Professional football sponsorship in the English Premier League and the German Bundesliga

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/704 on 10.04.2017 by CS (TIS)This research project looks at professional football sponsorship from three different perspectives: the clubs' perspective (sponsorship as an income stream for professional football clubs), the sponsors' perspective (sponsorship as a marketing tool for companies), and a joint perspective (sponsorship as an inter-organisational relationship between professional football clubs and their sponsors). The English Premier League and the German Bundesliga serve as the subject of research owing to their extraordinarily sound reputation in commercial terms. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods was used in order to answer the research questions which derived from an extensive literature review. First, qualitative in-depth interviews with representatives of English Premier League and German Bundesliga clubs and their sponsors as well as sponsorship experts were carried out in order to gain a broader understanding of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Consequently, seven principal research propositions and six hypotheses were formulated relating to the size of the football business, the importance of sponsorship as an income stream, motives and objectives of sponsors, and the importance and dimensions of relationship quality. Then, two content analyses were carried out (including an analysis of more than 500 clubs' and sponsors' websites and 106 televised football games) in order to identify as many football sponsors of English Premier League and German Bundesliga clubs as possible. The research propositions were then tested in a quantitative survey incorporating all English Premier League and German Bundesliga clubs as well as 460 sponsors. Parametric as well as non-parametric tests were applied at this stage. The findings of the research partially confirmed previous studies. More importantly, new insights have been uncovered. For example, new dimensions of relationship quality in the context of professional football sponsorship have been identified. This study therefore has both theoretical and practical implications for professional football clubs, sponsoring companies and prospective researchers in the field of (professional) football sponsorship. The study also contributes significantly to existing knowledge about the football business, sponsorship and relationship marketing

Endowing spoken language dialogue systems with emotional intelligence

While most dialogue systems restrict themselves to the adjustment of the propositional contents, our work concentrates on the generation of stylistic variations in order to improve the user’s perception of the interaction. To accomplish this goal, our approach integrates a social theory of politeness with a cognitive theory of emotions. We propose a hierarchical selection process for politeness behaviors in order to enable the refinement of decisions in case additional context information becomes available

The CMS Barrel Calorimeter Response to Particle Beams from 2 to 350 GeV/c

The response of the CMS barrel calorimeter (electromagnetic plus hadronic) to hadrons, electrons and muons over a wide momentum range from 2 to 350 GeV/c has been measured. To our knowledge, this is the widest range of momenta in which any calorimeter system has been studied. These tests, carried out at the H2 beam-line at CERN, provide a wealth of information, especially at low energies. The analysis of the differences in calorimeter response to charged pions, kaons, protons and antiprotons and a detailed discussion of the underlying phenomena are presented. We also show techniques that apply corrections to the signals from the considerably different electromagnetic (EB) and hadronic (HB) barrel calorimeters in reconstructing the energies of hadrons. Above 5 GeV/c, these corrections improve the energy resolution of the combined system where the stochastic term equals 84.7$\pm$1.6$\%$ and the constant term is 7.4$\pm$0.8$\%$. The corrected mean response remains constant within 1.3$\%$ rms