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Decoding the psychological dimensions of human odor perception has long been a central issue of olfactory research. As odor percepts could not be linked to a few measurable physicochemical features of odorous compounds or physiological characteristics of the olfactory system, odor qualities have often been assessed by perception–based ratings. Although these approaches have been promising, none of the proposed system has sustained empirical validation. In a review of 28 studies, the authors assessed how basic characteristics of study design have been biasing perception–based classification systems: (1) interindividual differences in perceptual and verbal abilities of subjects, (2) stimuli characteristics, (3) approaches of data collection, and (4) methods of data analysis. Remarkably, many of the difficulties in establishing these systems have been rooted in one underlying issue: the puzzling relationship between language and olfaction in general. While the reference from odors to language is weak, the reverse impact of verbal processing on olfaction seems powerful. Odor perception is biased by verbal–semantic processes when cues of an odor's source are readily available from the context. At the same time, olfaction has been characterized as basically sensation driven when this information is absent. The authors examined whether language effects occur when verbal cues are absent and how expectations about an odor's identity shape odor evaluations. Subjects were asked to rate 20 unlabeled odor samples on perceptual dimensions as well as quality attributes and to eventually provide an odor source name. In a subsequent session, they performed the same rating tasks on a set of written odor labels that was compiled individually for each participant. It included both the 20 correct odor names (true labels) and – in any case of incorrect odor naming in the first session – the self–generated labels (identified labels). The authors compared odor ratings to ratings of both types of labels and found higher consistencies between the evaluation of an odor and its identified label than between the description of an odor and its true (yet not associated) label. These results indicate that basic perceptual as well as quality ratings are affected by semantic information about an odor's source – even in absence of source cues. That is, odor sensation may activate a semantic mental representation of an odorous object that affects odor processing and may in turn relate to further multimodal properties. That means, associations between odors and stimuli from other sensory modalities should not only be stable, but these mappings should be mediated by an odor’s identity. The authors asked subjects to visualize their odor associations on a drawing tablet, freely deciding on color and shape. Additionally, they provided a verbal label for each sample. Color mappings were odor-specific, they reflected the imagery of a natural source and seemed to change with assumed odor identity. Shape mappings changed with odor identifications as well, as drawings frequently displayed concrete objects that reflected visual features of an odor's source. The influence of verbal identity codes on quality ratings or crossmodal mappings is rooted in the very same problem that perception–based classification systems have tried to solve – a terminology that relates to abstract mental categories. The less specific we communicate, the more we need to resort to source–related analogies – in scientific endeavors and everyday life alike.
On 25 October 2016, the European Commission presented a proposal for a directive on a Common Corporate Tax Base (CCTB Proposal), which contains a comprehensive concept for the harmonisation of profit calculation regulations within the EU. Against this current background, the objective of the present work is to contribute to the implementation of the CCTB by identifying ambiguities and conceptual weaknesses in the design of the profit determination system of the CCTB Proposal and developing concrete recommendations for action for adjustments in the course of the further legislative procedure. In the first article, selected profit calculation rules of the CCTB Proposal will be analysed in detail and compared with the provisions on profit calculation under German commercial and tax law and the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) recognised across member states. Based on the legal comparison, questions of interpretation and inadequacies of the profit calculation system will be considered and proposals for adjustments to various regulatory areas will be submitted. Furthermore, in the second article, within the framework of a holistic study, expert interviews will be used as an empirical-qualitative research design to generate reliable assessments on the part of the various stakeholder groups affected by the implementation of the future directive or involved in its elaboration. The results show the extent to which the profit determination rules of the CCTB Proposal in their current form are suitable for national and EU-wide implementation and in which areas the various expert groups still see concrete need for adaptation. Based on these expert assessments, the third article finally develops a proposal to reduce the threat of legal uncertainty in interpretation issues criticised by the experts. Based on economic maxims developed by the European Commission and existing accounting principles of the current CCTB Proposal, the EU Accounting Directive and IFRS, a system of specific European tax principles will be developed which could be implemented within the framework of the CCTB Proposal.
