Carmen Tanner, Bettina Ryf, Martin Hanselmann, Geschützte Werte Skala (GWS): Konstruktion und Validierung eines Messinstrumentes , Diagnostica, Vol. 55 (3), 2009. (Journal Article)
Sacred values (or protected values) (in German: Geschützte Werte, GW) are values that a community treat as absolute, not tradable and exchangeable for other values. To date, no reliable and valid measure of sacred values has been developed. The research presented here was therefore designed to develop a measure of sacred values (German title: Geschützte Werte Skala, GWS) and to provide preliminary tests. Study 1 examined the reliability and validity of the GWS and revealed satisfactory results. In terms of discriminant validity, the results suggest that GW has to be distinguished from attitude importance. Examining various group differences also supported the validity of the scales. In Study 2, a comparison between two extreme groups (proponents and opponents of gene technology) was conducted. These results provided additional evidence for the validity and conceptual differentiation between GW and attitude importance.
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Carmen Tanner, To Act or Not to Act: Nonconsequentialism in Environmental Decision-Making, Ethics & Behavior, Vol. 19 (6), 2009. (Journal Article)
Research on environmental-decision making is usually based on utilitarian models, which imply that
people’s decisions are only influenced by the outcomes. This research provides evidence for values
and moral positions that reflect nonconsequentialist rather than consequentialist views. In doing this,
this article refers to “sacred values,” which are values that are seen as not-substitutable and nontradable.
Two studies were designed to examine evidence for sacred values and their role on act versus
omission choices within the environmental domain. The studies revealed that sacred values were
closely associated with preferences for actions, trade-off reluctance, deontological focus, and position
of moral universalism. The results suggest that it is important to account for sacred values and
nonconsequentialist views in environmental decision-making research. |
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D Brunner, Die Wahrnehmung der Lohndisparität im Unternehmen und deren Wirkung auf die Kündigungsabsicht, Rainer Hampp Verlag, München/Mering, 2009. (Book/Research Monograph)
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Gudela Grote, Management of Uncertainty : Theory and Application in the Design of Systems and Organizations, Springer, Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York, 2009. (Book/Research Monograph)
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Andrea Schenker-Wicki, Maria Olivares, Comment les universités suisses ont-ellesmaîtrisées les réformes de l’enseignement supérieur ces dix dernières années?, La Vie économique (9), 2009. (Journal Article)
Se fondant sur une «analyse d'enveloppement des données» («Data Envelopment Analysis», DEA), le présent article étudie la manière dont a évolué l'efficience des différentes universités suisses de 1999 à 2007 et identifie celles dont la performance a été inférieure aux autres. La plupart des établissements ont bien maîtrisé l'exigeant processus de réforme de la décennie écoulée, malgré quelques difficultés initiales qui ont diminué leur niveau d'efficience. Celui-ci s'est davantage creusé pour les hautes écoles qui ont dû parallèlement mener à bien des restructurations internes et qui ont eu besoin de plus de temps pour parachever leur processus d'adaptation. |
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Andrea Schenker-Wicki, Matthias Inauen, Die vernachlässigte Dimension Innovation-Performance Management Systeme in der Schweizer Unternehmenspraxis, Rechnungswesen und Controlling (3), 2009. (Journal Article)
Umfassende Performance Management Systeme sollen die Implementierung von Strategien in Unternehmen verbessern und die Leistung nachhaltig erhöhen. Wie steht es um den Entwicklungsstand solcher Systeme in der Schweizer Unternehmenspraxis? Die nachfolgende Studie aus dem Jahr 2007 gibt Antworten bezüglich ihrer Ausgestaltung und Verwendung und zeigt Schwachstellen und Verbesserungspotentiale auf. |
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Andriy Bodnaruk, Per Nils Anders Östberg, Does investor recognition predict returns?, Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 91 (2), 2009. (Journal Article)
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Eleftherios Couzoudis, Ansatz zur Berechnung verallgemeinerter Nash-Gleichgewichte mittels Normalisierung, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2009. (Master's Thesis)
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Marius Moisa, Rolf Pohmann, Lars Ewald, Axel Thielscher, New coil positioning method for interleaved transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)/functional MRI (fMRI) and its validation in a motor cortex study, Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (JMRI), Vol. 29 (1), 2009. (Journal Article)
Purpose To develop and test a novel method for coil placement in interleaved transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)/functional MRI (fMRI) studies.Materials and Methods Initially, a desired TMS coil position at the subject's head is recorded using a neuronavigation system. Subsequently, a custom-made holding device is used for coil placement inside the MR scanner. The parameters of the device corresponding to the prerecorded position are automatically determined from a fast structural image acquired directly before the experiment. The spatial accuracy of our method was verified on a phantom. Finally, in a study on five subjects, the coil was placed above the cortical representation of a hand muscle in M1 and the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) responses to short repetitive TMS (rTMS) trains were assessed using echo-planar imaging (EPI) recordings.Results The spatial accuracy of our method is in the range of 2.9 ± 1.3 (SD) mm. Motor cortex stimulation resulted in robust BOLD activations in motor- and auditoryrelated brain areas, with the activation in M1 being localized in the hand knob.Conclusion We present a user-friendly method for TMS coil positioning in the MR scanner that exhibits good spatial accuracy and speeds up the setup of the experiment. The motor-cortex study proves the viability of the approach and validates our interleaved TMS/fMRI setup. |
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Marc Chesney, Enjeux et conséquences de l’utilisation de l’anglais pour les études d’économie et de gestion à l’université, 2009. (Other Publication)
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Antonio Rangel, Ian Michael Krajbich, Colin Camerer, J O Ledyard, Using Neural Measures of Economic Value to Solve the Public Goods Free-Rider Problem, Science, Vol. 326 (5952), 2009. (Journal Article)
