Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaften
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In the pre-seed phase before entering a market, new ventures face the complex, multi-faceted, and uncertain task of designing a business model. Founders accomplish this task within the framework of an innovation process, the so-called business model innovation process. However, because a set of feasible opportunities to design a viable business model is often not predictable in this early phase (Alvarez & Barney, 2007), business model ideas have to be revised multiple times, which corresponds to experimenting with alternative business models (Chesbrough, 2010). This also brings scholars to the relevant, but seldom noticed field of research on experimentation as a cognitive schema (Felin et al., 2015; Gavetti & Levinthal, 2000). The few scholars that discussed the importance of such thought experimentation did not elaborate on the manifestations of this phenomenon. Thus, building on qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs, the current state of the research has a gap that offers this dissertation the ability to clearly conceptualise the manifestation of experimentation as a cognitive schema in business model innovation. The results extend previous conceptualisations of experimentation by illustrating the interplay of three different forms of thought experimentation, namely purposeful interactions, incidental interactions, and theorising. In addition, the role of individuals in business model innovation has recently been recognised by scholars (Amit & Zott, 2015; Snihur & Zott, 2020). It is noticed that not only the founders themselves but also many other actors play a central role in this process to support a new venture on its way to designing a viable business model, such as accelerators or public institutions. It thus stands to reason that in addition to understanding how new ventures design their business model, it is also important to study how different actors are involved in this process. Building on qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs, this gap offers this dissertation the ability to study how different actors are involved in business model innovation and conceptualise actor engagement behaviours in this context. The results reveal six different actor engagement behaviours, including teaching, supporting, mobilising, co-developing, sharing, and signalling behaviour. Furthermore, it stands to reason, that entrepreneurs and external actors each play a certain role in business model innovation. Certain behavioural patterns and types of resource contributions may be characteristic for a group of actors, leading to the emergence of distinct actor roles. Thus, in this dissertation a role concept is established to illustrate how actors are involved in designing a new business model, including 13 actor roles. These actor roles are divided into task-oriented and network-oriented roles. Building on this, a variety of role dynamics are unveiled. Moreover, special attention is given to role temporality. Building on two case studies and a quantitative survey, the results reveal how actor roles are played at a certain point in time, thereby concretising them in relation to certain stages of the pre-seed phase.
By mapping the boundaries of Kant’s categorical imperative to the point where it permits the committing of a crime against Hume’s three principles of justice, it shall be demonstrated how far the area is in which these two concepts persist alongside each other and how narrow the border zone is in which they do not. Indeed, the latter is a forbidden place that can only be accessed through destiny and never by choice. Whoever is witnessed to stay there, must wish for Justice to draw her sword against him, and whoever dares to try reaching it, will only wander about a deserted land where both justice and morality are left behind.
Organizational Coordination of Digital Structures: The Effects of ICT and Values on Grand Challenges
(2022)
This doctoral thesis sheds light on organizing contributions toward grand challenges by
highlighting various effects on organizing values, coordination mechanisms, and digital
technologies. Grand challenges are defined as vast and complex problems affecting
organizations, governments, and entire societies. The objective of this thesis is to address such
global societal problems. Towards this end, at first a systematic literature review depicts the
overall process of addressing grand challenges. Second, building upon the holistic process from
this literature review, an empirical inquiry is conducted, scrutinizing the development of
organizing mechanisms and structures along organizing values. Third, digital technologies and
their role in the solution process are explored. Taken as a whole, the systematic literature
review offers a holistic overview over the solution process of grand challenges addressed by
organizations, while the empirically substantiated theoretical frameworks analyze and
highlight coordination mechanisms, organizing structures and values, as well as digital
infrastructures in great detail.