The dissertation analyzes the role of large banks in the context of financial (in)stability. Based on the underlying "too big to fail"-problem (TBTF), the three included papers investigate the reasons for the instability of banking systems on a national and international level. Already in advance, but at least since the years 2007/2008 with the escalation of the financial crisis, especially large banks are under critical supervision of regulators and the society. There exist numerous aspects that should to be taken into account when addressing TBTF which complicates the finding of a solution to the problem. In particular, the thesis investigates three major issues in this context: (1) The contribution of the size of a bank to the development of financial crises or the exposure of large banks to systematic risk and contagious spillovers. (2) The spillover effects from one banking system to another and the importance of banks' foreign asset holdings for the transmission of sovereign risk on foreign banks. (3) The impact of the degree of competition in the German banking market on the stability of the banking system.
This paper-based dissertation deals with capital structures and tax policies of German family businesses. Family firms as the predominant company form in Germany are mainly characterized by the overlapping of the two spheres family and business, both having different goal systems and preferences. This also has an impact on decision making with regard to corporate finance including the application of tax avoidance policies. In Germany, bank finance is the dominant financing source for family firms but there is a preference for internal finance since it comes along with more external independency. Extant research usually bases its results on samples of publicly listed companies. These studies come up with different results regarding family firms' actual financing preferences and capture their heterogeneity only to a very little extent. In this light, the present dissertation and its three papers examine different research questions in the context of capital structure decisions and tax avoidance in family firms. All the three papers apply a quantitative empirical research design. The first paper is a comparison between capital structures of family firms and non-family firms. The paper examines differences in bank debt and trade credit ratios. Overall, the findings show that family firms have significantly higher overall and long-term debt levels compared to their non-family counterparts. The identity as a family firm, which leads to a leap of faith by banks, can be a possible explanation for these results. The second paper is an in-depth examination of drivers of bank debt levels within the group of family firms. Further, it addresses heterogeneity amongst family firms and combines survey results and corresponding financial information. This represents a first attempt to capture family firm heterogeneity and its link to financial issues. The study shows that the more power in the company is exerted via management or supervisory board by the family, the less bank debt is used. Paper three is an extension of the previous two studies as it sheds light on tax avoidance, a significant instrument to strengthen the internal financing capability of a firm. This also takes up a research gap as there is very little research on taxation in family firms. Contrary to the expectation, the study reveals that private family firms might pay less tax than their non-family peers.
When Libet and colleagues published their results on the temporal order of movement preparation and the reported time of conscious will to move in 1983, they shed some doubt on the existence of free will. This marked the beginning of a controversial and still ongoing debate, not only about the existence of free will, but also about the appropriateness of methods and validity of results from research on free will. Belief in free will was also discovered as psychological research topic. Literature on belief in free will shows some evidence that most laypersons across different cultural backgrounds believe that they have free will and that a person's belief in free will might have an impact on cognition and behavior, tending to positive outcomes with a greater belief in free will. Empirical findings from the German-speaking area are sparse, probably due to a lack of validated measurements assessing belief in free will available in the German language. The aim of this dissertation is to critically examine some aspects in psychological research on free will and the belief in free will. Two studies are reported that aim to generalize the Libet paradigm for a free and voluntary decision with consequences for the acting person, as this was never reported to have been researched in literature before, and to test the critical objection that the measurement of reporting the conscious intention to move has a direct effect on the result in the Libet paradigm. Furthermore, the construction of the first inventory measuring belief in free will in the German language is described. This inventory was also created with the aim of overcoming some methodological problems in the existing instruments in English language. Furthermore, studies on the experimental manipulability of the belief in free will are reported. These findings provide implications in view of the current state of research on free will and belief in free will and its reliability.
