Contributions in Merlin

The objective of this text is to develop the theory of social health insurance (SHI; the expression used especially in the United States is “public health insurance,” which will be viewed as one variant of SHI here). While a good deal is known about the demand and supply of private insurance, the theoretical basis of SHI is much more fragile. Specifically, on the demand side, what are the reasons for social (or public) health insurance to exist, even to dominate private health insurance in most developed countries? With regard to supply, what do we know about the objectives and constraints of SHI managers? Finally, economists can predict properties of the equilibrium characterizing private health insurance (PHI). However, what is the likely outcome (“performance”) of SHI? At the normative level, one may ask, Should the balance be shifted from SHI to PHI?

Matthias Benz and Bruno S. Frey critically examines the theoretical perspective that the corporations should aspire for an uniformly optimal structure of governance structure in "Towards a Constitutional Theory of Corporate Governance." They make a comparative study of the pros & cons of limited constitutional rights to shareholders under the US corporate laws with the extensive constitutional rights under the Swiss corporate laws. They advocate the democratic approach under Swiss law as a better alternative to direct approach of the US that allows shareholders to set up corporate governance according to their preferences.

A central aspect of historical research is to provide explanations for the causes and effects of events that occurred in the past, in particular the Second World War. History can be analyzed and explained from different perspectives. Two such perspectives are considered, the first being the traditional historiographic approach, in which the main emphasis is on the qualitative analysis of various kinds of historical sources and documents, and the second being what we call the financial market approach, a recent methodology for linking significant changes in historical market prices to simultaneously occurring geopolitical events. The fundamental characteristics of the two approaches are identified and compared in answering some important historical questions concerning the Second World War. The financial market approach, as reflected in the secondary market for government bonds, is studied for various countries. Both approaches rely heavily on interpretation – but in different ways. They complement each other in a useful way.

Das vorliegende Papier schlägt eine neue Sicht auf Probleme der Corporate Governance in der Schweiz vor. Es wird analysiert, wie der Unternehmenssektor bezüglich Governance vom politischen Bereich lernen kann. Demokratien haben einzigartige Institutionen der Führung und Kontrolle von Akteuren im öffentlichen Bereich geschaffen, welche neue Einsichten für die Governance von Unternehmen geben können. Drei Bereiche werden diskutiert und konkret auf den Kontext der Schweizer Corporate Governance angewendet: Gewaltenteilung im Unternehmen, kompetitive Wahlen für Kernfunktionen in der Firma, und direkt-demokratische Beteiligungsrechte für Aktionäre.

We propose an approach to build a changeability assessment model for source code entities. Based on this model, we will assess the changeability of evolving software systems. The changeability assessment is based on a taxonomy of more than 30 change types and a classification of these in terms of change significance levels for consecutive versions of software entities. We consider change type propagation on different levels of granularity ranging from method changes to interface and class changes. We claim that this kind of assessment is effective in pointing to potential causes of maintainability problems in evolving software systems.

Query engines for ontological data based on graph models mostly execute user queries without considering any optimization. Especially for large ontologies, optimization techniques are required to ensure that query results are delivered within reasonable time. OptARQ is a first prototype for SPARQL query optimization based on the concept of triple pattern selectivity estimation. The evaluation we conduct demonstrates how triple pattern reordering according to their selectivity affects the query execution performance.

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In diesem Paper wird eine Auszeichnungssprache für multimediale und modularisierte Fallstudien, die in der Wirtschaftsinformatik-Lehre eingesetzt werden, vorgestellt. Während die meisten Fallstudien für eine spezifische Lehr-Lernsituation geschrieben sind, sollen die Fallstudien, wie sie hier beschrieben werden, flexibel und modular für verschiedene Aufgabenstellungen und in unterschiedlichen Lehr-Lern- Szenarien einsetzbar sein. Hierfür ist eine flexible Darstellung der Fallstudien notwendig; sie kann durch die von uns entwickelte Auszeichnungssprache CaseML sicherge- stellt werden.

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