Contributions in Merlin

null

The advances of electronic commerce had an tremendous impact on the media industry already. In this paper we take a closer look on the audio industry and summarize major considerations found in the relating media theoretical literature. This leads to the main topic under study: the much more significant impact mobile commerce might have. We discuss present and future technology options, which could offer new distribution mechanisms as well as significant changes in the underlying value chains. By presenting an existing prototype development for ordering music via air we afterwards even extend the discussion to the consideration of seeing mobiles of third generation networks as a download and distribution devices. From the discussion of optional features of the prototype we return to the general discussion of a relevant subset of open research questions.

Statecharts have evolved into a widely used instrument for specifying system behavior and interaction. Several variants of statecharts have been developed, for example, Harel's original statecharts, UML state machines or derived concepts such as the state machines in RSML. In this paper I investigate how a statechart variant for requirements models should look if we want it to be as simple as possible, easy to understand and well suited for expressing requirements models.

null

Technical documentation is riddled with domain speci?c terminology which needs to be detected and properly organized in order to be meaningfully used. In this paper we describe how we coped with the problem of terminology detection for a speci?c type of document and how the extracted terminology was used within the context of our Answer Extraction System.

In the standard ‘capital asset pricing model’ (CAPM) with a riskless asset we give a sufficient condition for uniqueness. This condition is a joint restriction on the agents’ endowments and their preferences which is compatible with non-increasing absolute risk aversion and which is in particular satisfied with constant absolute risk aversion. Moreover, in the CAPM without a riskless asset we give an example for multiple equilibria even though all agents have constant absolute risk aversion.

Cognitive evaluation theory and its hypothetical construct of intrinsic motivation are enjoying increasing popularity in the fields of business administration and economics. Consequently, intensifying skepticism towards performance incentives and agency theory is postulated. According to cognitive evaluation theory, it is argued that performance pay may undermine an agent's intrinsic motivation. In contradiction to agency theory, the principal might be worse off when providing an incentive contract to the agent than without doing so. Since the contention is substantiated by empirical evidence, it seems worrying enough for further investigation. Restricting attention to performance pay in business corporations, the scope of this article is to evaluate whether agency theory faces an urgent need to incorporate the construct of intrinsic motivation and its ‘hidden costs of reward' as postulated by supporters of the concept. The subsequent analysis reveals good and bad news for agency theory. The bad news is that hidden costs of reward do indeed exist. The good news is that the empirical evidence on undermining effects cannot be interpreted as being contradictory to agency theory. In particular, the antecedents for such effects not only seldomly prevail in business corporations, they are also easily avoidable.

null