This cumulative thesis extends the econometric literature on testing for cointegration in nonstationary panel data with cross-sectional dependence. Its self-contained chapters consist of two publications and two publication manuscripts which present three new panel tests for the cointegrating rank and an empirical study of the exchange rate pass-through to import prices in Europe. The first chapter introduces a new cointegrating rank test for panel data where the dependence is assumed to be driven by unobserved common factors. The common factors are first estimated and subtracted from the observations. Then an existing likelihood-ratio panel cointegration test is applied to the defactored data. The distribution of the test statistic, computed from defactored data, is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to that of a test statistic computed from cross-sectionally independent data. The second chapter proposes a new panel cointegrating rank test based on a multiple testing procedure, which is robust to positive dependence between the individual units' test statistics. The assumption of a certain type of positive dependence is shown by simulations not to be violated in panels with dependence structures commonly assumed in practice. The new test is applied to find empirical support of the monetary exchange rate model in a panel of eight OECD countries. The third chapter puts forward a new panel cointegration test allowing for both cross-sectional dependence and structural breaks. It employs known individual likelihood-ratio test statistics accounting for breaks in the deterministic trend and combines their p-values by a novel modification of the Inverse Normal method. The average correlation between the probits is inferred from the average cross-sectional correlation between the residuals of the individual VAR models in first differences. The fourth chapter studies the exchange rate pass-through to import prices in a panel of nineteen European countries through the prism of panel cointegration. Empirical evidence supporting a theoretical long-run equilibrium relationship between the model's variables is found by the newly proposed panel cointegration tests. Two different panel regression models, which take both cointegration and cross-sectional dependence into account, provide most recent estimates of the exchange rate pass-through elasticities.
In sub-Saharan Africa, women own or partly own one third of all businesses, thereby having a large potential to contribute to the economic development and societal well-being in this region. However, women-owned businesses tend to lag behind men-owned businesses in that they make lower profits, grow more slowly, and create fewer jobs. To identify reasons for this gap and effective means to promote women entrepreneurs, large parts of the entrepreneurship literature have compared male and female entrepreneurs with regard to individual characteristics, paying only limited attention to the underlying environmental conditions. This is problematic as women entrepreneurs operate under different conditions than men, with particularly pronounced differences in sub-Saharan Africa. Against this backdrop, the goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a more profound understanding of women entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa and its promotion through training by examining critical context factors. Specifically, I analyze two context factors that influence women’s entrepreneurial performance and the success of training interventions: 1) women entrepreneurs’ husbands and 2) the entrepreneurship trainer. These analyses are embedded in considerations of the cultural, social, and economic conditions women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa are facing. In Chapter 2, I conduct a systematic literature review on spousal influence in entrepreneurship and identify six recurrent types of influence. Complementing the literature originating from Western settings, I develop propositions on how the sub-Saharan context affects husbands’ influence on women entrepreneurship in this region. In Chapter 3, I build on a cultural theory and an economic theory of the household to develop and empirically test a theoretical model of husbands’ constraining and supportive influences on women entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. The empirical results point to three distinct types of husbands that differ significantly in their impact on women entrepreneurs’ business success. In Chapter 4, I explore the influence of the trainer on the effectiveness of entrepreneurship training in sub-Saharan Africa by drawing on an unsuccessful training implementation. Qualitative analyses indicate that the use of adequate teaching methods is critical towards training success. Overall, this dissertation makes an important contribution towards a better understanding of women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa and their promotion by shifting the perspective from a purely individualist to a more contextualized view of women entrepreneurship.
Space-related science and technologies affect our daily life dramatically. Many countries have already formulated national space regulations to regulate their space activities. China, as one space-faring country, has obtained impressive achievements in space science and technologies. In recent years, Chinese private space companies have sprung up quickly, which requires a stable and foreseeable legal framework to ensure development. However, compared to the other space powers, China is the only one that has not enacted any formal national space laws. Against the background of strengthening the rule of law in China, research on China´s domestic space legislation is valuable and significant. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. First, to find the legal basis and necessity of national space legislation and to extract the basic content of the existing national space legislation, simultaneously, to identify the new developments in the content of other States´ legislative practices. Second, based on the study of national space legislation, to propose the essential content of China´s space legislation.
