Contributions in Merlin

Pension plans in Switzerland favor active management over indexing to implement their strategic asset allocation. Empirical surveys show, however, that their success has been below expectations, as the median performance of Swiss pension plans in domestic and international equities is below market indices even gross of fees. The results of this paper's survey across decisionmakers of Swiss pension plans sheds some light on why active management is still so popular across Swiss pension plans. On average the participants in the sample are prone to the better-than-average-effect. A majority expects their managers and their overall pension plan to outperform the other survey participants in the future. The subjective perceptions of the own skill level relative to the competitors can explain the popularity of active management across Swiss pension plans.

Leasinggeschäfte sind gemäss Swiss GAAP FER nach ihrem wirtschaftlichen Gehalt und nicht nach Massgabe der rechtlichen Form anzusetzen. Die Problematik liegt dabei in der Beurteilung der rechtlichen und wirtschaftlichen Sachverhalte, die in Swiss GAAP FER 13 explizit geregelt wird. Der Beitrag zeigt, unter welchen Voraussetzungen und auf welche Art eine Bilanzierung von Leasinggeschäften im Rahmen der Swiss GAAP FER vorzunehmen ist und welche bilanziellen Konsequenzen sich ergeben.

We analyze the effect of national diversity on sports team performance. Due to language barriers, we expect the team’s productivity to decrease with the number of nationalities, but that the introduction of further nations and further aspects of different cultures might lead to additional skills within the team. We test our hypothesis on a seasonal individual team basis. We do not find that national diversity among team members significantly influences a team’s performance. However, we find that the influence of national diversity on team performance depends on the nature of the underlying task.

The travel industry has been subject to change in the past few years because of the develop- ment of the internet. As part of the study ""The travel agency of the future""we look for new possibilities to make the phone consultancy more attractive using a groupware system. In this work we are going to illustrate the fundamentals for designing such a system. By means of stakeholder interviews, literature research and the analysis of existing systemswewill gather the requirements for such a system. The focus of our work is a co-browsing system, which allows the collaborative and visual support of a counseling interview. In order to test the user acceptance, we test the requirements based on a developed prototype in several stages.

This paper uses a country-level panel data set to test the hypothesis that the United States biases its human rights reports of countries based on the latters' strategic value. We use the difference between the U.S. State Department's and Amnesty International's reports as a measure of U.S. “bias.” For plausibly exogenous variation in strategic value to the U.S., we compare this bias between U.S. Cold War (CW) allies to non-CW allies, before and after the CW ended. The results show that allying with the U.S. during the CW significantly improved reports on a country's human rights situation from the U.S. State Department relative to Amnesty International.

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Data provenance is information that describes how a given data item was produced. The provenance includes source and intermediate data as well as the transformations involved in producing the concrete data item. In the context of a relational databases, the source and intermediate data items are relations, tuples and attribute values. The transformations are SQL queries and/or functions on the relational data items. Existing approaches capture provenance information by extending the underlying data model. This has the intrinsic disadvantage that the provenance must be stored and accessed using a different model than the actual data. In this paper, we present an alternative approach that uses query rewriting to annotate result tuples with provenance information. The rewritten query and its result use the same model and can, thus, be queried, stored and optimized using standard relational database techniques. In the paper we formalize the query rewriting procedures, prove their correctness, and evaluate a first implementation of the ideas using PostgreSQL. As the experiments indicate, our approach efficiently provides provenance information inducing only a small overhead on normal operations.

Semantic Web technologies promise great benefits for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Knowledge Management (KM) in general when data needs to be exchanged or integrated. However, the Semantic Web also introduces new issues rooted in its distributed nature as multiple ontologies exist to encode data in the Personal Information Management (PIM) domain. This poses problems for applications processing this data as they would need to support all current and future PIM ontologies. In this paper, we introduce an approach that decouples applications from the data representation by providing a mapping service which translates Semantic Web data between different vocabularies. Our approach consists of the RDF Data Transformation Language (RDTL) to define mappings between different but related ontologies and the prototype implementation RDFTransformer to apply mappings. This allows the definition of mappings that are more complex than simple one-to-one matches.

Many applications of spatio-temporal databases require support for sequenced spatio-temporal (SST) aggregation, e. g., when analyzing traffic density in a city. Conceptually, an SST aggregation produces one aggregate value for each point in time and space.This paper is the first to propose a method to efficiently evaluate SST aggregation queries for the COUNT, SUM, and AVG aggregation functions. Based on a discrete time model and a discrete, 1.5 dimensional space model that represents a road network, we generalize the concept of (temporal) constant intervals towards constant rectangles that represent maximal rectangles in the space-time domain over which the aggregation result is constant. We propose a new data structure, termed SST-tree, which extends the Balanced Tree for one-dimensional temporal aggregation towards the support for two-dimensional, spatio-temporal aggregation. The main feature of the Balanced Tree to store constant intervals in a compact way by using two counters is extended towards a compact representation of constant rectangles in the space-time domain. We propose and evaluate two variants of the SST-tree. The SSTT-tree and SSTH-tree use trees and hashmaps to manage spacestamps, respectively. Our experiments show that both solutions outperform a brute force approach in terms of memory and time. The SSTH-tree is more efficient in terms of memory, whereas the SSTT-tree is more efficient in terms of time.