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Who do you trust: Peers or Technology? A conjoint analysis about computational reputation mechanisms
(2020)
Peer-to-peer sharing platforms are taking over an increasingly important role in the platform economy due to their sustainable business model. By sharing private goods and services, the challenge arises to build trust between peers online mostly without any kind of physical presence. Peer rating has been proven as an important mechanism. In this paper, we explore the concept called Trust Score, a computational rating mechanism adopted from car telematics, which can play a similar role in carsharing. For this purpose, we conducted a conjoint analysis where 77 car owners chose between fictitious user profiles. Our results show that in our experiment the telemetric-based score slightly outperforms the peer rating in the decision process, while the participants perceived the peer rating more helpful in retrospect. Further, we discuss potential benefits with regard to existing shortcomings of user rating, but also various concerns that should be considered in concepts like telemetric-based reputation mechanism that supplements existing trust factors such as user ratings.
This study contributes to the growing body of research concerning management consultancies by linking two previously disparate fields of study: (1) the examination of the effectiveness of consulting interventions and (2) the examination of the social processes that aim to create and legitimize the insights, knowledge and capabilities of management consultancies. We propose that consulting firms accumulate social authority in the course of pre-intervention discourse processes that is reflected in their reputation and celebrity. With respect to intervention, this social authority affects change recipients’ commitment to and compliance with the requirements of change implementation. We test the proposed relationships by conducting a measured variable path analysis of 117 change initiatives in German companies that were set up and implemented with the assistance of external consultancies. Our findings indicate that a consulting firm’s levels of both celebrity and reputation affect the change recipients’ commitment to proposed change strategies and thus, indirectly affect their behavioral compliance with the explicit requirements of change implementation.
Smart home systems change the way we experience the home. While there are established research fields within HCI for visualizing specific use cases of a smart home, studies targeting user demands on visualizations spanning across multiple use cases are rare. Especially, individual data-related demands pose a challenge for usable visualizations. To investigate potentials of an end-user development (EUD) approach for flexibly supporting such demands, we developed a smart home system featuring both pre-defined visualizations and a visualization creation tool. To evaluate our concept, we installed our prototype in 12 households as part of a Living Lab study. Results are based on three interview studies, a design workshop and system log data. We identified eight overarching interests in home data and show how participants used pre-defined visualizations to get an overview and the creation tool to not only address specific use cases but also to answer questions by creating temporary visualizations.
In January 2015, German trade and industry announced to support the national animal welfare initiative "Initiative Tierwohl" (ITW) which stands for a more sustainable and animal-friendly meat production. A web content analysis shows that the ITW initiative has been widely picked up and discussed by online media and that user comments are quite heterogeneous. The current study identifies different types of consumers through factor and cluster analysis and is based on an online survey as well as face-to-face interviews. According to our results, the identified consumer groups demonstrate a rather passive comment behaviour on the internet. In fact, the internet was hardly mentioned as an information source for meat production; consumers more frequently referred to brochures, leaflets and personal contacts with sales personnel.
The aim of this study was to investigate employees’ self-reported creativity before and after vacation and to examine the impact of recovery experiences (detachment, relaxation, mastery, meaning, autonomy, affiliation) on changes in creativity. The DRAMMA model of Newman et al. provides the theoretical background of our approach. Longitudinal data was assessed with four repeated measurements. The study encompassed data from 274 white-collar workers. Analyses showed that employees subjectively perceive their creativity to benefit not immediately after their vacation but 2 weeks later. Detachment was significantly related to lower creativity within persons, while mastery experiences explained differences in creativity between persons. This study provides a detailed picture of changes in creativity around vacations.
Although much effort is made to prevent risks arising from food, food-borne diseases are an ever present-threat to the consumers’ health. The consumption of fresh food that is contaminated with pathogens like fungi, viruses or bacteria can cause food poisoning that leads to severe health damages or even death. The outbreak of Shiga Toxin-producing enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) in Germany and neighbouring countries in 2011 has shown this dramatically. Nearly 4.000 people were reported of being affected and more than 50 people died during the so called EHEC-crisis. As a result the consumers’ trust in the safety of fruits and vegetables decreased sharply.
