Publication records

The book provides an overview of legal questions in regard to open science, with a particular focus on issues of copyright and data protection.

This field research case presents an account of leading digital transformation in a traditional organization. The case briefly traces more one hundred years of history of Klöckner & Co, an independent global steel and metal distributor, and presents challenges faced by the steel distribution branch. It then describes the thinking process of Gisbert Rühl, the company’s CEO concerned about taking the company into the future in the face of global changes faced by the industry. The case presents Rühl’s view of digital opportunities for the organization and his attempts to prepare the company for the digital age. The case pays particular attention to personal transformation of the leader in the in the process of transforming his company. It is intended for use in the MBA programs and executive education.

Key teaching/learning objectives:

1. To demystify digital transformation in a traditional organization


2. To explore the role of leaders in digital transformation


3. To discuss the personal changes required of leaders working on digital transformation in their companies

Based on two studies of flight crew members in civil and military aviation, we observed that the best performance was achieved by the crews where the captain actively included other flight crew members in the decision making process by asking open questions. Furthermore, we observed that preferences of commanders for asking open questions differed markedly between the German and the Israeli air forces.

With permission of the German Armed Forces Aviation Office (Luftfahrtamt der Bundeswehr)

Also available on SSRN.

Consumers often do not have complete information about the choices they face and therefore have to spend time and effort in acquiring information. Since information acquisition is costly, consumers trade-off the value of better information against its cost, and make their final product choices based on imperfect information. We model this decision using the rational inattention approach and describe the rationally inattentive consumer’s choice behavior when she faces alternatives with different information costs. To this end, we introduce an information cost function that distinguishes between direct and implied information. We then analytically characterize the optimal choice probabilities. We find that non-uniform information costs can have a strong impact on product choice, which gets particularly conspicuous when the product alternatives are otherwise very similar. There are significant implications on how a seller should provide information about its products and how changes to the product set impacts consumer choice. For example, non-uniform information costs can lead to situations where it is disadvantageous for the seller to provide easier access to information for a particular product, and to situations where the addition of an inferior (never chosen) product increases the market share of another existing product (i.e., failure of regularity). We also provide an algorithm to compute the optimal choice probabilities and discuss how our framework can be empirically estimated from suitable choice data.

© 2019, INFORMS

We study the optimal inventory policy of a firm selling an item whose price is affected by an exogenous stochastic price process which consequently affects customer arrivals. This case is typical for retailers that operate in different currencies, or trade products consisting of commodities or components whose prices are subject to market fluctuations. We assume that there is a stochastic input price process for the inventory item which determines purchase and selling prices according to a general selling price function. We also assume that unit demands arrive according to a doubly-stochastic Poisson process which is modulated by the stochastic input price process. We analyze optimal ordering decisions for both backorder and lost-sale cases. We show that under certain conditions a price-dependent base stock policy is optimal. The models are then extended to a price-modulated compound Poisson demand case. We present a numerical study on the sensitivity of the optimal profits to various parameters of the operational setting and stochastic price process such as price volatility, customer sensitivity to price changes etc. In another numerical setup, we compare the model with a corresponding discrete-time benchmark model that ignores within period price fluctuations and present the optimality gap when using the benchmark model as an approximation.

With permission of Elsevier

In the absence of externalities, marginality is equivalent to an independence property that rests on Harsanyi‘s dividends. These dividends identify the surplus inherent to each coalition. Independence states that a player‘s payoff stays the same if only dividends of coalitions to which this player does not belong to change. We introduce notions of marginality and independence for games with externalities. We measure a player‘s contribution in an embedded coalition by the change in the worth of this coalition that results when the player is removed from the game. We provide a characterization result using efficiency, anonymity, and marginality or independence, which generalizes Young‘s characterization of the Shapley value. An application of our result yields a new characterization of the solution put forth by Macho-Stadler et al. (J Econ Theor, 135, 2007, 339-356) without linearity, as well as for almost all generalizations put forth in the literature. The introduced method also allows us to investigate egalitarian solutions and to reveal how accounting for externalities may result in a deviation from the Shapley value. This is exemplified with a new solution that is designed in a way to not reward external effects, while at the same time it cannot be assumed that any partition is the default partition.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).