Contributions in Merlin

Garnishment of wage as a way for creditors to enforce payment by unwilling or insolvent debtors, while very common in Germany and Switzerland, is not very successful. Based on a dynamic model of debtor behaviour, this paper explores two alternatives of reform. One is to reduce the rate of garnishment, which at present amounts to 100 percent of the wage income exceeding a defined subsistence level, thus probably destroying incentives to work. According to model simulations, reducing the rate of garnishment is likely to result in an increase of labour supply but a decrease of garnishment revenue per period. Second, the introduction of a debt release as it exists in the United States would have an ambiguous effect on labour supply. While providing debtors with a fresh start, it would result a partial loss for creditors. A Pareto improvement thus does not seem to be possible. When taxpayers as an involved third party are taken into account, however, a potential Pareto improvement appears attainable through debt release.

Recently, the 'new economic geography' literature has developed as a theory of the emergence of large agglomerations which relies on increasing returns to scale and transportation costs. This literature builds on diverse intellectual traditions. It combines the insights of traditional regional science with those of modern trade theory and thus attempts to provide an integrative approach to interregional and international trade. The paper surveys this literature and discusses its relation to earlier approaches to similar topics.

Logic-based answer extraction techniques present a solution to retrieve and mark those exact passages in a document that directly answer a natural language query. In contrast to pure information retrieval techniques that treat content words as isolated terms, answer extraction techniques exploit syntactic information in a document to a certain degree and consider semantic relations between function words and content words. Minimal logical forms (MLF) - specially designed for this task - represent the semantic relations of the sentences and point to the textual information in the document. MLFs consist of existentially closed atomic formulas and use reification of objects, eventualities and properties as a building principle. On account of their simple design MLFs proved to be computationally tractable and incrementally extensible in our answer extraction system ExtrAns. Unresolved structural ambiguities are represented by alternative MLFs. The theorem prover of ExtrAns finds all proofs for an (ambiguous) query and considers the frequency of a part of a MLF used during the proof as an indicator for the retrieval relevance. The actual retrieval relevance is reflected by selective highlighting in the document. The more often a part of a MLF that points to a specific phrase of a sentence is used for the proof, the more intensively this phrase is marked by the colouring scheme.

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A critical need for many organizations in the next century will be the ability to quickly develop innovative business processes to take advantage of rapidly changing technologies and markets. Current process design tools and methodologies, however, are very resource-intensive and provide little support for generating (as opposed to merely recording) new design alternatives. This paper describes the Process Recombinator, a novel tool for generating new business process ideas by recombining elements from a richly structured repository of knowledge about business processes. The key contribution of the work is the technical demonstration of how such a repository can be used to automatically generate a wide range of innovative process designs. We have also informally evaluated the Process Recombinator in several field studies, which are briefly described here as well.