Although much effort is made to prevent risks arising from food, food-borne diseases are an ever-present threat to the consumers’ health. The consumption of fresh food that is contaminated with pathogens like fungi, viruses or bacteria can cause food poisoning that leads to severe health damages or even death. The outbreak of Shiga Toxin-producing enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) in Germany and neighbouring countries in 2011 has shown this dramatically. Nearly 4.000 people were reported of being affected and more than 50 people died during the so called EHEC-crisis. As a result the consumers’ trust in the safety of fruits and vegetables decreased sharply.
Dementia not only affects the cognitive capabilities, especially memory and orientation, but also physical capabilities, which are associated with a decrease of physical activities. Here, ICT can play a major role to improve health, quality of life and wellbeing in older adults suffering from dementia and related stakeholders, such as relatives, professional and informal caregivers. The aim of the presented system is to increase physical and cognitive capabilities of people with dementia and their caregivers to support them in daily life activities, reduce the strain of the caregivers and improve both their wellbeing.
Neutral buoyancy has been used as an analog for microgravity from the earliest days of human spaceflight. Compared to other options on Earth, neutral buoyancy is relatively inexpensive and presents little danger to astronauts while simulating some aspects of microgravity. Neutral buoyancy removes somatosensory cues to the direction of gravity but leaves vestibular cues intact. Removal of both somatosensory and direction of gravity cues while floating in microgravity or using virtual reality to establish conflicts between them has been shown to affect the perception of distance traveled in response to visual motion (vection) and the perception of distance. Does removal of somatosensory cues alone by neutral buoyancy similarly impact these perceptions? During neutral buoyancy we found no significant difference in either perceived distance traveled nor perceived size relative to Earth-normal conditions. This contrasts with differences in linear vection reported between short- and long-duration microgravity and Earth-normal conditions. These results indicate that neutral buoyancy is not an effective analog for microgravity for these perceptual effects.
The megatrends towards both a digital and a usership economy have changed entire markets in the past and will continue to do so over the next decades. In this work, we outline what this change means for possible futures of the mobility sector, taking the combination of trends in both economies into account. Using a sys-tematic, scenario-based trend analysis, we draft four general future scenarios and adapt the two most relevant scenarios to the automotive sector. Our findings show that combing the trends from both economies provides new insights that have often been neglected in literature because of an isolated view on digital technology only. However, service concepts such as self-driving car sharing or self-driving taxis have a great impact at various levels including microeconomic (e.g., service and product design, business models) and macroeconomic (e.g., with regard to ecological, economical, and social impacts). We give a brief outline of these issues and show which business mo dels could be successful in the most likely future scenarios, before we frame strategic implications for today’s automobile manufacturers.
The alternative use of travel time is one of the widely discussed benefits of driverless cars. We therefore conducted 14 co-design sessions to examine how people manage their time, to determine how they perceive the value of time in driverless cars and to derive design implications. Our findings suggest that driverless mobility will affect both people’s use of travel time as well as their time management in general. The participants repeatedly stated the desire of completing tasks while traveling to save time for activities that are normally neglected in their everyday life. Using travel time efficiently requires using car space efficiently, too. We found out that the design concept of tiny houses could serve as common design pattern to deal with the limited space within cars and support diverse needs.
Continued growth in international experiences for U.S. co++6llege students is a favorable trend. However, the most substantial increase has occurred with of short-term study abroad programs. Many of these programs include extensive travel instead of involving a single site. There is great danger that if not properly managed, these types of international educational experience will default into little more than an organized group tour.
In these types of programs it is challenging to induce student participants to engage meaningfully with local residents as the traveling group tends to form into its own portable society. In addition, the current state of wireless communications means that students participating in these types of programs can easily stay plugged into their home social networks which further reduces meaningful interactions in the cultures being visited.
Incorporating well designed research projects into short-term study abroad programs holds the potential to offset some of the inherent limitations of such programs. Research projects can serve both to prepare the students for the trip and promote meaningful cross-cultural interaction while the program is underway.
In this paper, the authors provide suggestions based on their experiences with short-term travel abroad programs which incorporated student research. Several potential problems are identified and suggestions are given for project design.
