Ideen und Interessen. Zum Verhältnis von Religion und wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung

While concentrating on the rise of modern capitalism, Weber’s seminal studies have little to say about the impact of religions on contemporary economic development. The paper comments about recent approaches to find an answer to the questions Weber left open. If one disregards a priori constructions of culturalist and rational-choice-theories, these approaches end up again in restating the circular relationship between ideas and interests showed already by Weber, albeit clearly with a higher emphasis on interests. However, the author argues that it would be premature to interpret this result simply as a confirmation of Weber’s “disenchantment” thesis. Rather, it goes back to the transformation of the economy itself into an entity that preaches “values”, proclaims “visions” and in this sense develops an affinity to religious movements. The author deepens this view by referring to Marx’ and Polanyi’s interpretation of capitalism as a system of disembedded markets. The disembedding of markets gives rise to a historically new potential of social uncertainty which the actors need to cope with, thereby developing symbolisms showing striking affinities with religious forms. Nevertheless, the analogies between capitalism and religion are limited.     

Experimental Evidence Against the Paradigm of Mortality Risk Aversion

This article deals with the question of how societal impacts of fatal accidents can be integrated into the management of natural or man‐made hazards. Today, many governmental agencies give additional weight to the number of potential fatalities in their risk assessments to reflect society's aversion to large accidents. Although mortality risk aversion has been proposed in numerous risk management guidelines, there has been no evidence that lay people want public decisionmakers to overweight infrequent accidents of large societal consequences against more frequent ones of smaller societal consequences. Furthermore, it is not known whether public decisionmakers actually do such overweighting when they decide upon the mitigation of natural or technical hazards. In this article, we report on two experimental tasks that required participants to evaluate negative prospects involving 1–100 potential fatalities. Our results show that neither lay people nor hazard experts exhibit risk‐averse behavior in decisions on mortality risks.     

An Alternative Theoretical Explanation and Empirical Insights into Overordering Behavior in Supply Chains*

The beer game and the supply line underweighting theory are central to our knowledge of decision making in dynamic environments such as supply chains. The core of these theories is that people are incapable of recognizing the pipeline inventory and this is the main cause of overordering and dysfunctional behavior. This article identifies lacunae in the theoretical and empirical foundations of extant literature and proposes an alternate explanation, a “correction model,” explaining why overreactions occur. We adopt a multi‐method research design, comprising a field case study and laboratory experiments, to ground our findings. [Submitted: July 19, 2010. Revisions received: December 8, 2010; March 14, 2011. Accepted: March 28, 2011.]     

Ein Optimierungsmodell für die wöchentliche Tourenplanung unter Einbeziehung der EU-Sozialvorschriften

The Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 and the Directive 2002/15/EC concern the driving and working hours as well as breaks and rest periods of drivers in road transportation. Although the regulations have an enormous effect on vehicle routing and scheduling, only parts of them have been integrated in few solution approaches and some vehicle routing models so far. This paper starts with the presentation of the restrictions of the relevant European Community regulations. Then, a mixed integer linear programming model for the vehicle routing problem with time windows including all rules of the regulations for a planning horizon of an entire week is presented. The model is solved with CPLEX and the impact of the regulations on the resulting vehicle schedules is analyzed by means of computational experiments.     

Corporate social responsibility: a strategic and profitable response to entry?

This paper investigates whether an incumbent has an incentive to introduce corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities only as a response to entry by a competitor, i.e., the incumbent would eschew CSR if left uncontested. We assume that the entrant cannot provide CSR at least at the outset for two reasons: (1) it would not be credible due to its lack of recognition and (2) due to high fixed cost to pay e.g., for licensing. More precisely, this paper shows that monopolistic firms can have indeed the incentive to introduce CSR activities only as a response to entry. Therefore, increased competition can turn a firm “green”, providing a “win–win” for business as well as for the environment.