Contributions in Merlin

In 2021 more than half of U.S. IPOs were SPACs, and more than a third of the companies that went public had chosen a de-SPAC transaction over a traditional IPO. However, the hot Wall Street trend ended soon after its emergence. Investors burnt their fingers, and sponsors walked away with huge profits. The SEC intervened with restrictive regulatory scrutiny to protect the investors. However, increasing the liability, improving disclosure, and ultimately enhancing the SPAC’s structure will not eliminate the risk of SPACs as an investment vehicle.

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The battlefield has evolved into a mobile and dynamic scenario where soldiers and heterogeneous military equipment exchange information in real-time and wirelessly. This fact brings to reality the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT). Wireless communications are key enablers for the IoBT, and their management is critical due to the spectrum scarcity and the increasing number of IoBT devices. In this sense, IoBT spectrum sensors are deployed on the battlefield to monitor the frequency spectrum, transmit over unoccupied bands, intercept enemy transmissions, or decode valuable information. However, IoBT spectrum sensors are vulnerable to heterogeneous cyber-attacks, and their accurate detection is an open challenge in the literature. Thus, this paper presents SpecForce, a security framework for IoBT spectrum sensors based on device behavioral fingerprinting and ML/DL techniques. SpecForce considers heterogeneous data sources to detect the most dangerous and recent cyber-attacks affecting IoBT spectrum sensors, such as impersonation, malware, and spectrum sensing data falsification attacks. To evaluate the SpecForce detection performance, it has been deployed on 25 real spectrum sensors, and results show almost perfect detection for the three cyber-attack families previously mentioned.

We assess how investors’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for sustainable investments responds to the social impact of those investments, using a framed field experiment. While investors have a substantial WTP for sustainable investments, they do not pay significantly more for more impact. This also holds for dedicated impact investors. When investors compare several sustainable investments, their WTP responds to relative, but not to absolute, levels of impact. Regardless of investments' impact, investors experience positive emotions when choosing sustainable investments. Our findings suggest that the WTP for sustainable investments is primarily driven by an emotional, rather than a calculative, valuation of impact.

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The rapid development of the “sharing economy” enables the effective and efficient coordination, acquisition, distribution, and sharing of many kinds of different resources. Beyond the well-known sharing economy services such as Airbnb and Uber, an increasing number of local sharing initiatives have established online platforms and services to facilitate access to the shared resources within their local communities. With the automation and complexity of digital tools and platforms, and the specific challenges of online sharing communities, users’ trust and reliance become increasingly critical for successful use and adoption. In our qualitative study in collaboration with two industry partners (a local sharing community and a large infrastructure provider in Switzerland), we unpack various perspectives of interpersonal trust in the community and the systems trust of the supporting technologies. On this basis, we elicited a set of design opportunities for future platforms in the context of sharing economy.

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Professeur de finances mathématiques à l’Université de Zurich et auteur du livre «La crise permanente», l’économiste Marc Chesney ne fait pas vraiment confiance aux banques systémiques. La faute, selon lui, à la Finma, à la BNS et à la majorité de l’élite politique qui, après l’effondrement d’UBS en 2008, ont pudiquement fermé les yeux sur les dérives des grandes banques.

Ongoing debates about ethical guidelines for autonomous vehicles mostly focus on variations of the ‘Trolley Problem’. Using variations of this ethical dilemma in preference surveys, possible implications for autonomous vehicles policy are discussed. In this work, we argue that the lack of realism in such scenarios leads to limited practical insights. We run an ethical preference survey for autonomous vehicles by including more realistic features, such as time pressure and a non-binary decision option. Our results indicate that such changes lead to different outcomes, calling into question how the current outcomes can be generalized. Additionally, we investigate the framing effects of the capabilities of autonomous vehicles and indicate that ongoing debates need to set realistic expectations on autonomous vehicle challenges. Based on our results, we call upon the field to re-frame the current debate towards more realistic discussions beyond the Trolley Problem and focus on which autonomous vehicle behavior is considered not to be acceptable, since a consensus on what the right solution is, is not reachable.

Shortseller haben unter Firmenlenkern oft keinen sehr guten Ruf - und auch viele Anleger dürften ihnen gegenüber eher negativ eingestellt sein. Denn die Leerverkäufer verdienen ihr Geld mit der Wette auf fallende Aktienkurse und sorgen mitunter selbst dafür, dass sich der Anteilsschein eines Unternehmens in die gewünschte Richtung bewegt. Doch laut Experten erfüllen sie mit ihrem Vorgehen eine wichtige Funktion am Markt.