Trust is the lubricant of the sharing economy, especially in peer-to-peer carsharing where you leave a valuable good to a stranger in the hope of getting it backunscathed. Central mechanisms for handling this information gap nowadays are ratings and reviews of other users. The rising of connected car technology opens new possibilities to increase trust by collecting and providing e.g. driving behavior data. At the same time, this means an intrusion into the privacy of the user. Therefore, in this work we explore technological approaches that allow building trust without violating the privacy of individuals. We evaluate to what extent blockchain technology and smart contracts are suitable technologies to meet these challengesby setting upa prototype implementation of a block-chain-based carsharing approach. In this context, we present our research approachand evaluate the prototype in terms of trust and privacy.
When dialogues with voice assistants (VAs) fall apart, users often become confused or even frustrated. To address these issues and related privacy concerns, Amazon recently introduced a feature allowing Alexa users to inquire about why it behaved in a certain way. But how do users perceive this new feature? In this paper, we present preliminary results from research conducted as part of a three-year project involving 33 German households. This project utilized interviews, fieldwork, and co-design workshops to identify common unexpected behaviors of VAs, as well as users’ needs and expectations for explanations. Our findings show that, contrary to its intended purpose, the new feature actually exacerbates user confusion and frustration instead of clarifying Alexa's behavior. We argue that such voice interactions should be characterized as explanatory dialogs that account for VA’s unexpected behavior by providing interpretable information and prompting users to take action to improve their current and future interactions.
The development of fully automated vehicles is becoming more and more present in the social discussion. The image of fully automated cars is determined by automobile manufacturers and placed in the context of individual traffic. In contrast to fully autonomous private cars, fully automated public transport is already operating in some cities and is to be expanded in the future. Autonomous public transport offers great potential for the development and promotion of sustainable mobility concepts. However, the user acceptance is important for the enforcement and widespread use of these technical innovations. An online study on the acceptance of fully automated public transport based on quantitative data of a sample of N = 201 is presented. The results show a high level of familiarity with the topic and a very high level of overall intention to use fully automated public transport in the future.
Green infrastructure has been widely recognized for the benefits to human health and biodiversity conservation. However, knowledge of the qualities and requirements of such spaces and structures for the effective delivery of the range of ecosystem services expected is still limited, as well as the identification of trade-offs between services. In this study, we apply the One Health approach in the context of green spaces to investigate how urban park characteristics affect human mental health and wildlife support outcomes and identify synergies and trade-offs between these dimensions. Here we show that perceived restorativeness of park users varies significantly across sites and is mainly affected by safety and naturalness perceptions. In turn, these perceptions are driven by objective indicators of quality, such as maintenance of facilities and vegetation structure, and subjective estimations of biodiversity levels. The presence of water bodies benefited both mental health and wildlife. However, high tree canopy coverage provided greater restoration potential whereas a certain level of habitat heterogeneity was important to support a wider range of bird species requirements. To reconcile human and wildlife needs in green spaces, cities should strategically implement a heterogeneous green infrastructure network that considers trade-offs and maximizes synergies between these dimensions.
Agricultural activities within the city boundaries have a long history in both developed and developing countries. Especially in developing countries these activities contribute to food security and the mitigation of malnutrition (food grown for home consumption). They generate additional income and contribute to recreation, environmental health as well as social interaction. In this paper, a broad approach of Urban AgriCulture is used, which includes the production of crops in urban and peri-urban areas and ranges in developed countries from allotment gardens (Schrebergarten) over community gardens (Urban Gardening) to semi-entrepreneurial self-harvest farms and fully commercialized agriculture (Urban Farming). Citizens seek to make a shift from traditional to new (sustainable) forms of food supply. From this evolves a demand for urban spaces that can be used agriculturally. The way how these citizens’ initiatives can be supported and their contribution to a resilient and sustainable urban food system increasingly attracts attention. This paper presents an empirical case study on Urban AgriCulture initiatives in the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg region (Germany). Urban AgriCulture is still a niche movement with the potential to contribute more significantly to urban development and constitute a pillar of urban quality of life.