Every social group needs to decide when to provide public goods and how to allocate the costs among its members. Ideally, this decision would maximize the group’s net benefits while also ensuring that every individual’s benefit is greater than the cost he or she has to pay. Unfortunately, the economic theory of mechanism design has shown that this ideal solution is not feasible when the group leadership does not know the values of the individual group members for the public good. We show that this impossibility result can be overcome in laboratory settings by combining technologies for obtaining neural measures of value (functional magnetic resonance imaging–based pattern classification) with carefully designed institutions that allocate costs based on both reported and neurally measured values. |
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Colin Camerer, Ian Michael Krajbich, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Natalie Denburg, Economic games quantify diminished sense of guilt in patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex, The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 29 (7), 2009. (Journal Article)
Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) impairs concern for other people, as reflected in the dysfunctional real-life social behavior of patients with such damage, as well as their abnormal performances on tasks ranging from moral judgment to economic games. Despite these convergent data, we lack a formal model of how, and to what degree, VMPFC lesions affect an individual’s social decision-making. Here we provide a quantification of these effects using a formal economic model of choice that incorporates terms for the disutility of unequal payoffs, with parameters that index behaviors normally evoked by guilt and envy. Six patients with focal VMPFC lesions participated in a battery of economic games that measured concern about payoffs to themselves and to others: dictator, ultima- tum, and trust games. We analyzed each task individually, but also derived estimates of the guilt and envy parameters from aggregate behavior across all of the tasks. Compared with control subjects, the patients donated significantly less and were less trustworthy, and overall our model found a significant insensitivity to guilt. Despite these abnormalities, the patients had normal expectations about what other people would do, and they also did not simply generate behavior that was more noisy. Instead, the findings argue for a specific insensitivity to guilt, an abnormality that we suggest characterizes a key contribution made by the VMPFC to social behavior. |
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Colin Camerer, Ming Hsu, Ian Michael Krajbich, Chen Zhao, Neural response to reward anticipation under risk is nonlinear in probabilities, The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 29 (7), 2009. (Journal Article)
A widely observed phenomenon in decision making under risk is the apparent overweighting of unlikely events and the underweighting of nearly certain events. This violates standard assumptions in expected utility theory, which requires that expected utility be linear (objective) in probabilities. Models such as prospect theory have relaxed this assumption and introduced the notion of a “probability weighting function,” which captures the key properties found in experimental data. This study reports functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data that neural response to expected reward is nonlinear in probabilities. Specifically, we found that activity in the striatum during valuation of monetary gambles are nonlinear in probabilities in the pattern predicted by prospect theory, suggesting that probability distortion is reflected at the level of the reward encoding process. The degree of nonlinearity reflected in individual subjects’ decisions is also correlated with striatal activity across subjects. Our results shed light on the neural mechanisms of reward processing, and have implications for future neuroscientific studies of decision making involving extreme tails of the distribution, where probability weighting provides an explanation for commonly observed behavioral anomalies. |
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Colin Camerer, Min Jeong Kang, Ming Hsu, Ian Michael Krajbich, George Loewenstein, Samuel McClure, Joseph Tao-yi Wang, The Wick in the candle of learning: Epistemic curiosity activates reward circuitry and enhances memory, Psychological Science, Vol. 20 (8), 2009. (Journal Article)
Curiosity has been described as a desire for learning and knowledge, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We scanned subjects with func- tional magnetic resonance imaging while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions was correlated with activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in anticipated reward. This finding led to a behavioral study, which showed that sub- jects spent more scarce resources (either limited tokens or waiting time) to find out answers when they were more curious. The functional imaging also showed that curiosity increased activity in memory areas when subjects guessed incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory enhancement was confirmed in a behavioral study: Higher curiosity in an initial session was correlated with better recall of surprising answers 1 to 2 weeks later. |
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Margit Osterloh, Bruno Frey, Das Peer Review System auf dem Prüfstand, Die Illusion der Exzellenz. Lebenslügen der Wissenschaftspolitik., 2009. (Journal Article)
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Markus Ludwig, Volatility Modeling with Neural Networks, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2009. (Master's Thesis)
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Katrin Hummel, Advance Pricing Agreements, Zeitschrift für Controlling, Vol. 21 (7), 2009. (Journal Article)
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Katrin Hummel, Catharina Kriegbaum-Kling, Stefan Schuhmann, Verrechnungspreise bei TRUMPF unter betriebswirtschaftlichen und steuerlichen Gesichtspunkten, In: Erfolgreiche Steuerung- und Reportingsysteme in verbundenen Unternehmen, Stuttgart, p. 145 - 155, 2009. (Book Chapter)
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Katrin Hummel, Catharina Kriegbaum-Kling, Stefan Schuhmann, Verrechnungspreisgestaltung im internationalen Produktionsverbund, Darstellung am Beispiel der Firma TRUMPF, Zeitschrift für Controlling, Vol. 21 (11), 2009. (Journal Article)
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Katrin Hummel, Burkhard Pedell, Verrechnungspreissysteme in der Unternehmenspraxis, Zeitschrift für Controlling, Vol. 21 (11), 2009. (Journal Article)
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