Vienna University of Economics and Business
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The Five Diamond Method for Explorative Business Process Management
Full text linkExplorative business process management (BPM) is attracting increasing interest in the literature and professional practice. Organizations have recognized that a focus on operational efficiency is no longer sufficient when disruptive forces can make the value proposition of entire processes obsolete. So far, however, research on how to create entirely new processes has remained largely conceptual, leaving it open how explorative BPM can be put into practice. Following the design science research paradigm and situational method engineering, we address this research gap by proposing a method called the Five Diamond Method. This method guides explorative BPM activities by supporting organizations in identifying opportunities from business and technology trends and integrating them into business processes with novel value propositions. The method is evaluated against literature-backed design objectives and competing artifacts, qualitative data gathered from BPM practitioners, as well as a pilot study and two real-world applications. This research provides two contributions. First, the Five Diamond Method broadens the scope of BPM by integrating prescriptive knowledge from innovation management. Second, the method supports capturing emerging opportunities arising from changing customer needs and digital technologies
The Identification of Non-Rational Risk Shocks
Full text linkThis paper studies how non-rational risk shocks affect the macroeconomy. Using a novel identification design which exploits survey data on expectations of financial executives in the US, I identify non-rational risk shocks via distortions in beliefs. Belief distortions are measured through surprises in beliefs of credit spreads, defined as the difference between subjective and objective forecasts. They are then used as a proxy for exogenous variation in the risk premium. Belief distortions elicit due to overreaction of credit spreads, eventually leading to exaggerated beliefs on financial markets. Results indicate that the constructed shocks have statistically and economically meaningful effects. This has sizeable consequences for the U.S. economy: A positive non-rational risk shock moves credit spreads remarkably while real activity and the stock market decline.Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Serie
Motives Behind Domestic Greywater and Rainwater Collection: Evidence from Australia
Full text linkPolicy has traditionally focused on increasing water supply by investing in large scale and centralised projects. However, demand for water can be substantially decreased if households reuse greywater and/or install rainwater tanks. We investigate water use based on an internet survey of 354 households in the Australian Capital Territory and examine the relationship between socio-economic and psychological variables and the likelihood of the garden being irrigated with greywater and/or rainwater. Income, gender, age and education could not differentiate residents’ by such water use. Residents who used tank water on the garden had higher self reported understanding of water supply options. Female participants and lower income residents were morelikely to use greywater on their garden. Concerns about water collection and reuse, which have lead to some large scale projects being politically unacceptable, were not found to predict the use of tank water or greywater on the garden.Series: SRE - Discussion Paper
Self-Governance in Generalized Exchange. A Laboratory Experiment on the Structural Embeddedness of Peer Punishment
Full text linkPeer punishment is widely lauded as a decentralized solution to the problem of social cooperation. However, experimental evidence of its effectiveness primarily stems from public good structures. This paper explores peer punishment in another structural setting: a system of generalized exchange. In a laboratory experiment, a repeated four-player prisoner’s dilemma is arranged either in a public good structure or in a circular network of generalized exchange. The experimental results demonstrate that the merits of peer punishment do not extend to generalized exchange. In the public good, peer punishment was primarily altruistic, was sensitive to costs, and promoted cooperation. In generalized exchange, peer punishment was also altruistic and relatively frequent, but did not increase cooperation. While the dense punishment network underlying the public good facilitates norm enforcement, generalized exchange decreases control over norm violators and reduces the capacity of peer punishment. I conclude that generalized exchange systems require stronger forms of punishment to sustain social cooperation
Ambivalente Demokratie. Zwischen emanzipatorischer Hoffnung und autoritärem Populismus
Full text linkDemokratien sind irgendwie immer in der Krise. Das ist auch im zweiten Jahrzehnt des gar nicht mehr so neuen Jahrtausends nicht anders, und dies quer durch die Bevölkerungsgruppen: In der Tendenz haben sich in den vergangenen Jahren immer weniger Menschen an Wahlen beteiligt, vor allem der sozial schwächeren Gruppen; jüngst liefen regelmäßig Demonstrationszüge durch die österreichischen und deutschen Großstädte, in denen vor allem Selbständige und Angehörige der Mittelschichten die Pandemie-Politik der Regierungen als „Diktatur“ brandmarkten und die Rückkehr zu einer „echten“ Volksdemokratie reklamierten (Nachtwey et al. 2020); Rechtspopulisten in vielen Ländern Europas ätzen gegen vermeintliche Parteien- und Elitenkartelle, welche sich der Demokratie bemächtigt hätten; und der rechtskonservative Bundeskanzler Österreichs äußert regelmäßig eine Fundamentalkritik am Parlamentarismus und einer konsensualdemokratischen Entscheidungsfindung, welche die amerikanische Journalistin Anne Applebaum auch als „Verlockung des Autoritären“ beschrieben hat (Applebaum 2021). Demokratie also, so ein zwischenzeitlicher Eindruck, wird längst nicht mehr nur punktuell und von Randgruppen in ihrer Legitimation angezweifelt, sondern an ganz unterschiedlichen sozialen Orten und aus ganz unterschiedlichen Motiven infrage gestellt
