Browsing by Type "forthcoming"

Environmental regulations force car manufacturers to renew the powertrain technology portfolio offered to the customer to comply with greenhouse gas emission targets. In turn, automotive companies face the task of identifying the “right” powertrain technology portfolio consisting of, e.g., internal combustion engines and electric vehicles, because the selection of a particular powertrain technology portfolio affects different company targets simultaneously. What makes this decision even more challenging is that future market shares of the different technologies are uncertain. Our research presents a new decision-support approach for assembling optimal powertrain technology portfolios while making decision-makers aware of the trade-offs between the achievable profit, the achievable market share, the market share risk, and the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the selected vehicle fleet. The proposed approach combines “a posteriori” decision-making with multi-objective optimization. In an application case, we feed the outlooks of selected market studies into the proposed decision-support system. The result is a visualization and analysis of the current real-world decision-making problem faced by many automotive companies. Our findings indicate that for the proposed greenhouse gas restriction at work in 2030 in the European Union, no optimal powertrain technology portfolio with less than 35% of vehicles equipped with an electric motor exists.

Institutionalism gives priority to structure over agency. Yet institutions have never developed and operated without the intervention of interested groups. This paper develops a conceptual framework for the role of agency in historical institutionalism. Based on recent contributions following the coalitional turn and drawing on insights from sociological institutionalism, it argues that agency plays a key role in the creation and maintenance of social coalitions that stabilize but also challenge institutions. Without such agency, no coalition can be created, maintained, or changed. Similarly, without a supporting coalition, no contested institution can survive. Yet, due to collective action problems, such coalitional work is challenging. This coalitional perspective offers a robust role for agency in historical institutionalism, but it also explains why institutions remain stable despite agency. In addition, this paper forwards several portable propositions that allow for the identification of who is likely to develop agency and what these actors do.

News values are based in part on journalists’ beliefs about the audience, which were, at least in the past, mostly based on journalists’ own imaginations of the actual audience. Now, with web analytics, journalists’ beliefs about the audience can be informed and influenced by a wealth of accessible and quantifiable audience data. Still, journalists must balance audience preferences with their news judgement and the norms that guide their news work. This chapter argues that to maintain editorial autonomy in the face of increasing influence from the audience, journalists might be tweaking their assessment of news values to reflect more of what they know about audience preferences.

We empirically examine how systemic risk in the banking sector leads to correlated risk in office markets of global financial centers. In so doing, we compute an aggregated measure of systemic risk in financial centers as the cumulated expected capital shortfall of local financial institutions. Our identification strategy is based on a double counterfactual approach by comparing normal with financial distress periods as well as office with retail markets. We find that office market interconnectedness arises from systemic risk during financial turmoil periods. Office market performance in a financial center is affected by returns of systemically linked financial center office markets only during a systemic banking crisis. In contrast, there is no evidence of correlated risk during normal times and among the within-city counterfactual retail sector. The decline in office market returns during a banking crisis is larger in financial centers compared to non-financial centers.

This study is the first to apply biclustering to households' home consumption of food and finds patterns of households and foods that may account for factors of consumption in Switzerland. We define and label five overlapping biclusters-basic, vegan processed, old & poor, vegan raw and sweet-toothedwhich are distinguished mainly by age and household size. Our results may help to target food and nutrition policy and marketing activities in the future by using clearer behavioural information about consumers.

In 1976, Amory Lovins suggested a distinction between hard and soft energy paths, referring to scenarios envisioning a future with varying degrees of (de-)centralisation. Almost half a century later, there are still diverging views as to whether the future of energy is going to be centralised or decentralised. An empirical context in which such competing visions are particularly present is Ukraine. With the current, highly centralised infrastructure severely damaged after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine a variety of stakeholders have published documents outlining scenarios for the country’s future energy system. Reviewing 32 such scenarios allows us to disentangle the technological and organisational dimensions of (de-) centralisation and identify incoherences in how they are addressed in expert documents.

Cyber risk is becoming more significant for insurance companies in both underwriting and operational risk terms, but the characteristics of cyber risk are still not yet well understood. We contribute to the literature by analyzing the role of cyber risk in insurance regulation frameworks. The aggregated cyber risk exposure of an insurer is estimated by fitting different marginal distributions and dependence models to historical cyber losses. This aggregated cyber exposure allows us to derive the insurer’s survival probability and compare it with the goals of regulatory frameworks, such as the U.S. Risk Based Capital (RBC) or Solvency II (SII). Our findings indicate that regulatory models underestimate the potential risks associated with cyber threats. This is especially true for small cyber insurance portfolios, which are predominant in practice today. Regulatory models should be adapted to account for the heavy tails and dependence structure specific to cyber risks, instead of assuming “one size fits all.

This paper appraises and evaluates more than three decades of empirical research on strategic change. Strategic change research has traditionally built on either the deterministic view or the voluntaristic view – two opposing perspectives with fundamentally different assumptions about the influence of managers on the fortunes of organizations. In addition, a dialectical view on strategic change, which aims to bridge the two traditional views, has emerged. Despite the richness and value of research within these three perspectives, the continued accumulation of isolated and idiosyncratic insights adds little to the understanding of strategic change. In this paper, therefore, the authors assess, contrast and integrate research across the three perspectives in order to foster one cumulative body of knowledge about strategic change and to provide guidance for future research. Based on an analysis of 119 studies published in the leading academic journals in the fields of strategy and management, they consolidate existing knowledge and identify shortcomings in the cumulative body of research. On the basis of this assessment concerning prior research foci, study designs and assumptions, the authors propose four pathways for future research across the three perspectives that they believe can help foster full understanding of strategic change: (1) examinations of different types, processes and outcomes of strategic change; (2) expansion of the scope of actors considered in relation to strategic change; (3) exploration of the non-linear nature of strategic change; and (4) investigations of strategic change conundrums.

We analyze the relationship between contracts and returns in private equity (PE) investments. Contractual control in the form of covenants tends to be employed to identify good deals. Better quality fi?rms are more likely to have covenant-rich contracts, as they are less concerned by the constraints imposed by the covenants. PE investors appoint closer associates of the fund in deals that are performing poorly but tend to outsource board governance in better deals. Collectively, our evidence suggests that PE investors operate along two dimensions, choosing covenants and board seats di¤erently, based on the ex-ante quality of the company.