Digital Finance and FinTech: current research and future research directions

Since decades, the financial industry has experienced a continuous evolution in service delivery due to digitalization. This evolution is characterized by expanded connectivity and enhanced speed of information processing both at the customer interface and in back-office processes. Recently, there has been a shift in the focus of digitalization from improving the delivery of traditional tasks to introducing fundamentally new business opportunities and models for financial service companies. Digital Finance encompasses a magnitude of new financial products, financial businesses, finance-related software, and novel forms of customer communication and interaction—delivered by FinTech companies and innovative financial service providers. Against this backdrop, the research on finance and information systems has started to analyze these changes and the impact of digital progress on the financial sector. Therefore, this article reviews the current state of research in Digital Finance that deals with these novel and innovative business functions. Moreover, it gives an outlook on potential future research directions. As a conceptual basis for reviewing this field, the Digital Finance Cube, which embraces three key dimensions of Digital Finance and FinTech, i.e., the respective business functions, the technologies and technological concepts applied as well as the institutions concerned, is introduced. This conceptualization supports researchers and practitioners when orientating in the field of Digital Finance, allows for the arrangement of academic research relatively to each other, and enables for the revelation of the gaps in research.     

Are sponsors blamed for edging off? Consumer reactions to sponsorship terminations

Firms regularly terminate sponsorships, even without publicly known misconduct by the sponsee such as athlete doping. Consumer reactions to these sponsorship terminations by firms have not been studied despite being a regular occurrence. Using a set of experimental studies, this paper analyzes consumer reactions to these sponsorship terminations (i.e., early and non-renewal) that were not caused by a sponsee’s misconduct, the underlying process that causes the reactions, and the role of several moderating factors (trust, power balance, and locus of control). Our findings reveal that sponsorship terminations have a negative effect on sponsors’ brand images—particularly early terminations that occur before the end of a contract—because consumers perceive these sponsorship terminations as unfair. The results also suggest that a termination is particularly harmful for the sponsor’s perceived fairness if the sponsor is powerful and if the termination decision is under the sponsor’s control. Further, the termination effect is particularly strong for firms that consumers trust.     

Building a Values‐Informed Mental Model for New Orleans Climate Risk Management

Individuals use values to frame their beliefs and simplify their understanding when confronted with complex and uncertain situations. The high complexity and deep uncertainty involved in climate risk management (CRM) lead to individuals’ values likely being coupled to and contributing to their understanding of specific climate risk factors and management strategies. Most mental model approaches, however, which are commonly used to inform our understanding of people's beliefs, ignore values. In response, we developed a “Values‐informed Mental Model” research approach, or ViMM, to elicit individuals’ values alongside their beliefs and determine which values people use to understand and assess specific climate risk factors and CRM strategies. Our results show that participants consistently used one of three values to frame their understanding of risk factors and CRM strategies in New Orleans: (1) fostering a healthy economy, wealth, and job creation, (2) protecting and promoting healthy ecosystems and biodiversity, and (3) preserving New Orleans’ unique culture, traditions, and historically significant neighborhoods. While the first value frame is common in analyses of CRM strategies, the latter two are often ignored, despite their mirroring commonly accepted pillars of sustainability. Other values like distributive justice and fairness were prioritized differently depending on the risk factor or strategy being discussed. These results suggest that the ViMM method could be a critical first step in CRM decision‐support processes and may encourage adoption of CRM strategies more in line with stakeholders’ values.     

Unterstützung dualer Karrieren im Spitzensport

The longstanding focus of elite athletes on top sports entails disadvantages hampering their later entry to the world of work. In order to successfully contribute their outstanding personality traits to a later job, athletes are thus particularly required to care for their employability. Contributing to this, the author carried out a competency balancing with top athletes. This coaching method significantly decreased the athletes’ need for self-information. Evaluation further showed indications of increased clarity and certainty of occupational goals as well as work satisfaction.     

