Immer wieder wird diskutiert, ob öffentlich-rechtliche Sparkassen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zu privatisieren seien. In dem vorliegenden Papier wird unter Rückgriff auf Methoden der Neuen Politischen ökonomie gezeigt, daß die Durchsetzung eines derartigen Privatisierungsschrittes...

Component commonality, the use of the same version of a component across multiple products, is increasingly considered as a promising way to offer high external variety while retaining low internal variety in operations. However, increasing commonality has both positive and negative cost...

The new field of research called Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) aims at tearing down the last barrier in enterprises' information flow, the data analysis step. This is done by developing and integrating data mining algorithms. A neuro-fuzzy-system can be such a data mining tool. After...

Consumers use price of a product both as a signal of product quality and as a monetary constraint in choosing it. Consequently, price has two distinct roles - informational and allocative - in the evaluation of a product. In this paper, we test the validity of a research approach proposed by...

Retailers have been criticized for heavily relying on odd prices although their advantage over even prices has not been convincingly proven. In this paper we argue that such behavior does not have to stem solely from tradition, but may be seen as a rational way of dealing with uncertainty. We...

The main objective of the European Council Directive 96/61/EC concerning integrated pollution prevention and control is to achieve an integrated approach of environmental protection by co-ordinating the authorization procedures of the competent authorities. However, by prescribing the permit...

In standard market theory demand and cost functions have to be known to compute optimal price or quantity responses. In case of risk or uncertainty the decisions depend on expectations, i.e. estimated parameters. Even in case of rational inference these expectations itself are uncertain, at...

Empirical studies show that decisions deviate from the predictions of expected utility theory and violate the axiomatic foundations. Hence, many generalizations to non-expected utility theory have been developped. But empirically they did not provide an improvement over the standard approach. In...

In reviewing Environmental Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany, one notices a domination of interventionist approaches in the most important areas. This contribution sheds light upon those economic conceptions opposing the command-and- control approach to environmental policy. Currently,...

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the plant level, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for manufactured goods. It...