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Really new products frequently receive great academic, managerial and public attention, because they have the potential to change everybody’s lives. Our economic system fundamentally relies on creative destruction, i.e. the constant process by which innovations challenge established products. This tension between the new and the already existing in the end promises competitive advantage, but makes it difficult to successfully introduce product innovations to the market. Hence, companies strive to become better all along the innovation process, ranging from idea generation, to product launch, and customers’ post-adoption product experience. This dissertation addresses challenges along the product innovation process in three independent essays.
Essay 1 focuses on members’ collaboration behavior in innovation forums. Many innovations at first are invented by users and later on get developed into products ready for the consumer market within firms’ R&D departments. Users are often the first to encounter novel needs and come up with ideas, concepts and even prototypes to satisfy them. Online forums are social spheres where hobbyists and professionals from all over the world meet to exchange their ideas about products and share their latest experiences. Hence, online forums represent incredibly rich resources to inspire companies’ ideation processes. Essay 1 investigates the social mechanism of member collaboration in innovation communities. Theory on creativity postulates that the interaction between the core and the periphery of social networks enables the communities’ innovative performance. Recent research showed that members from the periphery can boost their individual innovative performance via exchanging with the community core. However, we still do not know why core members assist peripherals. Essay 1 reveals that core members benefit from exchanging with members from the periphery throughout increasing their own influence as experts among peers in the core. The identified mechanism can be used to select the right candidates for co-creation workshops.
Essay 2 identifies a product launch strategy for innovations which are both, radical and disruptive. The successful launch of radical and disruptive innovations is a difficult challenge, because their radical newness provokes consumers’ uncertainties. Furthermore, because of their disruptiveness, at the time of product launch those innovations are perceived to be inferior regarding their primary functionality compared to established products, although their performance in general is fully sufficient to satisfy consumers’ actual needs. A means to address the perceived inferiority is to add a feature to the innovation which offers a functional surplus by means of existing technology. Essay 2 shows that simultaneously introducing the innovation and a functionally modified version thereof increases consumers’ adoption intentions. Furthermore, consumers who opted for the modified, but more expensive version are not dissatisfied with their choice in the long run, although they do not need the additional performance from an objective point of view. Essay 2 contributes insights regarding the causes and consequences of this new product launch strategy to the theory of radical and disruptive innovations. The findings of this essay are highly relevant to managers, because they show how this strategy can be implemented in practice to lower the failure rate of really new products at product launch.
Innovation research to date is rich on evidence regarding the determinants of consumers’ adoption decisions. However, perhaps due to questions of data accessibility, insights of consumers’ post-adoption product evaluation are still scarce. Hence, essay 3 shifts the focus beyond product adoption to investigate the interplay of early adopters’ experienced utility, perceived aesthetic value and attitude toward the product in the long-run. Findings show that the perceived aesthetic value creates a halo effect in the post-adoption phase, such that the influence of early adopters’ experienced utility on attitude gets weaker, the more positively they evaluate the innovations’ aesthetics over time. Furthermore, the halo effect only tempers the relationship between experienced hedonic utility and attitude when consumers are characterized by innate consumer innovativeness. Managers should see the products’ form not only as a means to increase purchase intentions, but understand that aesthetic value offers the potential to shape consumers’ long term attitude toward the product, which in turn is an important driver for word of mouth behavior. A high score on the trait innate consumer innovativeness is an appropriate criterion for the selection of users for design co-creation.
In the first article, I will focus on the career choice itself and identify core components that a career choice regarding the ICT-industry is comprised of.
In the second article, the thesis focuses on the Indian ICT-industry. The Indian ICT-industry consists of a comparably high percentage of female employees, namely 35% at the entry-level, but at the same time struggles with high attrition rates at higher levels. Therefore, the Indian ICT-industry serves as a best practice example for attracting women to the ICT-industry, and simultaneously assists us in under-standing the reasons why they tend not to stay.
In the third article, the thesis focuses on the stability of career choices by analyzing the short- and long-term persistence of females and males in computing disciplines.
