This article articulates a distinctive source of political influence of some technology firms, which we call platform power. Platform power inheres in companies of economic scale that provide the ...terms of access through which large numbers of consumers access goods, services, and information. Firms with platform power benefit from a deference from policymakers, but this deference is not primarily a function of direct influence through lobbying or campaign contributions, nor does it come from the threat of disinvestment. Companies with platform power instead benefit from the tacit allegiance of consumers, who can prove a formidable source of opposition to regulations that threaten these platforms. Focusing on the critical role played by consumers in explaining the powers platform firms wield in the rich democracies lends insight as well into their distinctive vulnerabilities, which flow from events that split the consumer–platform alliance or that cue citizen, as opposed to consumer, political identities.
Personal health records (PHRs), centralized places for consumers to electronically store, manage, and share their personal health information, offer new opportunities to help consumers manage their ...own health and health care. However, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of health information contained within PHRs is challenging. This paper analyzes the major properties of existing PHR systems and identifies specific privacy and security issues with each type of PHR. It proposes a consumer-controlled privacy protection approach that includes high-minded privacy principles such as independent consent management, independent privacy and security audits, and regulatory compliance requirements. It further presents a consumer-controlled system architecture that embodies these principles in the web-based PHR system.
Limited liability companies form the backbone of our modern economy. However, there is a persistent danger of moral hazard on the part of directors and shareholders, particularly in closely held or ...private companies. Like all developed legal systems, English and German law both provide mechanisms designed to protect creditors from such risks. This book investigates some of these mechanisms, including the avoidance of pre-insolvency acts, capital maintenance and creditor-regarding duties of directors. By analysing the different conceptual and doctrinal perspectives inherent in the English and German systems, this book seeks to advance a discourse between audiences with different legal backgrounds. It will be an invaluable guide for those wishing to understand how the protective mechanisms operate and interact with each other, and how they do so in quite different ways in the two jurisdictions.
Bauteilversuche Oberesslingen – Teil 2 Kötz, Harold; Begemann, Christoph; Jeannette Ebers‐Ernst
Die Bautechnik,
04/2024, Volume:
101, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Die Angebotsbearbeitung der Ausschreibung „Bauteilversuche an der Neckarschleuse in Oberesslingen (BTV OES)“ war sowohl hinsichtlich der Inhalte als auch durch das vom Auftraggeber gewählte ...Vergabeverfahren besonders. Die Planungen im Rahmen der Konzepterstellung als Teil des Angebots mussten eine Vielzahl von vorgegebenen Randbedingungen, Anforderungen und Leistungsumfängen berücksichtigen. Die Bearbeitung erfolgte durch eine auf ein späteres Totalunternehmen ausgerichtete Bietergemeinschaft. Das gesamte Vergabeverfahren erstreckte sich über einen Zeitraum von mehr als zwei Jahren mit einer intensiven Zeit der Angebotsbearbeitung und Konzeptfortschreibungen von ca. einem Jahr. Der Konzeptinhalt und folglich die Detailtiefe wuchsen dabei stetig an. Diese Konzentration auf die Konzeptinhalte und der damit verbundene hohe Stellenwert der technischen Lösungsansätze spiegelten sich in der entsprechend hohen Gewichtung bei der Angebotsbewertung mit einem Wertungsanteil von 80 % wider. Um die vielfältigen Leistungsanforderungen hinsichtlich Planung und Ausführung zu bedienen, erfolgte die Angebotsbearbeitung als Bietergemeinschaft aus Planungsbüros und bauausführenden Unternehmen. Die frühzeitige Beteiligung der Baufirmen bot im Hinblick auf die Sicherstellung der späteren Ausführbarkeit optimale Voraussetzungen. Im Folgenden werden die Herangehensweise sowie die Konzepte zu Trockenlegung, Abtrag und Reprofilierung sowie vorlaufende Maßnahmen genauer beschrieben.
