Optimal Allocation of Decision-Making Authority and the Provision of Incentives under Uncertainty

Incentives for managers are often provided by offering them performance-based compensation schemes. The efficiency of such monetary compensations, however, depends on several factors, among them the quality of the employed performance measures, the information available for contracting purposes, and the allocation of decision-making authority which translates into either more centralized or more decentralized organizational structures. This article investigates a firm's decision whether to delegate or retain the authority to decide on a specific job design in a moral hazard environment with asymmetric information on effort costs. It provides conditions under which decentralization is the preferred organizational form. Moreover, it derives the result that the relation between incentives and the delegation of decision-making authority is not univocal, but depends on the quality of the employed performance measure. In this regard, it contributes to explaining the mixed empirical evidence on the relation between incentives and decision-rights

Optimal Allocation of Decision-Making Authority and the Provision of Incentives under Uncertainty

Incentives for managers are often provided by offering them performance-based compensation schemes. The efficiency of such monetary compensations, however, depends on several factors, among them the quality of the employed performance measures, the information available for contracting purposes, and the allocation of decision-making authority which translates into either more centralized or more decentralized organizational structures. This article investigates a firm's decision whether to delegate or retain the authority to decide on a specific job design in a moral hazard environment with asymmetric information on effort costs. It provides conditions under which decentralization is the preferred organizational form. Moreover, it derives the result that the relation between incentives and the delegation of decision-making authority is not univocal, but depends on the quality of the employed performance measure. In this regard, it contributes to explaining the mixed empirical evidence on the relation between incentives and decision-rights

Synthesis and biological evaluation of a novel MUC1 glycopeptide conjugate vaccine candidate comprising a 4'-deoxy-4'-fluoro-Thomsen-Friedenreich epitope

The development of selective anticancer vaccines that provide enhanced protection against tumor recurrence and metastasis has been the subject of intense research in the scientific community. The tumor-associated glycoprotein MUC1 represents a well-established target for cancer immunotherapy and has been used for the construction of various synthetic vaccine candidates. However, many of these vaccine prototypes suffer from an inherent low immunogenicity and are susceptible to rapid in vivo degradation. To overcome these drawbacks, novel fluorinated MUC1 glycopeptide-BSA/TTox conjugate vaccines have been prepared. Immunization of mice with the 4' F-TF-MUC1-TTox conjugate resulted in strong immune responses overriding the natural tolerance against MUC1 and producing selective IgG antibodies that are cross-reactive with native MUC1 epitopes on MCF-7 human cancer cells

Bandwidth selection for kernel density estimation: a review of fully automatic selectors

On the one hand, kernel density estimation has become a common tool for empirical studies in any research area. This goes hand in hand with the fact that this kind of estimator is now provided by many software packages. On the other hand, since about three decades the discussion on bandwidth selection has been going on. Although a good part of the discussion is about nonparametric regression, this parameter choice is by no means less problematic for density estimation. This becomes obvious when reading empirical studies in which practitioners have made use of kernel densities. New contributions typically provide simulations only to show that the own selector outperforms some of the existing methods. We review existing methods and compare them on a set of designs that exhibit few bumps and exponentially falling tails. We concentrate on small and moderate sample sizes because for large ones the differences between consistent methods are often negligible, at least for practitioners. As a byproduct we find that a mixture of simple plug-in and cross-validation methods produces bandwidths with a quite stable performanc

Implementing miscanthus into farming systems:A review of agronomic practices, capital and labour demand

Miscanthus is a promising bioeconomy crop with several biomass utilisation pathways. However, its current cultivation area in Europe is relatively low. This is most likely due to a lack of knowledge about the imple- mentation of miscanthus into farming systems. This study reviews current best practices and suitable land areas for miscanthus cultivation. Biomass production costs and labour requirements were evaluated over the whole 20- year cultivation cycle of four utilisation pathways: combustion, animal bedding, and both conventional and organic biogas production. The assessment was performed for two field sizes (1 and 10 ha), two average annual yield levels (15 and 25 t dry matter ha 1), and both green and brown harvest regimes. The maximum attainable annual gross margins are 1657 € ha 1 for combustion, 13,920 € ha 1 for animal bedding, 2066 € ha 1 for conventional and 2088 € ha 1 for organic biogas production. The combustion pathway has the lowest labour demand (141.5 h ha 1), and animal bedding the highest (317.6 h ha 1) due to additional baling during harvest. Suitable cultivation areas include depleted soils, erosion-prone slopes, heavy clay soils and ecological focus areas such as riparian buffer zones and groundwater protection areas. On such sites, miscanthus would (i) improve soil and water quality, and (ii) enable viable agricultural land utilisation even on scattered patches and strips. Due to its low demands and perennial nature, miscanthus is suitable for sustainable intensification of indus- trial crop cultivation in a growing bioeconomy, benefiting soil and water quality, while providing large amounts of biomass for several utilisation pathways

Prosodic prominence in parkinsonian speech : a dynamical approach

In the present study, we investigate dynamic changes in prosodic highlighting strategies in PD patients and compare them to the productions of neurotypical speakers. Therefore, we compare the production of target words in divergent focus structure, contrastive focus and background. We recorded 40 German speakers: 20 patients with idiopathic Parkinson in medication ON condition, 14 males and 6 females, aged between 54 - 80 and 20 healthy aged and gender matched controls. All speakers were classified in terms of duration of the disorder, severity of the disorder, motoric activity level (UPDRS III, [6]), level of cognition and speech problems in terms of dysarthria. As speech material, we used a question-answer scenario presented on a computer screen to manipulate focal structure by means of contextualizing contexts. Nine target words were placed in either contrastive focus or background position in sentences such as (“The fly has touched the green nose.”) related to pictures on a computer screen [cf. fig.1]. Target words were always disyllabic (CV.CV structure), containing one of the three long vowels /i:/, /a:/ or /o:/, in the stressed syllable, such as /na:z@/. In total, we recorded 1440 tokens (9 target words x 40 speakers x 2 focus structures x 2 adjectives). For acoustic measurements, we analyzed the voice range, syllable duration, formant means and contours, the mean intensity and the F0 contours in terms of pitch height and tonal onglide [7]. For the upcoming conference, the results of all intonational and articulatory variables will be presented. We will discuss how much variation is tolerated in a dynamical system of prosodic prominence before the expression of prosodic functions is getting instable

Coarse‐Grained Refractory Composite Castables Based on Alumina and Niobium

Niobium-alumina composite aggregates with 60 vol% metal content and with particle sizes up to 3150 μm are produced using castable technology followed by sintering, and a crushing and sieving process. X-Ray diffraction (XRD) analysis reveals phase separation during crushing as the niobium:corundum volume ratios is between 37:57 and 64:31 among the 4 produced aggregate classes 0–45, 45–500, 500–1000, and 1000–3150 μm. The synthesized aggregates are used to produce coarse-grained refractory composites in a second casting and sintering step. The fine- and coarse-grained material shows porosities between 32% and 36% with a determined cold modulus of rupture of 20 and 12 MPa, and E-moduli of 37 and 46 GPa, respectively. The synthesized fine-grained composites reached true strain values between 0.08 at 1100 °C and 0.18 at 1500 °C and the coarse-grained ones values between 0.02 and 0.09. The electrical conductivity for the fine-grained and the coarse-grained material is 448±66 and 111±25  S cm$^{−1}$, respectively