Agricultural activities within city boundaries have a long history in both developed and developing countries. In this paper, a broad approach to Urban AgriCulture (UAC) is used, one that includes the production of crops in urban and peri-urban areas and ranges in developed countries from allotment gardens over community gardens to semi-entrepreneurial self-harvest farms and fully commercialized agriculture. With an empirical case study on UAC Initiatives in the Bonn/Rhein-Sieg region this work fills a gap since the lack of comprehensive and comparative studies on urban agriculture (UA) currently makes it difficult for researchers to identify the benefits of UA activities.
Humankind, it can be argued, lives beyond its means and often at the expense of future generations. This paper starkly demonstrates, with the aid of a mathematical model, the imperative for a sustainable existence. In the model, consumption of resources is represented as a closed system, just like our planet. Long-term survival is only possible if consumption is below the ability of the system to regenerate.
Unlimited paid time off policies are currently fashionable and widely discussed by HR professionals around the globe. While on the one hand, paid time off is considered a key benefit by employees and unlimited paid time off policies (UPTO) are seen as a major perk which may help in recruiting and retaining talented employees, on the other hand, early adopters reported that employees took less time off than previously, presumably leading to higher burnout rates. In this conceptual review, we discuss the theoretical and empirical evidence regarding the potential effects of UPTO on leave utilization, well-being and performance outcomes. We start out by defining UPTO and placing it in a historical and international perspective. Next, we discuss the key role of leave utilization in translating UPTO into concrete actions. The core of our article constitutes the description of the effects of UPTO and the two pathways through which these effects are assumed to unfold: autonomy need satisfaction and detrimental social processes. We moreover discuss the boundary conditions which facilitate or inhibit the successful utilization of UPTO on individual, team, and organizational level. In reviewing the literature from different fields and integrating existing theories, we arrive at a conceptual model and five propositions, which can guide future research on UPTO. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and societal implications of UPTO.
Universities, Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development in Africa – Conference Proceedings 2022
(2023)
These proceedings are the outcome of the 10th annual joint conference on "Universities Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development in Africa".
These proceedings document the culmination of the 10th annual joint conference on "Universities, Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development in Africa," which was held on the 8th and 9th of September 2022 at the Campus Sankt Augustin, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. The conference was a collaboration between the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
Universities, Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development in Africa – Conference Proceedings 2020
(2021)
These proceedings are the outcome of the 8th annual joint conference on "Universities Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development in Africa" between the University of Cape Coast, Ghana and Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany, held on 19-20 February 2020 on Campus Sankt Augustin, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences.
Universities, Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development in Africa – Conference Proceedings 2016
(2017)
These proceedings are the outcome of the 5th annual joint conference on “Universities Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development in Africa” between the University of Nairobi, Kenya, the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany, held on 10-11 November 2016 on Campus Sankt Augustin, Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences.
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) should, on the one hand, provide theoretical and practical knowledge to students and, on the other hand, make valuable contributions to theoretical knowledge and provide new insights by means of research. However, HEIs have to face changing and increasing demands with respect to what they are expected to achieve. Education and research issues are no longer enough, what matters today is the so called “third mission”. A specific example for implementing a third mission is the cooperation between HEIs and business incubators. With this in mind, a local consortium consisting of regional HEIs, e.g. Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, as well as public and private institutions and partners initiated and established an incubator hub for the region Bonn/Rhein-Sieg in 2016, called “Digital Hub Region Bonn”. This conference contribution reports on our experience with regards to this cooperation approach resulting from the above- mentioned case. Furthermore the pros and cons as well as some issues of this kind of cooperation will be discussed. Last but not least this paper initiates the opportunity to share and compare the experiences of other university business incubators in Africa as well as in Germany. As we will describe, the financial investment of HEIs in a joint-incubator with other public as well as private partners offers substantial benefits, such as mutual know-how transfer from HEIs to the economy and vice versa. This strengthens entrepreneurial mindsets and activities and contributes to the development and growth of the local economy. Consequently, this cooperation sometimes creates challenges at various levels, for example due to differing interests between HEIs and business partners. This conference contribution offers approaches to solve these issues and to support private public partnership in business incubation.