In the fourth article, the thesis analyzes the motivation structure of people that plan to enter the ICT-industry. This is to identify what kinds of people are attracted to the ICT-industry and to reveal differences in their vocational behavior.
Eine medienbruchfreie, automatisierte Verarbeitung von Geschäftsdokumenten ist die Grundlage für effiziente und fehlerfreie unternehmensübergreifende Geschäftsprozesse. Im Bereich der digitalen Übertragung von Geschäftsdokumenten in Form von strukturierten Daten existiert hierfür eine Vielzahl von Ansätzen. Daneben werden viele Geschäftsdokumente nach wie vor in bildlicher Form, wie beispielsweise auf Papier, verwendet. In diesem Bereich sind die Dokumente nur selten auf eine automatisierte Verarbeitung ausgelegt. Die Einbettung von digital strukturierter Information, die für eine automatisierte Verarbeitung benötigt wird, erfolgt üblicherweise über optische Codes. Der inhaltliche Aufbau dieser Codes wird meist zwischen den beteiligten Unternehmen individuell vereinbart. Ein standardisierter Ansatz dafür fehlt. Um eine standardisierte Verwendung optischer Codes zu ermöglichen, wird in dieser Arbeit der Ansatz verfolgt, Geschäftsdokumente in XML-basierter Form optisch zu codieren. Damit können bereits existierende Standards für XML-basierte Geschäftsdokumente und optische Codes verwendet werden. Aufgrund der beschränkten Kapazität optischer Codes ist die Kompression von XML-Dokumenten der zentrale Untersuchungsgegenstand dieser Arbeit. Im Rahmen dessen wird die Leistung bestehender Kompressionsverfahren betrachtet und analysiert, inwiefern diese für die optische Codierung XML-basierter Geschäftsdokumente verbessert werden kann. In einem mehrstufigen Analyseprozess erfolgt die Entwicklung eines Verfahrens, das eine neuartige Kombination bestehender Konzepte zur XML-Kompression verwendet und damit höhere Kompressionsraten ermöglicht. Dazu wird ein facettiertes Klassifikationssystem mit technischen und funktionalen Merkmalen erarbeitet, mit dem potentiell relevante XML-Kompressionsverfahren identifiziert werden. Die konzeptionellen Bestandteile der ausgewählten Verfahren werden im Hinblick auf ihre Leistungsfähigkeit beurteilt und sinnvolle Konzepte zu einem parametrisierten Verfahren (PSXC für parametric schema-based XML compression) kombiniert. Im Rahmen einer Fallstudie zur optischen Codierung von Rechnungsdokumenten wird die Leistungsfähigkeit von PSXC im Vergleich zu bestehenden Allzweck- und XML-Kompressionsverfahren geprüft und gezeigt, dass die Größe optischer Codes mit PSXC reduziert werden kann.
In order to end poverty by 2030, the declared goal of the United Nations, a better understanding is needed which policies help poor households to escape poverty and how to end its inter-generational transmission.
Since the Millennium Declaration in September 2000, and the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the delivery of basic social services, such as education, health, water supply and sanitation, has become the central focus of international development assistance.
However, the provision of basic social services is not necessarily sufficient to lead to an accumulation of human and productive capital, which would allow households to escape poverty and interrupt its inter-generational transmission.
To understand why people are poor, we need to understand what productive decisions poor households take, and to identify what constraints households face in their attempt to accumulate human, as well as, productive capital. A better understanding of such constraints could guide policies that have a long-term impact on poverty reduction and on development.
A number of factor could explain why poor households operate at unprofitable levels and why they are constrained in their investment decisions. Empirical evidence points to different explanations: cost of learning and access to information, insufficient education, risk, credit constraints, non-convex production technologies, and behavioral patterns that are inconsistent with standard neoclassical models. Currently, one of the major challenges in formulating policies that foster productive investments among the poor, seems to be to disentangle the effects of scale, credit constraints, and the lack of insurance mechanisms.