Was ist interkulturelles Coaching? 20 Jahre und (k)ein bisschen Klarheit

Looking at the articles and books published in German and English it becomes obvious that intercultural coaching has become a field of expertise just as leadership or conflict coaching. However, the developments in the scholarly debate about intercultural and cross-cultural communication have not expanded into coaching. To avoid constrictions coaching needs to be combined systematically with a dynamic and cohesive notion of culture. Inspired by the theories of transformative learning and the sociology of knowledge three methodological meta-perspectives are introduced to reflect and use cultures in coaching. A practical coaching example illustrates how these culture reflexive perspectives can be handled. Lastly, coaching itself needs to be considered as a culture bound format.     

What innovation managers really do: a multiple-case investigation into the informal role profiles of innovation managers

Over the last fifteen years companies tended to formalise their innovation management activities and to establish formal jobs like the innovation officer, the network manager or the innovation manager. Knowledge of the informal role profiles of these formal roles is still rare. HR and R&D Managers do not know which informal role profile might suit them best, thus having difficulties to assign the best candidates for jobs in innovation management. Researchers cannot help to resolve the problem. Our research answers the question what innovation managers really do, by analysing their tasks, skills and traits, theoretically based on informal role theories. Furthermore, we will analyse how these characteristics change with company size. To provide answers to our research questions we choose a multiple-case study approach. We found, among others, that innovation managers fulfil the role of the relationship and process promotor or a combination of both with the champion, but we also found, that the innovation manager’s roles profile becomes fuzzier with shrinking company size. Our results have practical implications for top management and also HR and R&D managers, enabling them to better select and steer employees in innovation management. Researchers will be able to build on our results because we offer a comprehensive understanding of the informal role profiles of innovation managers based on informal role theories.     

The mixed evacuation problem

A dynamic network introduced by Ford and Fulkerson is a directed graph with capacities and transit times on its arcs. The quickest transshipment problem is one of the most fundamental problems in dynamic networks. In this problem, we are given sources and sinks. Then the goal of this problem is to find a minimum time limit such that we can send the right amount of flow from sources to sinks. In this paper, we introduce a variant of this problem called the mixed evacuation problem. This problem models an emergent situation in which people can evacuate on foot or by car. The goal is to organize such a mixed evacuation so that an efficient evacuation can be achieved. In this paper, we study this problem from the theoretical and practical viewpoints. In the first part, we prove the polynomial-time solvability of this problem in the case where the number of sources and sinks is not large, and also prove the polynomial-time solvability and computational hardness of its variants with integer constraints. In the second part, we apply our model to the case study of Minabe town in Wakayama prefecture, Japan.     

Online MapReduce processing on two identical parallel machines

In this work we investigate the online over-list MapReduce processing problem on two identical parallel machines, aiming at minimizing the makespan. Jobs are revealed one by one, and each job consists of one map task and one reduce task. The map task can be arbitrarily split and processed on both machines simultaneously, while the reduce task has to be processed on a single machine and it cannot be started unless the map task has been completed. We first show that the general case of the problem reduces to the classical two machine online scheduling model with an optimal competitive ratio of 3/2. For a special case where the map task is at least as long as the reduce task, we prove that no online algorithm can be less than 4/3-competitive. An optimal Greedy algorithm with a matching competitive ratio is proposed as well.     

Deterministic construction of compressed sensing matrices based on semilattices

A central problem in compressed sensing is the construction of sensing matrices. In this paper, we show how to construct sensing matrices by using semilattices, and give many examples of sensing matrices constructed from specific semilattices. Moreover, we show that the new construction for some examples with small parameters gives better sensing matrices compared with previously known constructions.     

Planning personnel retraining: column generation heuristics

Retraining of staff is a compulsory managerial function in many organisations and often requires planning for a large number of employees. The large scale of this problem and various restrictions on the resultant assignment to classes make this planning challenging. The paper presents a complexity analysis of this problem together with linear and nonlinear mathematical programming formulations. Three different column generation based optimisation procedures and a large neighbourhood search procedure, incorporating column generation, are compared by means of computational experiments. The experiments used data typical to large electricity distributors.