Past research has shown that new firms can facilitate resource mobilization by signaling their unobservable quality to prospective resource providers. However, we know less about situations in which ...firms convey multiple signals of different strengths-that is, signals that are more- or less-correlated with unobservable firm quality. Building on a sociocognitive perspective, we propose that prospective resource providers respond differently to signals of different strengths and that the effectiveness of signals, especially weak signals, will be contingent on the media attention new firms receive. Empirically, we conduct a longitudinal analysis examining the ability of new private equity firms to raise a follow-on fund. Consistent with our theory, we find that unrealized performance, a relatively weak signal, positively influences fundraising. However, we fail to find statistical evidence that its effect is weaker than that of realized performance, a relatively strong signal. Further, media attention strengthens the relationship between unrealized performance and fundraising, but media attention exerts less impact on the relationship between realized performance and fundraising. Taken together, our findings deepen our understanding of how new firms can mobilize resources with signals of different strengths and of how the media-as a key information intermediary-differently impacts their effectiveness.
The construction industry is considered as backwards and lack of innovation. The main driving power of technological innovation in the construction industry is large construction companies. However, ...the driving process of technological innovation in them has not been fully investigated in previous studies. This study constructs a quantitative model to explore the technological innovation driving process of large construction companies considering the key influencing factors for technological innovation. The sample data are the 57 large construction companies selected from the world's largest construction market – China. The results show significant positive correlation between innovation input and innovation output, and between innovation output and performance. The operational capacity of the companies is positively correlated with innovation input, whilst the capital structure is negatively correlated with innovation input. The technical employees have a positive impact on the performance. The underlying reasons are discussed and suggestions are given for the construction industry to improve the technological innovation capacity of construction companies. This research contributes to the literature of construction innovation and benefits practitioners by providing a quantitative approach to demonstrate the driving power of large construction companies for technological innovation.
•Technological innovation process in large construction companies.•Significant positive correlation between innovation input and output, and between innovation output and performance.•Suggestions for the construction industry provided.
We propose several econometric measures of connectedness based on principal-components analysis and Granger-causality networks, and apply them to the monthly returns of hedge funds, banks, ...broker/dealers, and insurance companies. We find that all four sectors have become highly interrelated over the past decade, likely increasing the level of systemic risk in the finance and insurance industries through a complex and time-varying network of relationships. These measures can also identify and quantify financial crisis periods, and seem to contain predictive power in out-of-sample tests. Our results show an asymmetry in the degree of connectedness among the four sectors, with banks playing a much more important role in transmitting shocks than other financial institutions.
During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as—19 percent for annuities and — 57 percent for life ...insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market frictions, interacting with statutory reserve regulation that allowed life insurers to record far less than a dollar of reserve per dollar of future insurance liability. We identify the shadow cost of capital through exogenous variation in required reserves across different types of policies. The shadow cost was $0.96 per dollar of statutory capital for the average company in November 2008.
Stakeholder theory has gained currency in the business and society literature in recent years in light of its practicality from the perspective of managers and scholars. In accounting for the recent ...ascendancy of stakeholder theory, this article presents an overview of two traditional conceptualizations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Carroll: 1979, 'A Three-Dimensional Conceptual Model of Corporate Performance', The Academy of Management Review 4(4), 497-505 and Wood: 1991, 'Corporate Social Performance Revisited', The Academy of Management Review 16(4), 691-717), highlighting their predominant inclination toward providing static taxonomic CSR descriptions. The article then makes the case for a stakeholder approach to CSR, reviewing its rationale and outlining how it has been integrated into recent empirical studies. In light of this review, the article adopts a stakeholder framework - the Ethical Performance Scorecard (EPS) proposed by Spiller (2000, 'Ethical Business and Investment: A Model For Business and Society', Journal of Business Ethics 27, 149-160) - to examine the CSR approach of a sample of Lebanese and Syrian firms with an interest in CSR and test relevant hypotheses derived from the CSR/stakeholder literature. The findings are analyzed and implications drawn regarding the usefulness of a stakeholder approach to CSR.
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