Contributions in Merlin

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Warum sind manche Mitarbeitende empfänglicher für Korruptionsmöglichkeiten? Eine Studie zeigt, dass individuellen Werte und Normen dabei eine wichtige Rolle spielen. Korruption, definiert als der Missbrauch anvertrauter Macht zum privaten Nutzen und Vorteil, ist auch heute immer noch ein weit verbreitetes und anhaltendes Problem, das sowohl wirtschaftlichen, politischen als auch sozialen Schaden anrichtet. Korruption ist aber auch ein Problem für Organisationen, da Verstöße gegen Antikorruptions-Standards zu schwerwiegenden rechtlichen und finanziellen Konsequenzen führen. So musste beispielsweise 2017 der Triebwerke- hersteller Rolls Royce nicht nur rund 764 Millionen Euro an Behörden in Brasilien, Großbritannien, und den USA an Strafen bezahlen, sondern sah auch den eigenen Markennamen unter der Korruptionsaffäre leiden. Und allein im Jahr 2020 mussten u.a. der europäische Luft- und Raumfahrtkonzern Airbus ca. vier Milliarden Euro und die schweizerische Novartis rund 1,3 Milliarden Euro an Strafen für Korruption bezahlen. Trotz hoher Strafen scheint die Zahl an Korruptionsverfahren nicht abzureißen. Allein in den USA eröffnet das Justice Department jeden Monat um die 30 neue Korruptionsverfahren. Es ist deswegen nicht überraschend, dass sich Forscherinnen und Forscher verschiedenster Disziplinen wie Ökonomie oder Psychologie intensiv mit den Determinanten von korruptem Verhalten auseinandersetzen. Die ökonomische Forschung etwa, die das Phänomen Korruption vorzugsweise auf der Makroebene analysiert, hat wesentlich zu einem besseren Verständnis beigetragen, warum sich Länder, Kulturen, oder Unternehmen bezüglich des Levels an Korruption unterscheiden. Was bisherige Forschung jedoch kaum thematisiert hat: Warum unterscheiden sich Individuen innerhalb desselben Unternehmenskontextes in Bezug auf ihr korruptes Verhalten? Tatsächlich lässt sich in der Unternehmenspraxis beobachten, dass in einem Umfeld, in dem Korruption bereits verbreitet ist oder starke finanzielle Anreize für Korruption vorhanden sind, die einen Mitarbeitenden sich mehr oder rasch anpassen und ebenfalls korruptes Verhalten zeigen. Andere Führungskräfte und Mitarbeitende dagegen scheinen deutlich resistenter gegen Korruption zu sein, auch wenn sie dadurch finanzielle Möglichkeiten verpassen. Dies wirft eine sowohl für die Forschung als auch für die Praxis gleichermaßen höchst relevant Frage auf: Wer ist resistenter gegenüber Korruption?

ICT hold significant potential to increase resource and energy efficiencies and contribute to a circular economy. Yet unresolved is whether the aggregated net effect of ICT overall mitigates or aggravates environmental burdens. While the savings potentials have been explored, drivers that prevent these and possible counter measures have not been researched thoroughly. The concept digital sufficiency constitutes a basis to understand how ICT can become part of the essential environmental transformation. Digital sufficiency consists of four dimensions, each suggesting a set of strategies and policy proposals: (a) hardware sufficiency, which aims for fewer devices needing to be produced and their absolute energy demand being kept to the lowest level possible to perform the desired tasks; (b) software sufficiency, which covers ensuring that data traffic and hardware utilization during application are kept as low as possible; (c) user sufficiency, which strives for users applying digital devices frugally and using ICT in a way that promotes sustainable lifestyles; and (d) economic sufficiency, which aspires to digitalization supporting a transition to an economy characterized not by economic growth as the primary goal but by sufficient production and consumption within planetary boundaries. The policies for hardware and software sufficiency are relatively easily conceivable and executable. Policies for user and economic sufficiency are politically more difficult to implement and relate strongly to policies for environmental transformation in general. This article argues for comprehensive policies for digital sufficiency, which are indispensible if ICT are to play a beneficial role in overall environmental transformation.

This paper documents that managers of multinational companies adjust voluntary disclosure after significant events at international subsidiaries. We show an increase in the likelihood and frequency of management forecasts following natural disasters in regions where companies operate subsidiaries. The exogenous and staggered nature of natural disasters as well as our research design choices substantially raise the hurdle for alternative explanations of our result. Further analyses suggest that the effect is particularly strong for companies that rely on equity financing. Our paper contributes to the nascent literature on transmission effects within international business groups.

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This study explores shifts in political trust during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, examining the role that media consumption and threat perceptions played in individuals’ trust in politics. We combine panel surveys taken before and during the first nation-wide lockdown with webtracking data of participants' online behaviour to paint a nuanced picture of media effects during the crisis. Our work has several findings. First, political trust, an attitude known for its stability, increased following lockdown. Second, consumption of mainstream news on COVID-19 directly hindered this increase, with those reading more news having lower over-time trust, while the relatively minor alternative news consumption had no direct effect on political trust. Third, threat perceptions a) to health and b) from the policy response to the pandemic, have strong and opposite effects on political trust, with threats to health increasing trust, and threats from the government policy response decreasing it. Lastly, these threat perceptions condition the effect of COVID-19 news consumption on political trust: perceptions of threat had the power to both exacerbate and mute the effect of media consumption on government trust during the pandemic. Notably, we show that the expected negative effect of alternative news on political trust only exists for those who did not think COVID-19 posed a threat to their health, while public service news consumption reduced the negative effect produced by government threat perceptions. The paper therefore advances our understanding of the nuanced nature of media effects, particularly as relates to alternative media, especially during moments of crisis.

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Face recognition systems are on the rise and are being widely used throughout the industry. With the advance of face recognition systems, more and more adversarial attacks are emerging. Layerwise Origin-Target Synthesis is one such attack in which the image of a source person is iteratively modified so that a face recognition system identifies it as another person. We extend this approach by allowing one input image to mimic multiple targets simultaneously. We further improve the loss function of the approach by including additional components that measure the structural similarity between the original image and the adversarial image. We evaluate our new method quantitatively with experiments and conduct an empirical analysis with 73 participants to investigate the relationship between human perception and similarity metrics. Our results show that we can successfully perform multi-target attacks and keep perturbations minimal. We also show how different source-target constellations affect the quality of adversarial images. Lastly, we demonstrate that the similarity metrics used to measure the size of perturbations are not perfect predictors of human perception.