Managers sometimes sacrifice profits only to improve their relative competitive standing, a behaviour that is known as “competitive irrationality.” Previous research has generated a wealth of insight into the general foundations of this often dysfunctional type of managerial decision-making....

We add a new perspective to research on organizational response to non-paradigmatic change by studying an irregular yet increasingly important form of organizing: meta-organizations (MOs), i.e., associations whose members are organizations, rather than individuals. We use extensive revelatory...

Summary Benefiting from new Internet technologies and altered user behavior, social networking sites have become the poster child of a series of new web services that have been emerging with the advent of "Web 2.0". In this article, we follow a comparative case approach of two major German...

Prediction markets are an innovative forecasting method that has proven high prediction accuracy in many areas. The method is, however, far from being established since many organizations are still reluctant to use the method. In particular the trust in the forecast results is a key challenge...

The authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of traditional store-based and online retailing. To minimise the drawbacks, the emerging trend in retailing is a covergence of the two business models of retailing. Several examples of major companies in 'bricks-and-mortar' and 'online...

An increasing number of rural municipalities wants to meet their entire energy demand with biomass. This article gives a system analytic view on these “bioenergy villages” by balancing pros (reduction of CO2 emissions) and cons (increasing costs, land use) using the example of a model...

The possible uses of biomass for energy provision are manifold. Gaseous, liquid and solid bioenergy carriers can be alternatively converted into heat, power or transport fuel. The contribution of the different utilisation pathways to environmental political targets for greenhouse gas (GHG)...

Many European municipalities develop energy supply concepts based on renewable energies to reduce energy related greenhouse gas emissions and stimulate regional and rural economies. Improvement of security of supply using regional energy sources is an additional motivation for renewable energy...

Die grundsätzlich neuen institutionellen und politischen Rahmenbedingungen, die durch die Errichtung des europäischen Systems der Zentralbanken (ESZB) vorgegeben wurden, verlangen - darin sind sich alle an der Diskussion Beteiligten einig - eine grundlegende Strukturreform der Deutschen...

We analyze the relationship between management support offered by venture capital firms and the performance of entrepreneurial start-ups. Based on the reasoning of the resource-based view, we use a sample of 106 German start-up companies to derive and empirically test several hypotheses. Our...