Contributions in Merlin

In this paper, we report on a study to establish process transparency in service encounters of financial advisors and their clients. To support their interaction, we implemented a cooperative software system for tabletops, building on transparency patterns suggested by the literature. In evaluations, however, we found that our design did not improve the perceived transparency and comprehensibility. Introducing the IT artifact into advisory failed to enhance the client?s overall experience and even seemed to negatively influence the client?s perception of the advisory process. Using the representational guidance of depicting the process and its activities as a navigable, interactive map made clients believe that interactions with their advisor were restricted to the system?s functionality, thus expecting that what they see is all they can get.

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Public administrations offer a number of citizen services on their governmental online portals ranging from simple information provision to whole transactions. This integrated service provision is not visible in co-located citizen-administrator encounters. Public administrators fail to adopt the available IT-resources and other media suitably in their task of providing on-site advisory services. Combined with the advancing diffusion of IT in governmental departments, these missing advisors’ skills lead to perceivable decreasing service quality, namely, the individual’s competencies in giving sound advice and being media literate, which have been well discussed in the research literature. However, considering the low quality that citizens attribute to governmental services, the transfer of these findings into the practice of citizen advisory services does not happen.To bridge this gap, we emphasise the interrelations between the advisors’ basic competencies and their media literacy. We identify the prerequisite competencies which public administrators require to provide co-created citizen advisory service while integrating the available media into their advisory activities. We propose a didactical concept of training, divided into a qualification stage and a learning-on-the-job construct to empower advisors to perform IT-supported, value co-created citizen advisory services. We base our work empirically on a qualitative approach: We conducted ten mystery shopping episodes and interviewed nine advisors and 26 citizens in eight municipalities in Germany and one in Switzerland.

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This study tries to exhibit today's new term structure of commodity futures prices and how it affects long only passive investment products, especially Exchange Traded Commodities. Therefore, trying to replicate the nature of ETCs, a long only commodity futures index was computed and analyzed over the time period from 2006 up until 2011, confirming the new negative trend of returns on long only commodity futures strategies. After highlighting the benefits and risks of commodity investing, we focused on the analysis of the three return components of commodity futures indexes, especially the roll yield, which turned out to be the main reason for ETCs underperforming the spot prices of commodities.

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