach is that we obtain an improvement on the linear relaxation we start from. Moreover, we can take into account all the existing theoretical and practical experience accumulated in the linear approach. After presenting the rules to treat each type of constraint, we describe our algorithm, and then apply it to obtain semidefinite relaxations for three classical combinatorial problems: the K-CLUSTER problem, the Quadratic Assignment Problem, and the Constrained-Memory Allocation Problem. We show that we obtain better SDP relaxations than the previous ones, and we report computational experiments for the three problems.     

Validation of the theory: satisfaction with time-delimited daily occupations

OBJECTIVES: This study examines the construct validity of the theory Satisfaction with time-delimited daily occupations (STO). The outcome of STO concerns how individuals perceive their occupational health status and to what degree the individuals experience satisfaction with their performance of time-delimited daily occupations. DESIGN: The "known-groups technique" was used for discriminating the occupational health status among four groups (n = 147) of full-time workers or sick-listed participants. A mailed ActivityLog-sheet was used for recording their occupational health 24 times during 24 hours. The computerized program ActivityLog was used for data registration. The data analysis were accounted by ANOVA, Tukey's HSD test with significance level of p < 0,05 using the SPSS program. RESULTS: The occupational health status did not differ significantly among the four groups, but the number of records concerning work (p = 0,00) and care (p = 0,02) time-delimited daily occupations were significantly different. The patterns of occupational health status during the 24-hour-records were visually separated for the four groups. CONCLUSION: There is need for refining the STO theory and then for undertaking further investigations of the STO construct validity.