Vienna University of Economics and Business
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A Systematic Review of Blockchain Literature in Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Identifying Research Questions and Future Directions
Get PDFPotential blockchain applications in logistics and supply chain (LSCM) have gained increasing attention within both academia and industry. However, as a field in its infancy, blockchain research often lacks theoretical foundations, and it is not clear which and to what extent organizational theories are used to investigate blockchain technology in the field of LSCM. In response, based upon a systematic literature review, this paper: (a) identifies the most relevant organizational theories used in blockchain literature in the context of LSCM; and (b) examines the content of the identified organizational theories to formulate relevant research questions for investigating blockchain technology in LSCM. Our results show that blockchain literature in LSCM is based around six organizational theories, namely: agency theory, information theory, institutional theory, network theory, the resource-based view and transaction cost analysis. We also present how these theories can be used to examine specific blockchain problems by identifying blockchain-specific research questions that are worthy of investigation
Extended Working Life Policies Country Experiences: Chapter 8 Austria
Get PDFThis chapter deals with the labour market situation of older (50+)workers and pension policies in Austria, a country where gender differences are strongly pronounced over the entire lifecourse. The target of recent policies is not primarily to tackle the negative effects of the system for women, but to decrease pension costs by discouraging early retirement and inducing employers to keep and/or employ older workers. However, this will have some gendered effects since recent policy changes will increase women's lower legal retirement age stepwise (60) to match that of men(65) in 2033. Although caring time already partly contributes topension payments, this does not substantially decrease the large gender pension gap
Interdependence, participation, and coordination in the budgeting process
Get PDFThis article studies the role of participation in the budgeting process when the company has to coordinate two interdependent divisions. The focus lies on the design of the budgeting process (top-down vs. participative budgets) and the underlying supply of information. This is studied in a principal agent model where two divisions (agents) jointly generate earnings. With the participative budgeting process, the company (principal) implements an information system that provides the division managers with private information. Two economic effects occur. First, the company can benefit from the division managers' private information by perfectly coordinating the divisions' operations. Second, the company has to induce the managers to provide productive effort and with participation, to additionally report truthfully. Thus, the company incurs incentive costs. The two considered budgeting processes trade off these effects diametrically. For a low importance of coordination, the company prefers the top-down budgeting process and not installing an information system that allows the managers to obtain private information. Otherwise, the participative budgeting process is used. In contrast to the company, managers always prefer the participative budgeting process. In addition, the model predicts that a higher earnings potential increases the attractiveness of participative budgets
AgroTutor: A Mobile Phone Application Supporting Sustainable Agricultural Intensification
Get PDFTraditional agricultural extension services rely on extension workers, especially in countries with large agricultural areas. In order to increase adoption of sustainable agriculture, the recommendations given by such services must be adapted to local conditions and be provided in a timely manner. The AgroTutor mobile application was built to provide highly specific and timely agricultural recommendations to farmers across Mexico and complement the work of extension agents. At the same time, AgroTutor provides direct contributions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, either by advancing their implementation or providing local data systems to measure and monitor specific indicators such as the proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture. The application is freely available and allows farmers to geo-locate and register plots and the crops grown there, using the phone’s built-in GPS, or alternatively, on top of very high-resolution imagery. Once a crop and some basic data such as planting date and cultivar type have been registered, the application provides targeted information such as weather, potential and historical yield, financial benchmarking information, data-driven recommendations, and commodity price forecasts. Farmers are also encouraged to contribute in-situ information, e.g., soils, management, and yield data. The information can then be used by crop models, which, in turn, send tailored results back to the farmers. Initial feedback from farmers and extension agents has already improved some of the application’s characteristics. More enhancements are planned for inclusion in the future to increase the application’s function as a decision support tool
Corporate Headquarters in the DACH region: A Benchmarking Study of Vienna, Zurich, and Munich
Get PDFCorporate Headquarters (HQs) of large multinational corporations are important economic actors in the location. Decision-making of those organizations culminates in the Corporate HQ, which is also the provider of high-quality employment and business opportunities for related businesses such as accounting firms, banks, start-ups, or owners of office properties. In this short descriptive study, we compare the cities and metropolitan areas of Vienna, Zurich, and Munich with regards to the number of Corporate HQs it hosts and what kind of firms are governed by those HQs. The key results are twofold. First, Vienna is substantially less densely populated by Corporate HQs of large firms than Zurich or Munich. Second, Vienna’s Corporate HQs run firms that are, on average, considerably smaller than those run from Zurich or Munich. We refrain from interpreting these findings in this report and refer to future studies in which we plan to discuss the findings in greater detail. Yet, our opinion is that our finding is an indicator of Vienna’s competitive disadvantage with negative implications for related businesses (accounting firms, banks, start-ups, etc.)
