Contributions published at Department of Business Administration (Egon Franck)

Social media open up new possibilities for firms to exploit information from various external sources. Does this information help firms to become more innovative? Combining firm-level survey data with information from firms’ Facebook pages, we study the role that firms’ and users’ activities on Facebook play in the innovation process. We find that firms’ adoption of a Facebook page as well as feedback from users are positively and significantly related to product innovations. Our results withstand a large set of robustness checks, including estimations that take potential endogeneity of firms’ Facebook use as well as unobserved heterogeneity into account. Analyzing the content of firm posts and user comments reveals that Facebook adoption is only correlated with product innovations if firms and users actively participate in a discussion, especially when engagement is above-average and comes from both sides.

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Eine wissenschaftliche Studie in den USA zeigte: Die Einführung von Facebook führte zu einer deutlichen Verschlechterung der mentalen Gesundheit bei Jugendlichen. Nicht nur für die bevorstehende Weihnachtszeit empfiehlt sich daher die Pflege persönlicher Kontakte.

Recent strides in economic complexity have shown that the future economic development of nations can be predicted with a single “economic fitness” variable, which captures countries' competitiveness in international trade. The predictions by this low-dimensional approach could match or even outperform predictions based on much more sophisticated methods, such as those by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, all prior works in economic complexity aimed to quantify countries' fitness from World Trade export data, without considering the possibility to infer countries' potential for growth from alternative sources of data. Here, motivated by the long-standing relationship between technological development and economic growth, we aim to forecast countries' growth from patent data. Specifically, we construct a citation network between countries from the European Patent Office (EPO) dataset. Initial results suggest that the H-index centrality in this network is a potential candidate to gauge national economic performance. To validate this conjecture, we construct a two-dimensional plane defined by the H-index and GDP per capita, and use a forecasting method based on dynamical systems to test the predicting accuracy of the H-index. We find that the predictions based on the H-index-GDP plane outperform the predictions by IMF by approximately 35%, and they marginally outperform those by the economic fitness extracted from trade data. Our results could inspire further attempts to identify predictors of national growth from different sources of data related to scientific and technological innovation.

Social networking sites have become a predominant means of communication across the globe. Activities on these sites generate massive amounts of personal information and raise concerns about its potential abuse. Means designed to protect the user’s privacy and prevent exploitation of confidential data often go unused. In this study, we draw on the theory of planned behavior, a reasoned action approach, to explain intentions to adopt privacy behaviors on social networking sites, with a focus on Twitter users. Consistent with the theory, an online survey of Twitter users (n = 1,060) found that instrumental and experiential attitudes and descriptive and injunctive subjective norms regarding these behaviors were direct predictors of intentions. Perceived behavioral control had a moderating effect, such that subjective norm was a better predictor of intentions for participants high as opposed to low in perceived control. We briefly discuss the implications of these results for developing theory-driven and evidence-based interventions to promote privacy behavior.

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Transparenz hat gesellschaftlich an Bedeutung gewonnen und vor allem Organisationen sehen sich in der Pflicht, diesen Erwartungen gerecht zu werden. Im Fokus dieses Beitrags steht der an Organisationen gerichtete, zunehmende Anspruch der Transparenz. Anhand zweier empirischer Fälle wird analysiert, wie Organisationen auf diese Erwartungen reagieren. Indem wir zwischen vier Arten von Transparenz unterscheiden, Transparenz, Intransparenz, Enthüllung und Nicht-Transparenz, zeigen wir, dass die gesteigerte Erwartung von Transparenz Organisation in der Unsicherheitsabsorption behindert. Aus diesem Grund ist die Erfüllung von Transparenzansprüchen für Organisationen ein Problem. Stattdessen bedienen sich Organisationen nebst hinreichend bekannter Darstellung technischer und quantifizierter Kennzahlen, der symbolischen Darstellung, die selektiert und kuratiert erfolgt. Abschliessend werden Effekte der organisationalen Realisierung für die Organisationsgesellschaft diskutiert, die einerseits zu einer Stärkung der gesellschaftlichen Transparenzerwartung beitragen, andererseits in variantenreichen und manchmal konträren Realisierungen dieser Erwartungen resultieren.

Art. 958c OR enthält in Abs. 1 Ziff. 1-7 die nicht abschliessende Aufzählung der Grundsätze ordnungsmässiger Rechnungslegung (GoR). Im Folgenden wird der Grundsatz der Vollständigkeit (Ziff. 2) näher erläutert. Die Zulässigkeit stiller Reserven ist grundsätzlich kein Verstoss gegen das Gebot der Vollständigkeit.

Superstars in European football are exceptionally talented and enjoy celebrity status. While second-tier stars, i.e., players barely below superstar status, lack popularity, their marginal contribution to team performance on the pitch relative to that of superstars is unknown. Relying on league-specific preseason market value distributions to define superstars and second-tier stars, we compare the marginal contributions of superstars and second-tier stars to team performance on the pitch in the top five European football leagues. Examining the impact of unexpected injury-related absences, we find that second-tier stars’ marginal contribution is at least equal to that of superstars. Thus, European football players with the highest market values do not outperform second-tier stars in terms of their marginal contributions to team performance on the pitch. These findings have important implications for football managers, as the players with arguably the highest costs for clubs do not contribute accordingly to short-run sportive success.

Introduction: The model proposed by Rothbart is one of the most frequently used models to describe children’s temperament. However, the structure of temperamental traits in children is not unambiguous. We examine this structure in children from 3 to 10 years of age using two different measures in a less often studied cultural context (i.e., central Europe), and using a recently developed and still less common approach to study the internal structure of scales (i.e., network psychometrics). Material and methods: This paper examines the structure of temperamental dimensions in children using two different measures – the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ) and the Temperament in Middle Childhood Questionnaire (TMCQ) – in two studies conducted on children aged 4-7 years (N = 178; CBQ) and aged 7-10 years (N = 189; TMCQ). We verified the structural validity of these measures with a bootstrapped exploratory graph analysis, which represents the network psychometric approach. Results: Network psychometric analysis supported differentiation of three factors of temperamental traits in both groups of children. In addition, the construct validity of these instruments was supported through correlations of the temperament factors measured by the CBQ and the TMCQ with Emotionality, Activity, Sociability, and Shyness scales measured with the EAS Temperament Survey; and through confirmation of expected gender differences in the CBQ and TMCQ factors. Conclusions: Our findings support a three-factor solution of temperamental traits in children representing Negative Affectivity, Effortful Control, and Surgency.

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Les buts explicitement prévus dans le CO et dans la Ioi sur la fusion peuvent rendre nécessaire d’établir des comptes intermédiaires. L’art. 960f nCO précise que ces comptes doivent être établis conformément aux prescriptions relatives aux comptes annuels. Ils doivent contenir au moins le bilan, le compte de résultat et l’annexe. Des simplifications ou réductions sont admissibles pour autant que la représentation de la marche des affaires ne s’en trouve pas altérée. L’article décrit les éléments dont il faut tenir compte lors de l’application du nouvel article de loi.

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Art. 958c OR enthält in Abs. 1 Ziff. 1-7 die nicht abschliessende Aufzählung der Grundsätze ordnungsmässiger Rechnungslegung (GoR). Im Folgenden wird der Grundsatz der Klarheit und Verständlichkeit näher erläutert.