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This cumulative dissertation investigates the newly emerged phenomenon of customer success management (CSM). CSM has received a significant amount of attention from academics and practitioners alike. However, the body of academic literature is still in its infancy, especially when comparing CSM’s relevance to the field of relationship marketing.
Manuscript 1: Zakrzewski, K., Krause, V., Pfaff, C. & Seidenstricker, S. (2023). Is customer success management a new relationship marketing practice? A review, definition, and future research agenda based on practice theory.
Manuscript 2: Zakrzewski, K., Krause, V., Eberl, D. & Rangarajan, D. (2023). Dynamic & proactive segmentation of post-sale customer relationships in B2B subscription settings: The customer health score.
Manuscript 3: Zakrzewski, K. (2023). Customer success management - closing a capability gap in the customer-focused structure toward customer centricity in B2B service contexts.
The first manuscript adopts a new approach to the investigation of CSM, providing a practice-based definition that distinguishes CSM from other relationship marketing constructs. By utilizing the 3 Ps framework of practice theory (praxis, practices, and practitioners), the definition of CSM as a strategic function was refined. In addition, the second manuscript utilized praxis to develop the customer health score, which can be used as an indicator for the dynamic and proactive segmentation of customers. The third manuscript builds on this functional definition to show how CSM’s organizational embeddedness can help overcome barriers to customer centricity by enabling adaptive organizational capability.
In forecast combination, multiple predictions are linearly combined through the assignment of weights to individual forecast models or forecasters. Various approaches exist for defining the weights, which typically involve determining the number of models to be used for combination (selection), choosing an appropriate weighting function for the forecast scenario (weighting), and using regularization techniques to adjust the calculated weights (shrinkage). The papers listed address the integration of the three approaches into holistic data analytical models.
The first paper develops a two-stage model in which weights are first calculated based on the in-sample error covariances to minimize the error on the available data by combining the individual models. Based on the selection status of a model, the weight of an individual model is then linearly shrunk either toward the mean or toward zero. The selection status is thereby derived apriori from information criteria, where Contribution 1 introduces the selection based on the model’s in-sample accuracy and performance robustness under uncertainty.
Contribution 2 modifies the two-stage model to shrink the forecasters’ weights non-proportionally to the mean or zero. Further, a new information criterion based on forward feature selection is proposed that iteratively selects the forecaster that is expected to achieve the largest increase in accuracy when combined.
Contribution 3 extends the iteration-based information criterion presented in the second contribution to consider diversity gains in addition to accuracy gains when selecting and combining forecasters.
A one-stage model for simultaneous weighting, shrinking, and selection is finally built and evaluated on simulated data in Contribution 4. Instead of requiring a prior selection criterion, the model itself learns which forecasters to shrink to the mean or to zero, while relying on a new sampling procedure to tune the model.
In this dissertation, I investigate how innate decision-making tools, such as culture and curiosity, affect individual economic education and innovation decisions. The cumulative dissertation consists of the following four chapters:
Chapter 1: Culture in Individual Economic Decision-Making—A Conceptual Contribution
Chapter 2: Individualism and the Formation of Human Capital (based on joint work with Sven Resnjanskij, Jens Ruhose, and Simon Wiederhold)
Chapter 3: Individualism, Creativity, and Innovation
Chapter 4: Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes? Casino-Based Evidence on Exploration Strategies and Curiosity in a High-Complexity Game (based on joint work with Alexander Patt)
Through a combination of methods (theoretical as well as structural and reduced-form empirical work) and data sources (ranging from large-scale international data to experimentally generated data), each chapter answers a distinct but related research question:
While the first chapter contributes to our conceptual understanding of culture in an economic context, chapters two and three are dedicated to investigating economic effects of individualism. Individualism is a polarizing dimension of culture with its emphasis on personal achievement and personal responsibility. Although individualism is an established driver of long-run economic growth, the underlying individual-level mechanisms have not been well understood. To close this research gap, I study the role of individualism in individual education and innovation decisions. Using data from an international skill assessment, the second chapter shows that individualism strongly and positively affects human capital investments. Individualism matters more for human capital formation than any other dimension of culture found in the economic literature and should, thus, be included more rigorously in the education production function. Complementarily, the third chapter reveals that individualism is positively related to individual innovativeness – which is captured by a wide range of measures from selection into creative-innovative occupations and knowledge diffusion on the job to creativity traits and patenting.
Focusing on the exploration-exploitation trade-off that is prevalent in innovation decisions, the fourth chapter uses slot machine games to investigate exploration behavior in a natural yet controlled setting. The experimental results document that a significant group of players engage in curiosity-based exploration related to the game’s entropy. The different player types identified in the data showcase the variety of strategies economic agents use to navigate a high-uncertainty high-complexity decision environment.