Innovations in the mobility industry such as automated and connected cars could significantly reduce congestion and emissions by allowing the traffic to flow more freely and reducing the number of vehicles according to some researchers. However, the effectiveness of these sustainable product and service innovations is often limited by unexpected changes in consumption: some researchers thus hypothesize that the higher comfort and improved quality of time in driverless cars could lead to an increase in demand for driving with autonomous vehicles. So far, there is a lack of empirical evidence supporting either one or other of these hypotheses. To analyze the influence of autonomous driving on mobility behavior and to uncover user preferences, which serve as indicators for future travel mode choices, we conducted an online survey with a paired comparison of current and future travel modes with 302 participants in Germany. The results do not confirm the hypothesis that ownership will become an outdated model in the future. Instead they suggest that private cars, whether conventional or fully automated, will remain the preferred travel mode. At the same time, carsharing will benefit from full automation more than private cars. However, the findings indicate that the growth of carsharing will mainly be at the expense of public transport, showing that more emphasis should be placed in making public transport more attractive if sustainable mobility is to be developed.
Political economic analyses of recent social protection reforms in Asian, African or Latin American countries have increased throughout the last few years. Yet, most contributions focus on one social protection mechanism only and do not provide a comparative approach across policy areas. In addition, most studies are empirical studies, with no or very limited theoretical linkages. The paper aims to explain multiple trajectories of social protection reform processes looking at cash transfers and social health protection policies in Kenya. It develops a taxonomy and suggest a conceptual framework to assess and explain reform dynamics across different social protection pillars. In order to allow for a more differentiated typology and enable us to understand different reform dynamics, the article uses the approach on gradual institutional change. While existing approaches to institutional change mostly focus on institutional change prompted by exogenous shocks or environmental shifts, this approach takes account of both, exogenous and endogenous sources of change.
Trust-Building in Peer-to-Peer Carsharing: Design Case Study for Algorithm-Based Reputation Systems
(2023)
Peer-to-peer sharing platforms become increasingly important in the platform economy. From an HCI-perspective, this development is of high interest, as those platforms mediate between different users. Such mediation entails dealing with various social issues, e.g., building trust between peers online without any physical presence. Peer ratings have proven to be an important mechanism in this regard. At the same time, scoring via car telematics become more common for risk assessment by car insurances. Since user ratings face crucial problems such as fake or biased ratings, we conducted a design case study to determine whether algorithm-based scoring has the potential to improve trust-building in P2P-carsharing. We started with 16 problem-centered interviews to examine how people understand algorithm-based scoring, we co-designed an app with scored profiles, and finally evaluated it with 12 participants. Our findings show that scoring systems can support trust-building in P2P-carsharing and give insights how they should be designed.
Trust your guts: fostering embodied knowledge and sustainable practices through voice interaction
(2023)
Despite various attempts to prevent food waste and motivate conscious food handling, household members find it difficult to correctly assess the edibility of food. With the rise of ambient voice assistants, we did a design case study to support households’ in situ decision-making process in collaboration with our voice agent prototype, Fischer Fritz. Therefore, we conducted 15 contextual inquiries to understand food practices at home. Furthermore, we interviewed six fish experts to inform the design of our voice agent on how to guide consumers and teach food literacy. Finally, we created a prototype and discussed with 15 consumers its impact and capability to convey embodied knowledge to the human that is engaged as sensor. Our design research goes beyond current Human-Food Interaction automation approaches by emphasizing the human-food relationship in technology design and demonstrating future complementary human-agent collaboration with the aim to increase humans’ competence to sense, think, and act.
Trust is the lubricant of the sharing economy. This is true especially in peer-to-peer carsharing, in which one leaves a highly valuable good to a stranger in the hope of getting it back unscathed. Nowadays, ratings of other users are major mechanisms for establishing trust. To foster uptake of peer-to-peer carsharing, connected car technology opens new possibilities to support trust-building, e.g., by adding driving behavior statistics to users' profiles. However, collecting such data intrudes into rentees' privacy. To explore the tension between the need for trust and privacy demands, we conducted three focus group and eight individual interviews. Our results show that connected car technologies can increase trust for car owners and rentees not only before but also during and after rentals. The design of such systems must allow a differentiation between information in terms of type, the context, and the negotiability of information disclosure.