This thesis seeks to shed further light on the relative role of these three constraints. In the context of rural India, it analyzes what production and investment decisions households take and how important risk and credit constraints as well as scale effects are in these decisions. Finally, it evaluates potential policy tools that could support households in overcoming these constraints.
Today, 33% of the world's poor live in India, the vast majority of them (80.5%) in rural areas. The economic structure of rural India is still dominated by agricultural production, and consequently, this thesis concentrates on agricultural production decisions and employment in agriculture.
In particular, this thesis addresses three questions in three individual papers: First, are farm households constrained in their crop choices by agricultural production risk and to which extent can India's public works program support households in overcoming this constraint? Second, how profitable is cattle farming in rural India at different levels of investment and which barriers do households face in reaching optimal investment levels? And third, can risk in agricultural wages explain limited investment in girls' education in the presence of intra-household substitution in household chores?
The first paper focuses on crop choice of farm households. It reassesses the stylized fact that households have to trade-off between returns and risk in their crop choice in the context of Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India. It then explores the effect of India's flagship anti-poverty program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on households' crop choice using a representative panel data set. The NREGS guarantees each household living in rural India up to a hundred days of employment per year, at state minimum wages.
The paper shows theoretically, and empirically, that the introduction of the NREGS reduces households' uncertainty about future income streams because it provides reliable employment opportunities in rural areas independently of weather shocks and crop failure. With access to the NREGS, households can compensate income losses emanating from shocks to agricultural production. Households with access to the NREGS can therefore shift their production towards riskier but also more profitable crops. These shifts in agricultural production have the potential to considerably raise the incomes of smallholder farmers.
The paper concludes that employment guarantees can, similarly to crop insurance, help households in managing agricultural productions risks. It also argues that accounting for the effects of the NREGS on crop choice and profits from agricultural production affects the cost-benefit analysis of such a program considerably.
The second paper concentrates on the profitability of farming cattle in Andhra Pradesh.
The paper also uses a representative panel dataset, and examines average and marginal returns to cattle at different levels of cattle investment. It finds average returns in the order of -8% at the mean of cattle value. These returns vary across the cattle value distribution between negative 53% (in the lowest quintile) and positive 2% (in the highest). While marginal returns are positive on average, they also vary considerably with cattle value and breed. The paper shows that average and marginal returns are considerably higher for modern variety cows, i.e. European breeds and their crossbreeds, than for traditional varieties of cows or for buffaloes. It also shows that cattle farming becomes most profitable at minimum herd sizes of five animals, due to decreasing average labor costs with increasing herd sizes.
The results of this paper suggest that cattle farming is associated with sizable non-convexities in the production technology and that substantial economies of scale, as well as high upfront expenses of acquiring and feeding high-productivity animals, might trap poorer households in low-productivity asset levels. The fact that wealthier households and households with lower costs to access veterinary services are more likely to overcome these barriers, supports this idea.
The second paper concludes that cattle farming might well generate positive returns for households in rural India, but that most households seem to operate at unprofitable levels. This could also explain the apparent paradox between widespread support of cattle farming through agricultural policy interventions and negative returns to cattle, as stressed in recent works. It argues that policy interventions that target productive assets will only be beneficial if transfers are high enough to allow households to overcome these entry barriers.
The third paper concentrates on the effect of risk on the productive decisions of households, and analyzes the effect of wage risk in agricultural employment on women's labor supply and time allocated to home production. It seeks to understand the extent to which risk raises labor supply of women to levels that can become harmful for other members of the household. The hypothesis is that in the presence of intra-household substitution effects -- for instance in the performance of household chores -- increased female labor supply might have negative effects on the time allocation of girls. If women have less time available for home production and childcare, and such activities can only be foregone at high cost, they might be forced to take older girls out of school or to cut down on the time these girls study at home in order for them to fill in for these tasks.
