Wird die Relevanz von Ertragsteuern für die Unternehmensrechnung nach rechtlichen oder ökonomischen Kriterien beurteilt?

Textbooks in the areas of Management Accounting, Finance and Valuation treat taxes very differently. Finance and Valuation increasingly consider tax effects. Management Accounting considers taxes only if they meet certain legal “cost” criteria. These criteria follow tax law rules, but not economic rules and primarily consider tax effects of the local business tax only. This view is also reflected in recent cost accounting regulations. We present evidence from a survey of managers and chambers of commerce, according to which practitioners’ views of whether the local business tax is a cost are heterogeneous. The majority of managers do not consider the local business tax as a cost and do not pass it on to customers. The chambers of commerce however still consider the local business tax as a cost.     

The no-wait job shop with regular objective: a method based on optimal job insertion

The no-wait job shop problem (NWJS-R) considered here is a version of the job shop scheduling problem where, for any two operations of a job, a fixed time lag between their starting times is prescribed. Also, sequence-dependent set-up times between consecutive operations on a machine can be present. The problem consists in finding a schedule that minimizes a general regular objective function. We study the so-called optimal job insertion problem in the NWJS-R and prove that this problem is solvable in polynomial time by a very efficient algorithm, generalizing a result we obtained in the case of a makespan objective. We then propose a large neighborhood local search method for the NWJS-R based on the optimal job insertion algorithm and present extensive numerical results that compare favorably with current benchmarks when available.     

On reliability estimation based on fuzzy lifetime data

Real lifetime data are never precise numbers but more or less non-precise, also called fuzzy. This kind of imprecision is connected with all measurement results of continuous variables, therefore also with time observations. Imprecision is different from errors and variability. Therefore estimation methods for reliability characteristics have to be adapted to the situation of fuzzy lifetimes in order to obtain realistic results.     

‘I Want to Persuade You!’ – Investigating the effectiveness of explicit persuasion concerning attributes of the communicator and the marketing campaign

In explicit persuasion, the communicator states explicitly a desire to persuade the consumer. By referring to an attributional approach, social engagement was simultaneously explored as a beneficial communicator attribute, while cause-related marketing (CRM) was addressed as a boundary condition. In an experiment, we varied the persuasion strategy (explicit vs. implicit), the communicator’s prior experience with social engagement (yes vs. no), and the specific marketing strategy (CRM vs. non-charity marketing). As expected, in the non-charity marketing condition, explicit (vs. implicit) persuasion was more effective when the communicator had prior experience in social engagement. In the CRM condition, explicit (vs. implicit) persuasion was less effective when the communicator had prior experience in social engagement; when no prior experience was reported, persuasiveness increased.     

Antisemitische Einstellungen in Deutschland Zwischen 1994 und 1998

The paper deals with the problem whether the transformation process in Germany since 1990, the year of unification of East and West Germany, has influenced the cognitive and affective structure as well as the amount of anti-Semitic attitudes. Data on these aspects come from three representative social surveys, conducted in 1994, 1996 and 1998 by three different research institutes. An attempt to cumulate the three data fileds leads to some severe problems, referring to the (in-)comparability of sampling procedures and data collection methods. Depending on the nearly complete absence of equally measured indicators, and of differing operationalizations of the remaining, it was not possible to construct a time series that would contain data on cognitive and affective aspects of anti-Semitism in the period studied. Nevertheless, the overall sample, which included information on 6671 respondents, was used to construct a summated scale of the amount of anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany. The data analysis yields evidence that the amountof anti-Semitic attitudes seems to increase slightly in East and to decrease slightly in West Germany. Results of a multiple regression analysis show that sociodemographic variables — gender, age, formal education, income — effect the amount of anti-Semitic attitudes in both parts of Germany, but differently.