Organizational routines constitute how work is accomplished in organizations. This dissertation thesis draws on recent routine research and is anchored in the field of organization theory. The thesis consists of four separate manuscripts that contribute to related research fields such as agility or coordination research from a routine perspective while also extending routine dynamics research. Recent routine dynamics research offers a wide perspective on how situated actions within and across routines unfold as emergent accomplishments. This allows us to analyze other organization research phenomena, such as agility and coordination. Accordingly, the first and second manuscripts argue for the adoption of a very dynamic perspective on routines and the incorporation of these insights into agility and coordination research. This is followed by two empirical manuscripts that expand the routine literature based on qualitative research within agile software development. The third manuscript of this dissertation analyzes how situated actions address different temporal orientations (i.e., past, present, and future). Last, the fourth manuscript addresses the performing of roles within and through routines. In general, this dissertation contributes to overall organization research in two ways: (1) by outlining and examining how agility is enacted; (2) by highlighting that actions are performed flexibly to consider the situation at hand.
The four essays deal with social motivators for human behavior in economics, namely social norms and social preferences. The first three essays present and analyze a particular social preference model, socially attentive preferences. The fourth essay gives a review of the theoretical economic literature on social norms.
Climate change and its effects are accelerating, with climate-related disasters surging. To tackle climate change, the reduction of emissions by means of climate policy is vital. As such, the purpose of the present dissertation is to provide deeper insights about market-based and non-market-based environmental state interventions. Using regression analyses, the empirical part of this doctoral thesis investigates the adverse effect of financial subsidy payments on the energy market. Findings indicate that subsidized renewables may depress the profitability of energy storages and lower their own market values. Research projects demonstrate that carbon pricing is a promising solution to counteract the adverse effect. The theoretical part of this doctoral thesis examines the implementation of a unilateral price floor in emissions trading schemes and emissions cap negotiations. Results suggest that, under certain conditions, i) a unilateral price floor can be welfare-enhancing and ii) negotiations can achieve the socially optimal emissions cap. The dissertation helps provide a better understanding of climate policy design and emphasizes the advantage of carbon pricing as a market-based approach.
We examine the predictability of 299 capital market anomalies enhanced by 30 machine learning approaches and over 250 models in a dataset with more than 500 million firm-month anomaly observations. We find significant monthly (out-of-sample) returns of around 1.8–2.0%, and over 80% of the models yield returns equal to or larger than our linearly constructed baseline factor. For the best performing models, the risk-adjusted returns are significant across alternative asset pricing models, considering transaction costs with round-trip costs of up to 2% and including only anomalies after publication. Our results indicate that non-linear models can reveal market inefficiencies (mispricing) that are hard to conciliate with risk-based explanations.
Interview with Frank Petry on “Digital Entrepreneurship: Opportunities, Challenges, and Impacts”
(2022)
Frank Petry is a primal rock of Germany's startup scene. He is a serial founder, serial investor (e.g., Ticketmaster, Expedia, Lending Tree, Web.de, ESCOM), partner and member of the Advisory Board at Blue Lake VC, as well as a partner, mentor and advisory board member at the Baltic Sandbox Accelerator. Additionally, he is the CEO of PECON (Consulting) and Thundermountain (VC, Accelerator, Corporate innovation).
In recent decades, academia has addressed a wide range of research topics in the field of ethical decision-making. Besides a great amount of research on ethical consumption, also the domain of ethical investments increasingly moves in the focus of scholars. While in this area most research focuses on whether socially or environmentally sustainable businesses outperform traditional investments financially or investigates the character traits as well as other socio-demographic factors of ethical investors, the impact of sustainable corporate conduct on the investment intentions of private investors still requires further research. Hence, we conducted two studies to shed more light on this highly relevant topic. After discussing the current state of research, in our first empirical study, we explore whether besides the traditional triad of risk, return, and liquidity, also sustainability exerts a significant impact on the willingness to invest. As hypothesized, we find that sustainability shows a clear and decisive impact in addition to the traditional factors. In a consecutive study, we investigate deeper into the sustainability-willingness to invest link. Here, our results show that improved sustainability might not pay off in terms of investment attractiveness, however and conversely, it certainly harms to conduct business in a non-sustainable manner, which cannot even be compensated by an increased return.