Towards Querying in Decentralized Environments with Privacy-Preserving Aggregation
Get PDFThe Web is a ubiquitous economic, educational, and collaborativespace, however, it also serves as a haven for personal information harvesting. Ex-isting decentralised Web-based ecosystems, such as Solid, aim to combat personaldata exploitation on the Web by enabling individuals to manage their data in thepersonal data store of their choice. Since personal data in these decentralisedecosystems are distributed across many sources, there is a need for techniques tosupport efficient privacy-preserving query execution over personal data stores.Towards this end, in this position paper we present a framework for efficient pri-vacy preserving federated querying, and highlight open research challenges andopportunities. The overarching goal being to provide a means to position futureresearch into privacy-preserving querying within decentralised environments
Citizens prosocial behavior in times of crisis
Get PDFAustrians felt they could help others less in the corona-lock down, compared to one year before the crisis, but still feel helped by others. This is the output of a quantitative comparison of survey data collected in 2019 and 2020. Further qualitative exploration suggests that the social distancing is a major reason for not being able to help others, as social contact is often seen as a condition to help others. However, having the feeling of being helped by others – and thus be more dependent on others – relates negative with how people help others themselves, and with prosocial intentions and public service motivation. Moreover, people that felt more helped by others were also less satisfied about the corona measures and how other citizens (did not) comply with these measures
Assessing the Market Niche of Eurasian Rail Freight in the Belt and Road Era
Get PDFThis paper presents an overview of the recent development of Eurasian rail freight in the Belt and Road era and further evaluates its service quality in terms of transit times and transport costs compared to other transport modes in containerised supply chains between Europe and China.
A trade-off model of transit time and transport costs based on quantitative data from primary and secondary sources is developed to demonstrate the market niche for Eurasian rail freight vis-a-vis the more established modes of transport of sea, air, and sea/air. In a scenario analysis, further cargo attributes influencing modal choice are employed to show for which cargo type Eurasian rail freight service is favourable from a shipper’s point of view.
At present, Eurasian rail freight is about 80% less expensive than air freight with only half of the transit time of conventional sea freight. Our scenario analysis further suggests that for shipping time-sensitive goods with lower cargo value ranging from 1.23 USD/kg to 10.89 USD/kg as well as goods with lower time sensitivity and higher value in a range of 2.46 USD/kg to 21.78 USD/kg, total logistics costs of Eurasian rail freight service rail is cheaper than all other modes of transport.
As an emerging competitive solution, Eurasian rail freight demonstrates to be an option beneficial in terms of transport cost, transit time, reliability and service availability, which offers a cost-efficient option enabling shippers to build up agile and more sustainable supply chains between China and Europe.
Our study firstly provides a comprehensive assessment of present Eurasian rail freight including a thorough comparison with alternative modes of transport from a shipper’s point of view
The political trilemma of contemporary social-ecological transformation - lessons from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation
Get PDFThis article advances Rodrik's political trilemma of the world economy by using insights from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which helps to grasp the interwoven dynamics of long-term transformations due to climate change and geopolitical reordering on one hand, and on the other short-term political ruptures due to countermovements. Rodrik's globalization trilemma shows the incompatibility of hyperglobalization with the need for an enlarged democratic policy space. Its nodes (globalization, nation state and democracy), however, have to be redefined to grasp contemporary dynamics of deglobalization. Based on a modified political trilemma of contemporary social-ecological transformation, I discuss and compare three visions and the resultant strategies: (1) Liberal globalism, focusing on hyperglobalization and individualism, (2) nationalistic capitalism, stressing national sovereignty and authoritarian governance, and (3) foundational economy based on planetary coexistence which combines selective economic deglobalization with a strengthening of a place-based foundational economy, and their respective social-ecological infrastructural configurations