To embrace diversity in thoughts and approaches economically, an understanding of the specific role of cultural tools in economic decision making is imperative.
In this cumulative dissertation, I investigate unintended economic consequences of government interventions in three essays, each looking at a very specific question. The first essay examines how the introduction and enhancement of public pension systems affect demography, the second essay focuses on tax evasion via citizenship-by-investment programs, and the third essay evaluates the diversion of foreign financial assistance by powerful elites from recipient countries.
Despite the different research questions, all three essays evolve around the issue that actions of governments almost always create incentives causing unforeseen or unexpected behavioral responses. The first essay shows that increasing pension wealth creates incentives to save less for old-age in the form of own children, the second essay documents that policy instruments that increase the detection probability of tax evasion create incentives for evaders to find new ways to circumvent the law, and the third essay shows that foreign assistance creates rent-seeking incentives.
The results collected in the dissertation have implications for economic policy: Government interventions must be informed by an understanding of how well policies and programs produce (or contribute to) their desired outcomes. The results of all three essays presented in this thesis demonstrate that unforeseen or unexpected behavioral responses to government interventions can lead to economic outcomes or side effects that are divergent or contrary to the intentions of policymakers. These unintended economic consequences can significantly lessen the effectiveness of the policy or render it unsustainable. The first essay illustrates that the fertility effects of public pensions can erode the contribution base and, thus, the sustainability and political acceptance of a PAYG pension system in the long-run. The second essay shows that loopholes that have been found by evaders can lessen the deterrence effect of tax information exchange mechanisms, undermining their effectiveness to curb tax evasion. The third essay demonstrates that aid capture can prevent resources from being spent on their intended use, rendering foreign assistance less effective.
The overall aim of this cumulative dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of both antecedents of the usage of automated mobility offerings and outcomes that individual consumers experience from such usage. The dissertation contains three distinct papers:
Paper 1: Janotta, F. (2022), “Making emergent technologies more tangible - Effects of presentation form on user perceptions in the context of automated mobility”
Paper 2: Janotta, F. & Hogreve, J. (2022), “Ready for take-off? The dual role of affective and cognitive evaluations in the adoption of Urban Air Mobility services”
Paper 3: Janotta, F.; Hogreve, J.; Gustafsson, A. & Lervik-Olsen, L. (2022), “Will automated mobility contribute to consumer well-being? The role of mindfulness interventions in the context of automated driving”
Each paper addresses a specific prevailing research gap in the literature related to automated mobility offerings, focusing on different use cases of automated mobility. Paper 1 investigates the effects of different presentation forms of automated driving on consumers’ perceptions, thereby addressing the challenge of effectively visualizing emergent automated technologies and making them more tangible to respondents in the context of empirical research, thus providing a methodological basis for the further investigation. Paper 2 investigates antecedents of consumers’ adoption intentions of autonomous passenger drones, specifically focusing on the dual role of affective and cognitive considerations in the formation of usage intentions. Paper 3 investigates outcomes of consumers’ usage of automated mobility offerings, focusing on the use case of automated driving and its effects on individual well-being of consumers.
Trading in the shadows
(2022)
1. Credit supply externalities of a secondary loan market
We analyze the primary and secondary market for leveraged loans over the period from January 2010 to January 2020. Our findings indicate a trading channel of credit supply contraction. Nonbank lenders that are active loan traders decrease their credit supply relative to banks when the secondary market becomes cheap and expected profitability of loan trading increases. Direct evidence from collateralized loan obligations, the largest nonbank lenders, is consistent with the interpretation that credit is crowded out by nonbanks responding to profitable opportunities in the secondary loan market, rather than with a demand-based interpretation. The results suggest that the existence of a secondary loan market might have negative spillovers to the real economy, a possibility overlooked thus far.
2. Do investors care about climate change risk – even if nobody looks? Evidence from the private market
This paper contributes to the discussion about the regulation of private markets by taking climate change into the equation. It aims at filtering out factors of public awareness and regulation to see how investors behave on private markets, where “nobody looks”. We analyze changes in leveraged loan index prices and trades that can be associated with changes in climate risk awareness during the Paris Agreement and the French Energy Transition Law in 2015. CLOs, the largest players on the leveraged loan market and barely regulated or publicly observed institutional investors, do care about climate risks – just not the way climate activists would hope for: They further invest in brown firms and even increase their inventory when the overall prices of these decline as a response to the Paris Agreement. The effect reverses in face of more concrete regulatory threats of the French Energy Transition Law.
