infonet-economy

Managers are facing new problems in their quest for organizational fitness. With environments of growing complexity, foresight, adaptability, and learning become critical features for a social system to survive and develop. Established models of organizational control are insufficient to cope with this proliferating complexity. The science of cybernetics provides powerful models to…

The LEN-Model (referring to "linear functions", "exponential utility" and "normal distribution" as major properties of the LEN-Model) allows to study profit-sharing agreements in a team of principal and agent. First, this article describes and analyses the LEN-Model again (which was originally presented in 1987 by the same author). Second, agency costs…

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Upper House (Council of States) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote, legislators' decisions could only be verified ex post through the time-consuming…

First generation endogenous growth models had the counterfactual implication that the long-term growth of per-capita GDP increased with the population size. Two influential growth paradigms, the semi-endogenous and the second generation fully endogenous, eliminated this strong scale effect. Both solutions have useful aspects and
insights, but very different policy implications…

Since house prices govern the consumption decisions of renters and owners alike, changing house prices can have far-reaching macroeconomic consequences. We analyze how the disposable income and consumption decisions of households are affected by exogenous house price changes in Switzerland. We look at consumption of both housing and nondurable goods to establish a comprehensive…

This paper examines the success of corporate communication in voluntary sustainability reporting. Existing studies have focused on the perspective of the communicators but lack an understanding of the perspective of information recipients to clearly evaluate this interactive communication process. This paper looks at the issue of a credibility gap perceived by external stakeholders…