Regions and their innovation ecosystems have increasingly become of interest to CSCW research as the context in which work, research and design takes place. Our study adds to this growing discourse, by providing preliminary data and reflections from an ongoing attempt to intervene and support a regional innovation ecosystem. We report on the benefits and shortcomings of a practice-oriented approach in such regional projects and highlight the importance of relations and the notion of spillover. Lastly, we discuss methodological and pragmatic hurdles that CSCW research needs to overcome in order to support regional innovation ecosystems successfully.
Over the past two decades many low and middle income countries worldwide have started to extend the coverage and improve the functioning of public social protection systems. The research program on international policy diffusion provides empirical evidence that apart from domestic factors international interdependencies matter as well for national policy change in social protection. However, little is known about the governance structures mediating international policy diffusion in social protection.
Work-related thoughts during off-job time have been studied extensively in occupational health psychology and related fields. We provide a focused review of the research on overcommitment—a component within the effort–reward imbalance model—and aim to connect this line of research to the most commonly studied aspects of work-related rumination. Drawing on this integrative review, we analyze survey data on ten facets of work-related rumination, namely (1) overcommitment, (2) psychological detachment, (3) affective rumination, (4) problem-solving pondering, (5) positive work reflection, (6) negative work reflection, (7) distraction, (8) cognitive irritation, (9) emotional irritation, and (10) inability to recover. First, we apply exploratory factor analysis to self-reported survey data from 357 employees to calibrate overcommitment items and to position overcommitment within the nomological net of work-related rumination constructs. Second, we leverage apply confirmatory factor analysis to self-reported survey data from 388 employees to provide a more specific test of uniqueness vs. overlap among these constructs. Third, we apply relative weight analysis to assess the unique criterion-related validity of each work-related rumination facet regarding (1) physical fatigue, (2) cognitive fatigue, (3) emotional fatigue, (4) burnout, (5) psychosomatic complaints, and (6) satisfaction with life. Our results suggest that several measures of work-related rumination (e.g., overcommitment and cognitive irritation) can be used interchangeably. Emotional irritation and affective rumination emerge as the strongest unique predictors of fatigue, burnout, psychosomatic complaints, and satisfaction with life. Our study is intended to assist researchers in making informed decisions on selecting scales for their research and paves the way for integrating research on the effort–reward imbalance and work-related rumination.
Work-related thoughts in off-job time have been studied extensively in occupational health psychology and related fields. We provide a focused review of research on overcommitment – a component within the effort-reward imbalance model – and aim to connect this line of research to the most commonly studied aspects of work-related rumination. Drawing on this integrative review, we analyze survey data on ten facets of work-related rumination, namely (1) overcommitment, (2) psychological detachment, (3) affective rumination, (4) problem-solving pondering, (5) positive work reflection, (6) negative work reflection, (7) distraction, (8) cognitive irritation, (9) emotional irritation, and (10) inability to recover. First, we leverage exploratory factor analysis to self-report survey data from 357 employees to calibrate overcommitment items and to position overcommitment within the nomological net of work-related rumination constructs. Second, we leverage confirmatory factor analysis to self-report survey data from 388 employees to provide a more specific test of uniqueness vs. overlap among these constructs. Third, we apply relative weight analysis to quantify the unique criterion-related validity of each work-related rumination facet regarding (1) physical fatigue, (2) cognitive fatigue, (3) emotional fatigue, (4) burnout, (5) psychosomatic complaints, and (6) satisfaction with life. Our results suggest that several measures of work-related rumination (e.g., overcommitment and cognitive irritation) can be used interchangeably. Emotional irritation and affective rumination emerge as the strongest unique predictors of fatigue, burnout, psychosomatic complaints, and satisfaction with life. Our study assists researchers in making informed decisions on selecting scales for their research and paves the way for integrating research on effort-reward imbalance and work-related rumination.
Digitisation has brought a major upheaval to the mobility sector, and in the future, self-driving cars will probably be one of the transport modes. This study extends transport and user acceptance research by analysing in greater depth how the new modes of autonomous private cars, autonomous carsharing and autonomous taxis fit into the existing traffic mix from today's perspective. It focuses on accounting for relative added value. For this purpose, user preference theory was used as a base for an online survey (n=172) on the relative added value of the new autonomous traffic modes. Results show that users see advantages in the autonomous modes for driving comfort and time utilization whereas, in comparison to conventional cars, in many other areas – especially in terms of driving pleasure and control – they see no advantages or even relative disadvantages. Compared to public transport, the autonomous modes offer added values in almost all characteristics. This analysis at the partwor th level provides a more detailed explanation for user acceptance of automated driving.