This thesis deals with the influence of sustainability communication on the purchase decision of sustainable tourism products involving German specialist tour operators. Sustainability communication is a challenge, because sustainable tourism is an abstract and vague concept which consumers find it difficult to grasp and about which they are sceptical, and the service characteristics of tourism products complicate the decision making stage, which is a high-involvement situation of uncertainty to which sustainable product attributes add complexity. As an introduction, an interdisciplinary theory discussion reveals knowledge gaps in terms of the value-belief-norm theory and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM). The first article, which is the first systematic literature review on the topic, reveals that there is a limited theoretical understanding of sustainability communication, a lack of practical understanding of how to design sustainability messages, and an inadequate set of methodologies for its research. It identifies knowledge gaps concerning: the holistic approach to sustainability communication; its role in the attitude-behaviour gap; an interdisciplinary theoretical understanding focusing on belief-based social psychological theories and theories of persuasion; qualitative methods; and experimental design. The second article investigates the role of sustainability communication in the attitude-behaviour gap, employing the value-belief-norm theory to explain how information is processed by special interest customers. Interview findings show that ineffective sustainability communication is the reason for the gap and that customers unintentionally booked sustainably. The study identifies eight groups of beliefs which explain the processing of sustainability attributes. Sustainability information is effective when it is value-congruent, that is, when customers perceive they can make a difference, they begin to ascribe a responsibility to themselves. The third article investigates how to design an effective sustainability message in tour operator advertising. Drawing on the ELM, the study shows that appeal type does not significantly influence persuasion but the topic presented is important. Cultural sustainability is the sustainability topic that is most persuasive for cultural tourists, while consumer prior knowledge and issue-involvement with the topic promote successful information processing. The thesis has contributed to a target-group specific understanding of effective sustainability product communication and contributes to knowledge in terms of theory, methodology, and practical solutions.
Employee health is an important factor for individual and organizational performance. In particular the healthcare sector is characterized by high physical and mental demands that result in poor employee health and high levels of sick leave. One way to support employee health at the workplace is through leadership. By creating a healthy work environment and climate, leadership can promote employee health and well-being, in particular health-specific leadership. However, there has been scant insights into contextual factors that are relevant for health-specific leadership. This dissertation aims to investigate the relevance of contextual factors for health-specific leadership and its relationship with employee health. Three studies were conducted to identify relevant individual and work-related characteristics for health-specific leadership as well as to investigate the influence of specific individual and organizational factors. The first study is a questionnaire-based survey with 861 healthcare employees. Its findings show a positive relationship between health-specific leadership and employee health in the healthcare sector. Social demands and social resources are analysed as mediating factors. Furthermore, the affective commitment of employees is considered as an additional outcome of health-specific leadership. The second study identifies drivers and barriers for health-specific leadership in an explorative design based on 51 interviews with healthcare managers and collates these factors with the theoretical background. The findings show various influencing factors relating to leadership, employees, and the organization. The third study investigates the influence of individual factors on health-specific leadership and is based on a questionnaire survey among 525 healthcare employees. Managers personal initiative and employee self-care influence the relationship between health-specific leadership and employee burnout in different ways. In summary, this dissertation contributes to the literature by putting health-specific leadership into context and providing insights into influencing factors. The findings broaden the understanding of how health-specific leadership can influence employee health. The implications for theory and practice are discussed and directions for future research are outlined.
The process perspective provides a unifying framework that has substantially contributed to our understanding of entrepreneurship. However, much of the research up to now has neglected this process oriented conception of entrepreneurship. There is therefore a need for studies that take the inherent dynamic processes into account and analyze the underlying mechanisms when researching entrepreneurship. This dissertation aims to improve our understanding of the entrepreneurial process. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on new venture creation and the processes of sustainable opportunity identification and opportunity deviation. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction that highlights the theoretical contributions of this dissertation and gives an overview over the conducted studies. Chapter 2 argues for a process model of entrepreneurship that places entrepreneurs and their actions center stage. The model combines different perspectives and levels of analysis and provides an integrative framework for researching new venture creation. In chapter 3 we establish and test a theoretical model of sustainable opportunity identification. The chapter explains how younger generations identify sustainable opportunities. The findings indicate that sustainable opportunity identification is a process with two transitions from problem to solution identification and from solution identification to sustainable opportunity identification. These transitions are contingent on awareness of consequences and entrepreneurial attitude. Chapter 4 offers insights into how deviation from the original opportunity increases the performance of entrepreneurial teams. The findings indicate that entrepreneurial teams with a high level of error orientation set themselves higher goals when deviating from their original opportunity. Higher goals then lead to higher team performance. Chapter 5 summarizes the overall findings and outlines the general theoretical and practical implications. Each chapter thus contributes to the process perspective by focusing on how different phases of the entrepreneurial process unfold and develop over time. Thereby, this dissertation advances our understanding of entrepreneurship as a process.
