Contributions in Merlin

In this paper we argue that the dominant shareholder-centered model of cor-porate governance does not take into account two interrelated developments: the increasing threat to corporate legitimacy in a globalized economy and the growing complexity and dynamics of corporate environments, that potential-ly diminish the efficiency of corporations. Indeed, this model of corporate governance can be regarded as a potential threat to corporate legitimacy and efficiency. To tackle both problems of organizational legitimacy and effi-ciency we suggest to make corporate governance subject to and complement it by democratic processes based on stakeholder participation and communi-cation. So it can serve as a counterweight and corrective to the dominant economic logic underlying corporate structures and processes.

In this paper we study the implications of valuing health in an otherwise standard real business cycle model. We contrast the model predictions over the business cycle with the corresponding data counterparts. We find that health can improve the predictions of the standard real business cycle model. In particular, the benchmark model with health improves the predictions in terms of the comovements between investment and market hours relative to output. Considering health in the environment also increases the volatility of consumption, investment and market hours while slightly reducing output volatility. In terms of health observables the benchmark model is able to account for practically all comovement between health outcomes and health expenditures as well as with output.

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CEO succession is one of the most important landmarks in the life of an organization. The post-succession period, following the appointment of a new CEO, is critical for an organization as both it and the new CEO have to adjust to each other in order to insure organizational performance. By reviewing the literature, this paper identifies the fundamental processes, the contextual factors and the outcomes which shape the post-CEO-succession period. Our review suggests that new CEOs have to manage both a strategic change process and a leader integration process during this period. We conclude this paper by identifying avenues of future research.

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This paper studies profit-maximizing sampling and pricing of paid content for online news publishers. The key feature of the model is the twofold role of free samples which allows publishers to generate advertising revenues and simultaneously disclose editorial quality to potential subscribers. Taking customers' prior beliefs about article qualities into account and employing Bayesian updating, we derive the subscription demand and characterize the optimal number of articles offered for free as well as the subscription price for the content behind the paywall. Considering two cases where free sampling aims to persuade either all consumers to subscribe or only those with the highest willingness-to-pay, we find that is optimal for the publisher to offer a larger number of free samples when consumers underestimate product quality.