Conceptualizing Corruption in Public Private Partnerships

Public Organization Review - This article conceptualizes the vulnerability of the different stages of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) models for corruption against the backdrop of contract theory,...     

Aus dem Büro in den Wald

CHANGE OR DIE. The competitiveness of business companies continuously demands innovative ideas and the willingness to implement these from executive managers. Thereby their own personal needs are often neglected. The consequences range from stress and overload up to burnout symptoms. To support an appropriate handling of the imposed work load by managers, a scientifically grounded stress-tolerance-training will be designed and evaluated. For the first time, certain outdoor exercises will be used specifically among conventional elements as active experiences of challenges outside the office can deeply strengthen the constructive handling of stressful situations.     

Shrinkage averaging estimation

We discuss the impact of tuning parameter selection uncertainty in the context of shrinkage estimation and propose a methodology to account for problems arising from this issue: Transferring established concepts from model averaging to shrinkage estimation yields the concept of shrinkage averaging estimation (SAE) which reflects the idea of using weighted combinations of shrinkage estimators with different tuning parameters to improve overall stability, predictive performance and standard errors of shrinkage estimators. Two distinct approaches for an appropriate weight choice, both of which are inspired by concepts from the recent literature of model averaging, are presented: The first approach relates to an optimal weight choice with regard to the predictive performance of the final weighted estimator and its implementation can be realized via quadratic programming. The second approach has a fairly different motivation and considers the construction of weights via a resampling experiment. Focusing on Ridge, Lasso and Random Lasso estimators, the properties of the proposed shrinkage averaging estimators resulting from these strategies are explored by means of Monte-Carlo studies and are compared to traditional approaches where the tuning parameter is simply selected via cross validation criteria. The results show that the proposed SAE methodology can improve an estimators’ overall performance and reveal and incorporate tuning parameter uncertainty. As an illustration, selected methods are applied to some recent data from a study on leadership behavior in life science companies.     

Public-Private Governance Regimes in the Global Sphere

Globally, there are challenges and threats that cannot be targeted by a single actor, even if it may be a national state, legitimized and willing to act. Hence, new collaboration regimes were created: international organizations, but also – formal or informal – cooperations with the private sector. Our paper discusses organization forms of these cooperations or ‘global public private partnerships’ (GPPP) theoretically and outlines framework conditions for the use of these global partnerships. Additionally, the health sector will be tackled exemplarily to delineate in how far GPPP are largely depending on the nature of the good provided.