Through the “Act to Strengthen the Non-financial Reporting by Corporations in their Management and Group Management Reports” (Gesetz zur Stärkung der nichtfinanziellen Berichterstattung der Unternehmen in ihren Lage- und Konzernlageberichten) (CSR Directive Transposition Act, „CSR-RUG“) of 11 April 2017[1], the German Bundestag implemented Directive 2014/95/EU (“CSR Directive”)[2] into German law. Following the European impetus, the CSR-RUG enriches the traditional repertoire of forms of action under environmental law by a further instrument. Already the regulatory context gives an idea of its atypical nature: The centrepiece of the CSR-RUG is the amendment of and addition to the Third Book of the German Commercial Code (Handelsgesetzbuch, “HGB”), which deals with the “trading books” of undertakings, i.e., accounting and reporting requirements. Since the reporting year 2017, large capital market-oriented corporations must report extensively within the framework of their annual management reports on their activities and effects in certain areas of “Corporate Social Responsibility”. This also includes environmental matters. The transparency and publicity this entails is intended to generate positive stimuli for more responsible, sustained and not least of all environmentally friendly entrepreneurial action.
Following a brief presentation of the European legal bases and their implementation in Germany (I.), we will classify the provisions within the underlying concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (II.) and analyse and systemise the governance effects of non-financial reporting (III.). A few remarks on selected aspects of the chosen approach and its implementation (IV.) as well as an outlook summarising our conclusions (V.) will complete this article. By detailing the German approach to transposing the CSR Directive, this paper intends to provide an example of the challenges member state legislators face when complying with modern governance concepts such as Corporate Social Responsibility by way of non-financial reporting obligations.
[1] Federal Law Gazette, Part I 2017, 802 et seq.
[2] Directive 2014/95/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council 22 October 2014 amending Directive 2013/34/EU as regards disclosure of non-financial and diversity information by certain large undertakings and groups, OJ EU No. L 330, p. 1.
The corporate landscape is experiencing an increasing change in business models due to digitization. An increasing availability of data along the business processes enhance the opportunities for process automation. Technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are widely used for business process optimization, but as a side effect an increase in stand-alone solutions and a lack of holistic approaches can be observed. Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is said to support more complex processes and enable automated decision-making, but due to the lack of connectors makes the implementation difficult. RPA marketplaces can be a bridging technology to help companies implement Intelligent Process Automation. This paper explores the drivers and challenges for the adoption of RPA marketplaces to realize IPA. For this purpose, we conducted ten expert interviews with decision makers and IT staff from the process automation sector.
Over the past two decades many governments of low and middle income countries have started to introduce social protection measures or to extend the coverage and improve the functioning of public social protection systems. These reforms are a "global phenomenon" and can be observed in many African, Asian and Latin American countries. This paper focuses on international determinants for policy change within social protection by assessing the state of the art of both policy diffusion and policy transfer studies. Empirical studies of policy transfer and diffusion in the field of social protection are furthermore assessed in light of the theoretical background.
The Poverty Reduction Effect of Social Protection: The Pros and Cons of a Multidisciplinary Approach
(2022)
There is a growing body of knowledge on the complex effects of social protection on poverty in Africa. This article explores the pros and cons of a multidisciplinary approach to studying social protection policies. Our research aimed at studying the interaction between cash transfers and social health protection policies in terms of their impact on inclusive growth in Ghana and Kenya. Also, it explored the policy reform context over time to unravel programme dynamics and outcomes. The analysis combined econometric and qualitative impact assessments with national- and local-level political economic analyses. In particular, dynamic effects and improved understanding of processes are well captured by this approach, thus, pushing the understanding of implementation challenges over and beyond a ‘technological fix,’ as has been argued before by Niño-Zarazúa et al. (World Dev 40:163–176, 2012), However, multidisciplinary research puts considerable demands on data and data handling. Finally, some poverty reduction effects play out over a longer time, requiring longitudinal consistent data that is still scarce.