The paper uses cross-sectional data on the time allocation of different household members and predicts wage risk at the village level as a function of the historical rainfall distribution and a village's share of land that is under irrigation. The results show that wage risk affects the time allocation of women, increasing their labor supply and reducing the time they allocate to home production. Wage risk also increases the time girls spend on household chores and reduces their time in school. Because the observed effect of wage risk on girls' time allocated to household chores corresponds very closely to the effect observed for women, it seems plausible to attribute it to intra-household substitution effects. The observed effect of risk on girls' school time, however, is greater than the observed effect of risk on the home-production time of girls. This can be due to two reasons: First, in the presence of intra-household substitution effects, shocks in wages will not only increase female labor supply but also girls' time on household chores. And the model predicts that risk-averse households invest less in education when future school time becomes uncertain, because future school time affects the returns to current schooling. Second, if school attendance is indivisible, then girls might be forced to drop out of school temporarily or even permanently.
The paper then simulates the effect of the NREGS on the time-allocation decisions of working women and school-age girls. The results suggest that the NREGS could increase the time working women spend on household duties, because it reduces uncertainty regarding future earnings, and alleviates the need to accumulate savings. Thereby, the NREGS would reduce the pressure on girls to perform household tasks and allow them to increase the time they spend in school or studying by 6 minutes daily.
Wit these findings, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of the choices poor households in rural India face in their day-to-day decision making, and offers insights into what policies could support households in escaping poverty, and interrupt its inter-generational transmission.
Durch den Einsatz immer größerer Containerschiffe zum Transport containerisierter Güter über den Seeweg gewinnt die Produktivität der zur Be- und Entladung der Containerschiffe eingesetzten Containerbrücken in Seehafencontainerterminals immer mehr an Bedeutung. Einen erheblichen Einfluss auf die Produktivität der Containerbrücken hat die Containerbrückeneinsatzplanung. Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist das im Rahmen der Containerbrückeneinsatzplanung auftretende Container Sequencing Problem, welches hier erstmals unter Berücksichtigung von Ladelukendeckeln und Rehandlecontainern verschiedener Containerkategorien untersucht wird. Die Problemstellung wird als ganzzahliges lineares Optimierungsmodell formuliert. Zur Lösung des Problems werden verschiedene heuristische Verfahren vorgeschlagen. Deren Leistungsfähigkeit wird anhand numerischer Experimente analysiert.
Advocated by leading consulting firms, the concept of value-based management has enjoyed popularity and found its way into corporate practice in the mid 1990s. But the large breakthrough of value-based management held off, especially in the German landscape. The following four documents first analyze the status quo of value-based management in board compensation, second analyze performance effects of value-based management implementations, third investigate the reasons why inconsistent implementations of value-based management might exist and fourth, the effects of investor relations activities on corporate stock.
Während sich die Geschäftsmodellforschung großer Beliebtheit erfreut, ist bisweilen schwach erforscht, wie sich die konkrete Ausgestaltung der Operationalisierungen von Geschäftsmodellelementen von internetbasierten, nicht börsennotierten Startups auf deren Unternehmenserfolg auswirkt. Die vorliegende Arbeit adressiert diese Fragestellung und deckt mittels statischer Verfahren Zusammenhänge auf.
Three Essays on Understanding Mobile Consumer Behavior: Business Models, Perceptions, and Features
(2016)
For about a decade, consumers have been carrying the Internet in their pockets. The rapid penetration of modern smartphones has meant that more than two-thirds of the people in the West can access and use online resources, anytime and anywhere. Consumers also can communicate and share their consumption experiences instantaneously. Platforms reach users for time-critical events through highly personal communication channels, in the sense that smartphones serve as constant companions. Many mobile applications and their basic services and contents also are available for free. The digital and mobile worlds thus are changing the very means of communication, suggesting the powerful need for marketing research and practice to find the opportunities and meet the challenges of the mobile Internet. In particular, scientific investigations are required to describe new business models in the free e-service industry and the consumer behavior affected by mobile features. This thesis examines these topics in three essays.