In this dissertation, the author focuses on the link between (internal) corporate governance structures and processes and firms financial reporting quality. Specifically, the dissertation aims to provide insights into the following general research question: What is the effect of different corporate governance stakeholders on the financial reporting quality of a firm? The author provides insights into this question through three different articles. Paper #1 explores the relationship between family firm status and earnings management and synthesizes and explains previous research findings with the help of meta-analytic methods that are still uncommon in financial accounting research. The authors find a negative relationship between family firms and earnings management on average across 37 primary studies (and 305 effect sizes in total). Furthermore, they show that the considerable variation in size and direction of primary effect sizes can be explained by researchers choice of study design, earnings management proxy and different institutional settings. The second paper explores institutional owners as a different set of shareholders and their impact on financial reporting quality. The study enables the authors to compare the results against the backdrop of the previous chapter and to see different rationales that managers in institutionally-owned companies might have to engage in earnings management. Here, the authors study 511 effect sizes from a total of 87 primary studies and find that the average effect is slightly negative, meaning institutional owners on average can get more transparent earnings figures from the companies they invest in. Similar to the work they did on family firms, they find considerable heterogeneity between results from primary studies. Specifically, their multivariate meta-regression models can explain 26% of the variability in effect sizes, mainly attributable to study design choices. The third paper is concerned with managers and how managerial personality drives the propensity to engage in fraudulent accounting activities. The author uses a primary sample of 956 professionals, who work in accounting and finance departments, and ask them to rate their immediate superior on dark triad personality traits, as well as common actions taken by management to obscure and manipulate earnings figures. He finds that managers with high ratings for dark triad personality traits engage to a greater extent in fraudulent accounting practices, than managers scoring low on the dark triad scale. Moreover, the author can show that traditional risk management mechanisms, like internal audit departments, are only partially effective. Specifically, he finds that only internal audit departments that are fully staffed by external personnel can curb the adverse effect of dark triad managers on financial reporting quality. This suggests that managers with dark personalities can take advantage of mixed or entirely in-house internal audit departments. Overall, this dissertation contributes significantly to both literature streams of corporate governance and financial reporting quality. This work can explain a significant degree of heterogeneity in previous findings on the link between different kinds of ownership and earnings management. Further, it stresses that the considerable variation in current findings is not mainly attributable to cross-country differences, as previously suggested, but in no small part attributable to study design features. Finally, the author can provide additional evidence on current research linking executive personality traits and financial reporting practices.
In this cumulative thesis, the author presents four manuscripts and two appendixes. In the manuscripts he discusses mindsets and their relation to the effectiveness of negotiation training. His general claim is that mindsets promise to be relevant for training effectiveness. Still, more research needs to be done and chapter 3 presents the Scale for the Integrative Mindset of Negotiators (SIM) that can be used for some of that research. In the appendixes, the author presents two negotiation training exercises. The first addresses an international refugee policy summit and the second a negotiation over the sale of a large solar pv park in Thailand.
Corporate irresponsibility is often the result of intentionally irresponsible strategies, decisions, or actions, which negatively affect an identifiable stakeholder or environment. For instance, these range from the violation of the human rights and labor standards to environmental damages. Organizations enacting irresponsible practices rely on different factors upon multiple levels (field, organizational, individual) and its interrelations as well as processes evolving within the organization leading to such behavior. However, reasons for the occurrence of and explanations for corporate irresponsibility so far have been limited, leaving a fragmented understanding of this phenomenon. This dissertation helps to improve the understanding and explanation of corporate irresponsibility by identifying driving patterns of corporate irresponsibility and showing how the interactions across multiple levels add to this phenomenon. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the topic of corporate irresponsibility, the theoretical approaches of this dissertation and an introduction to the chapters. The second chapter offers a review and analysis of the corporate irresponsibility literature. The chapter presents a variance model outlining the concept, antecedents, moderators and outcomes of recent corporate irresponsibility literature as well as the different factors across levels (field, organizational, individual). Chapter 2 offers a critical analysis of what we know by referring to current literature and offers insights on what we don't know by deriving main implications for future research on corporate irresponsibility. Chapter 3 enlarges the understanding of corporate irresponsibility introducing a process approach to explain how corporate irresponsibility evolves over time and under which conditions. Based on a qualitative meta-analysis findings converge around two distinct process paths of corporate irresponsibility, the opportunistic-proactive, and, the emerging-reactive, subdivided into three phases. Chapter 3 sheds different lights upon the phases of corporate irresponsibility and its underlying mechanisms. The final chapter 4 focuses on different underlying mechanisms driving the final downfall or demise of organizations, organizational failure. Chapter 4 offers an alternative explanation to the competing extremism and inertia mechanisms driving organizational failure in recent studies by suggesting that these explanations are rather complementary. In addition, chapter 4 enlarges the explanation of organizational failure identifying the role of conflict mechanisms and its interplay with rigidity mechanisms. In sum, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of what causes and increases corporate irresponsibility, and a better explanation of how and why corporate irresponsibility and organizational failure emerges, develops, grows or terminates over time.