3. Value and momentum in private debt: Trading strategies for leveraged loans
This paper applies empirical asset pricing literature on the leveraged loan market by analyzing short-term (one-month) value and momentum strategies. We apply portfolio sorts on aggregate industry and country excess returns for four different panels in the US and Europe with almost seventy years of combined data. This novel approach of aggregating leveraged loans ensures tradability as investors can choose from available facilities within an industry or country portfolio. Sorting countries into terciles of HIGH, MEDIUM, and LOW according to value and momentum results in annualized credit excess returns of long HIGH-value portfolios from 548 bps to 1,040 bps; and long HIGH-momentum returns from 429 bps to 1,358 bps. Annualized Sharpe ratios span 0.93 to 1.45 and 1.11 to 1.64, respectively. These profits are neither compensation for default risk nor liquidity provision.
Demystifying pairs trading
(2022)
This thesis contributes to the literature on algorithm-based hedge fund strategies with new insights into pairs trading to further demystify the rule-based trading strategy. Thereby, I closely follow the popular trading approach of Gatev, Goetzmann, and Rouwenhorst (2006). After introducing the methodology, the return calculation, and previous academic work, three research questions are investigated to extend the current knowledge of researchers and practitioners about the trading strategy.
Advancing digitalization, the emergence of disruptive technologies, the radically changing customer requirements, or the growing competitive work environment force every organization to re-invent themselves rapidly and constantly and to re-think the relevance of their current business model. In this dynamic organizational environment, companies rely increasingly on their employees’ creativity and need to motivate them to cultivate and drive new ideas and proposals for products and services. At the same time, it is also imperative for organizations to encourage their employees to communicate issues, problems or concerns that might decrease the organizational performance. However, employees might decide to rather withhold their beneficial ideas or relevant concerns, which impedes the enhancement of organizational efficiency or hinders the necessary development of new and improved processes, services or products. This behavior was defined as employee silence, withholding any form of genuine expression from a person that might be able to make a change. Despite the high relevance of employee silence and the growing research body over the last two decades, the relationship of employee silence and innovative behavior has received just little empirical attention in the field of organizational behavior and management sciences. Therefore, the overall purpose of this thesis is to empirically examine the role and relevance of employee silence in the context of disruptive business model transformation. The comprehensive literature review conducted within this thesis demonstrated that silence behavior is a distinct and valid multidimensional construct that is rather complex to measure and therefore also scientifically defiant. The literature review also provides a comprehensive overview of scientific outcomes in the area of organizational and employee silence over the last 20 years. Based on two preliminary qualitative studies (16 expert interviews) in different work settings a structural equation model (SEM) for the empirical investigation was designed by combining the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). For the empirical (quantitative) examination, a global survey (n = 4,527) was rolled out in an industrial company undergoing major change initiatives. The main results of the SEM (n = 4,527) demonstrated that job dissatisfaction significantly increased employee silence, whereas work engagement significantly decreased silence behavior. With respect to the direct influential factors causing employee silence, it was also shown that certain job demands (collaboration) and job resources (authentic leadership) significantly influenced the antecedents of silence, even with certain buffering effects. These results also confirmed the dual pathways of the JD-R model and the interaction effects between job demands and resources suggested by the literature. Moreover, the study also revealed that employee silence showed a weak positive, but significant relation to innovative performance. Therefore, the assumption that silence is more than just the absence or opposite of voice could be supported empirically. Within the thesis also potentially fruitful implications for research and practice as well as limitations are discussed.
This dissertation comprises three essays on the leveraged loan market. The first essay investigates leveraged loan market liquidity. The second essay evaluates several models in terms of their ability to predict leveraged loan volatility. The third essay analyzes the informational efficiency of the leveraged loan market.
This thesis develops methodological approaches to extend the service spectrum of price comparison websites for electronic consumer goods with respect to the determination of the optimal purchase time point. The central decision criterion of price comparison sites’ customers is the (expected) minimum price.
This paper therefore focuses on the prediction of minimum prices and therefrom derived events and answers three questions that set the stage for extending services of price comparison sites:
1. How long do is the expected waiting time to buy our desired product for a set budget or desired price?
2. When should a customer buy so that s/he pays the lowest price within a short, predefined decision horizon?
3. How can a price comparison site make price predictions for a large, heterogeneous set of products over different horizons, and what are the best methods for doing so?
The database used for the analysis results from the specific requirements of the study context. While the first two papers focus on a subset of electronic consumer goods - smartphones - to demonstrate the application of the developed methodology, the third paper addresses the challenges of price prediction for the heterogeneous product landscape on price comparison sites and therefore includes multiple product categories in the analysis.