Study 1 considers business models that offer their services without charge. Offering services for free is symptomatic of not only mobile apps (90% of all apps are available for free) but the digital economy in general. For companies offering free e-services, this situation raises several important questions, in that, without any access device restrictions, how do customers of free e-services contribute value without paying? What are the nature and dynamics of nonmonetary value contributions by nonpaying customers? With a literature review and interviews with senior executives of free e-service providers, Study 1 presents a comprehensive overview of nonmonetary value contributions in the free e-service sector, including word of mouth, co-production, and network effects. Moreover, adding attention and data into this framework reveals two further aspects that have not been addressed in prior customer value research. By putting the findings in the context of the existing literature on customer value and customer engagement, this study sheds light on the complex processes of value creation in the emerging e-service sector, while advancing marketing and service research in general.
Study 2 deepens the findings from the first study; specifically, the focus is on the way that mobile users co-produce content and how this contribution is perceived by recipients in the network. With field data and a scenario experiment, this study demonstrates that recipients appreciate mobile-generated customer reviews fundamentally differently from other reviews. In particular, they discount the helpfulness of mobile reviews, due to their text-specific content and style particularities. The very fact that a review has been identified as written on a mobile device also lowers recipients’ perceptions of its value. Recipients use information about the device as a source cue to assess their compatibility with the review contribution channel. If they perceive themselves as compatible with the method used to generate the review (mobile or non-mobile), recipients regard the review as more helpful, because they attribute the review to the quality of the reviewed subject. If they perceive it as incompatible though, recipients assume that the review reflects the personal dispositions of the reviewer and discount its helpfulness.
Finally, Study 3 takes up the attention and cross-market network effects in a mobile setting; these were two nonmonetary dimensions identified by Study 1. Platform providers should develop measures to draw the attention of nonpaying customers to the offers of their paying customers. One attention-grabbing mobile-specific feature is push notifications to the device, which provide information about temporally or spatially relevant events. More concretely, Study 3 investigates how mobile push notifications remind users of upcoming deadlines in online auctions and therefore improve late bidding success. Late bidding is a prevalent strategy, in which bidders submit their bids at the very end of an online auction. This research uses field data about an online auction platform to demonstrate that late bidders use these mobile push notifications more frequently than do bidders with different bidding patterns. Within the group of late bidders, the chance to win an auction increases with their use of push notifications. After a mobile push notification, late bidders submit bids through mobile devices but also through non-mobile channels. Less experienced late bidders also benefit from push notifications, which increase their chances of success.
In summary, this dissertation contributes to an enhanced understanding of mobile consumer behavior by using various methods, including qualitative interviews, field observations, and online experiments. From a theoretical perspective, it contributes to current knowledge about nonmonetary costumer value contributions in general and their role in mobile settings in particular. This thesis highlights the role of mobile devices in co-production and perceptions of co-produced content. It also reveals how mobile-specific interactive features, like push notifications, affect late bidding efficiency. Therefore, it specifies the role of mobile devices in cross-market effects, in that they enable the platform to direct the relationship between buyers and sellers. The insights presented herein encourage managers to reevaluate their current practices, think about whether they should label co-produced content as generated through a mobile channel or not, and contemplate whether to develop mobile push notifications as helpful features for users (not as intrusive marketing messages).
This dissertation sets out to deepen our understanding on the causes and manifestations of digital inequality through the lens of technology adoption research. To this day, digital inequality remains an important and relevant societal issue. With the rapid proliferation of digital ICT over the last 20 years the nature of the phenomenon may have evolved from an access-based to an appropriation-based issue, yet its significance has not diminished. Again this backdrop, this dissertation aims to explore which mechanisms and factors influence why and how individuals use ICT in the context of digital inequality, and, in particular, what role social influence, socio-cognitive processes, and socio-economic determinants play. In a series of essays, this dissertation first develops a theoretical understanding of the concept of social influence, which plays an important role in determining whether and how individuals use a technology. Next, a process lens is adopted to explore the underlying mechanisms that drive individuals to disengage from a new technology and may lead to digital exclusion. Building on that, this dissertation examines how digital inequality manifests itself in the specific realm of e-commerce. This dissertation concludes with a practical perspective on the issue of digital inequality aimed at policy makers seeking to bridge the gap between digitally advantaged and disadvantaged users.