The concept of empowerment has gained considerable attention in the field of international development. Institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations invest considerable funds and efforts trying to facilitate empowerment in developing countries. Thus, empowerment becomes important when people need to take action and be innovative in overcoming scarcity and fighting against poverty. Research shows the positive effects of empowerment on entrepreneurship-related behavior and outcomes such as proactive behavior, goal achievement, and innovation. Yet, there is a dearth of research addressing the phenomenon of empowerment in entrepreneurship. This dissertation aims to contribute to the understanding of the role of empowerment in entrepreneurship and its effects. Particularly, this dissertation targets the interplay between empowerment and entrepreneurship in the context of developing countries. Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the different topics of this dissertation. Chapter 2, introduces the construct of psychological empowerment at work as the theoretical foundation to advocate for the importance of empowerment in entrepreneurship. The chapter takes initial steps in drawing the rationale and identifying empirical evidence for the relationship between empowerment and entrepreneurial behavior and outcomes. Specifically, the chapter links the components of psychological empowerment to concrete action characteristics in entrepreneurship such as effectuation and experimentation. Chapter 3 establishes a first empirical link between empowerment and entrepreneurship. The chapter provides the construct of entrepreneurial empowerment and develops a multidimensional measure to measure its dimensions. By means of a nomological network, the chapter reveals the relations of entrepreneurial empowerment with relevant constructs and outcomes derived from entrepreneurship and empowerment research such as innovation, self-reliance, and decision-making. Chapter 4 posits entrepreneurship training, particularly personal initiative training and business literacy training, as effective means to facilitate entrepreneurial empowerment and its effect on business performance. The chapter uncovers the mechanisms accounting for the relationship between entrepreneurship training and entrepreneurial empowerment. Chapter 5 provides general theoretical and practical contributions and finishes with a general conclusion.
The increasing perils of connectivity technologies in the context of large satellite constellations come alongside with legal aspects concerning the protection of the space environment. The interplay of connectivity and sustainability must be regulated. To analyse the legal measures and tools regulating the risks, both sides of the problem are taken into consideration. The technological side of large satellite constellations is summarized under the term cybersecurity. Cyber is a code-based system, i.e. at first sight it requires a specialized field of law. This holds true on space sustainability as well. Large satellite constellations raise the discussion on space debris and junk. The consensus on the LTS guidelines by COPUOS at UNISPACE+50 in 2018 constitutes a milestone in Space Law. Space sustainability requires a particular adoption of legal norms: the idea is very similar to the subject of cybersecurity. Since both areas of issue are internationally driven and have multilateral impact, self-regulation proves ineffective. The genesis of reliable and uniform legal rules requires a different approach considering the multilevel systems of obligations with different binding authority. This thesis evaluates the balance between the future of connectivity and space sustainability in the context of large satellite constellations by considering the impact of legal rules with different binding authority.