Data analytics in a privacy-concerned world
Full text linkData is considered the new oil of the economy, but privacy concerns limit their use, leading to a widespread sense that data analytics and privacy are contradictory. Yet such a view is too narrow, because firms can implement a wide range of methods that satisfy different degrees of privacy and still enable them to leverage varied data analytics methods. Therefore, the current study specifies different functions related to data analytics and privacy (i.e., data collection, storage, verification, analytics, and dissemination of insights), compares how these functions might be performed at different levels (consumer, intermediary, and firm), outlines how well different analytics methods address consumer privacy, and draws several conclusions, along with future research directions
The linked legal data landscape: linking legal data across different countries
Full text linkThe European Union is working towards harmonizing legislation across Europe, in order to improve cross-border interchange of legal information. This goal is supported for instance via standards such as the European Law Identifier (ELI) and the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI), which provide technical specifications for Web identifiers and suggestions for vocabularies to be used to describe metadata pertaining to legal documents in a machine readable format. Notably, these ECLI and ELI metadata standards adhere to the RDF data format which forms the basis of Linked Data, and therefore have the potential to form a basis for a pan-European legal Knowledge Graph. Unfortunately, to date said specifications have only been partially adopted by EU member states. In this paper we describe a methodology to transform the existing legal information system used in Austria to such a legal knowledge graph covering different steps from modeling national specific aspects, to population, and finally the integration of legal data from other countries through linked data. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by exemplifying practical use cases from legal information search, which are not possible in an automated fashion so far
The Effects of Cooperative Compliance on Firms’ Tax Risk, Tax Risk Management and Compliance Costs
Full text linkIn cooperative compliance programs, firms and tax administrations agree on cooperation instead of confrontation. Firms provide full transparency and advanced tax control frameworks. Tax administrations, in turn, offer certainty as to the tax treatment of complex transactions. In this study, we test how firms’ perceptions of tax risk, the quality of tax risk management, and compliance costs are related to cooperative compliance. To our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to analyze both reasons for and consequences of participation in cooperative compliance programs. We examine the Austrian cooperative compliance pilot project known as horizontal monitoring that was aimed at large businesses and launched in 2011. We use survey data from representatives of firms participating in the pilot project and a sample of comparable firms under a traditional ex-post audit regime. We conduct group comparisons to test differences between these groups, as well as mediation analyses to shed light on more complex relationships between variables. Results show that horizontal monitoring firms perceive a significantly higher increase in tax certainty, which is associated with significant relative decreases in tax risk and compliance costs. Furthermore, while the quality of tax risk management upon entering the pilot project appears significantly higher for horizontal monitoring firms, they do not report greater improvement in tax risk management compared to the control group. These results are relevant for the development of cooperative compliance programs and the decision to participate in them.Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie
‘Remaining the same or becoming another?’ – Adaptive resilience versus transformative urban change
Full text linkStructural change of cities has long been a central theme in urban studies. Recent manifestations of urban change have been described either as instances of ‘adaptation’, often associated with flexible adjustment and reorganization, or ‘transformation’, implying a deeper and more radical scope of change. The conceptual difference between these two ideas, however, remains surprisingly under-theorized and ambiguous in the extant literature. We find both notions casually (and at times even interchangeably) employed in recent debates on ‘resilient cities’. Addressing this conceptual imprecision, our commentary focuses on the structure-identity relationship, coupling resilience thinking with an institutional perspective that has provided the intellectual moorings for recent scholarly approaches to city identity. Through this prism, city identity is firmly conceptualized as a distinctive set of socio-political values; the structure of a city, then, provides the means to realize these values. In consequence, we are able to offer a precise conceptual differentiation between what we here dub ‘adaptive resilience’ and ‘transformative urban change’ as the two facets of change in city contexts: If structural change is accompanied by a shift in socio-political values (and thus a change in identity), we refer to this as transformative; if no such identity shift takes place, this is an instance of adaptive urban change, primarily on the level of structures. We illustrate our argument with the empirical case of the City of Vienna. Overall, our commentary’s ambition is to add nuance, clarity, and conceptual precision to the debates on resilience currently raging in the field of urban change