This dissertation analyses external appointees and successions on boards and consists of three papers which are all empirical in nature. It provides insights into the present literature from a meta-perspective, enlarges the understanding of external successions to German executive bank boards and extends the rare number of studies on the internal supervisory bodies of bank institutions. The first paper highlights the existing literature: conducting a literature search process, the paper aggregates 102 empirical results from 28 journal articles and working papers published between 1990 and 2017. The meta-analysis focuses on how researchers address the build-in issue that outsiders are not randomly assigned to firms. The results reveal that the relationship of outside successions and performance varies significantly with the methodological characteristics of the original studies. The following two papers concentrate on successions in banking institutions. More specifically, the second study examines the appointments of executive directors external to the bank and the consequences of that appointment on bank performance. The study addresses in particular alternative explanations, i.e. outside selection and/or joint endogeneity, while examining external executive appointments and their consequences on bank performance. The second empirical paper lend significant support to the view that some outsiders are better predisposed to helping the bank turn around poor performance and that the selected proxies of managerial ability, which are based on the historical return on assets and risk-return efficiency measured at outsiders' former banks, are able to identify such good outsiders. Finally, the third paper considers the link between the executive and the supervisory board. The study points to the conclusion that newly appointed executives to the supervisory board differ from their non-appointed counterparts with a particular set of experiences. The study provides evidence for the view that the pre-appointment financial situation, measured by several proxies of bank risk and performance, has significant influence on the decision to appoint such an experienced member to the supervisory board. This dissertation is framed by an introduction and concluding chapter where the author reflects on the research questions of her empirical studies, summarizes the results and identifies some possibilities for future research.
Online marketing, especially Paid Search Advertising, has become one of the most important paid media channels for companies to sell their products and services online. Despite being under intensive examination by a number of researchers for several years, this topic still offers interesting opportunities to contribute to the community, particularly because of its large economic impact and practical relevance as well as the detailed and widely unfiltered view of consumer behavior that such marketing offers. To provide answers to some of the important questions from advertisers in this context, the author present four papers in his thesis, in which he extends previous works on optimization topics such as click and conversion prediction. He applies and extends methods from other fields of research to specific problems in Paid Search. After a short introduction, the dissertation starts with a paper in which the authors illustrates a new method that helps advertisers to predict conversion probabilities in Paid Search using sparse keyword-level data. They address one of the central problems in Paid search advertising, which is optimizing own investments in this channel by placing bids in keyword auctions. In many cases, evaluations and decisions are made with extremely sparse data, although anecdotal evidence suggests that online marketing is a typical "Big Data" topic. In the developed algorithm presented in this paper, the authors use information such as the average time that users spend on the advertiser's website and bounce rates for every given keyword. This previously unused data set is shared between all keywords and used as prior knowledge in the proposed model. A modified version of this algorithm is now the core prediction engine in a productive Paid Search Bid Optimization System that calculates and places millions of bids every day for some of the most recognized retailers and service providers in the German market. Next, the author illustrates the development of a non-reactive experimental method for A/B testing of Paid Search Advertising activities. In that paper, the authors provide an answer to the question of whether and under what circumstances it makes economic sense for brand owners to pay for Paid Search ads for their own brand keywords in Google AdWords auctions. Finally, the author presents two consecutive papers with the same theoretical foundation in which he applies Bayesian methods to evaluate the impact of specific text features in Paid Search Advertisements.
Internet- and mobile technologies are increasingly used to deliver mental health care. E-Mental Health is promising for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders. However, while E-Mental Health was shown to be an effective treatment tool, fewer studies investigated the prevention of mental health problems with E-Mental Health approaches. In a series of three studies, this dissertation examines internet- and mobile-based approaches for the early monitoring and supporting of mental health. First, a pilot study investigates the use of smartphone data as collected by daily self-reports and sensor information for the self-monitoring of bipolar disorder symptoms. It was found that some, but not all smartphone measurements predicted clinical symptoms of mania and depression, indicating that smartphones could be used as an earlywarning system for patients with bipolar disorder. Second, a randomized controlled trial evaluates the effectiveness of an internet-based intervention among persons with depression and sickness absence. The intervention was found to be effective in reducing depressive symptoms compared to a control group, suggesting that the internet can provide effective support for people with sickness absence due to depression. Third, a study protocol proposes to combine self-monitoring with a mobile intervention to support mental health in daily life. Supportive self-monitoring will be evaluated in a fully mobile randomized controlled trial among a sample of smartphone users with psychological distress. If supportive self-monitoring on the basis of a smartphone application is effective, it could be widely distributed to monitor and support mental health on a population level. Finally, the contribution of the presented studies to current research topics in E-Mental Health is discussed.