New Firms---Different Jobs? An Inquiry into the Quality of Employment in Start-ups and Incumbents

The present contribution addresses the question whether and how qualitative aspects of employment---like weekly hours of work, wages or qualification---differ between new and established firms. Although a wide strand of literature in entrepreneurship research analyses the employment effects of start-ups vs. incumbent firms, our knowledge about differences in these qualitative aspects of employment is rather poor. Labour market research, on the other hand, has been thoroughly accounting for the consequences of technological and organisational change on the characteristics and turnover of jobs, but it rarely has been attempting to consider the relevance of firm entry. Based on the Establishment History Panel, a plant-level dataset constructed from employment information and comprising nearly the entire German economy, we find significant differences between new and incumbent firms with respect to employment quality. Surprisingly, the difference regarding the share of high-qualified labour is---though highly significant---not as high as commonly expected.Start-ups, Employment, Quality of Employment, Germany, Entrepreneurship, Qualification, Wages, Part-Time, Marginal Employment

Revisiting spatial vision: toward a unifying model

We report contrast detection, contrast increment, contrast masking, orientation discrimination, and spatial frequency discrimination thresholds for spatially localized stimuli at 4° of eccentricity. Our stimulus geometry emphasizes interactions among overlapping visual filters and differs from that used in previous threshold measurements, which also admits interactions among distant filters. We quantitatively account for all measurements by simulating a small population of overlapping visual filters interacting through divisive inhibition. We depart from previous models of this kind in the parameters of divisive inhibition and in using a statistically efficient decision stage based on Fisher information. The success of this unified account suggests that, contrary to Bowne [Vision Res. 30, 449 (1990)], spatial vision thresholds reflect a single level of processing, perhaps as early as primary visual cortex

New firms - different jobs? An inquiry into the quality of employment in start-ups and incumbents

The present contribution addresses the question whether and how qualitative aspects of employmentlike weekly hours of work, wages or qualificationdiffer between new and established firms. Although a wide strand of literature in entrepreneurship research analyses the employment effects of start-ups vs. incumbent firms, our knowledge about differences in these qualitative aspects of employment is rather poor. Labour market research, on the other hand, has been thoroughly accounting for the consequences of technological and organisational change on the characteristics and turnover of jobs, but it rarely has been attempting to consider the relevance of firm entry. Based on the Establishment History Panel, a plant-level dataset constructed from employment information and comprising nearly the entire German economy, we find significant differences between new and incumbent firms with respect to employment quality. Surprisingly, the difference regarding the share of high-qualified labour isthough highly significantnot as high as commonly expected

New firms and new forms of work

The present contribution examines whether and how young firms and incumbents differ with regard to selected aspects of work forms and work organization in order to assess their roles for the qualitative changes of work in industrialized countries. Conceptually, we emanate from the approach of negotiated order and we empirically ground our research upon guided interviews conducted with employers and employees in about 50 firms in four distinct industries in Germany. According to our results, new forms of work are particularly widespread in new firms. Most of the young companies in our sample practice autonomous work forms like working on one's own responsibility and team working more frequently than incumbents, they are more prone to revert to functional flexibility (e.g. changing tasks and duties) and their working time arrangements tend to be more flexible. Altogether, firm age turns out to be an important parameter of new work forms and organization, though it is not the only one. Our results show that also the general and industry-specific framework conditions, a firm's internal characteristics (e.g. innovation intensity, hierarchies and routines), the relevant actors (management, workforce) and particularly the coaction of these elements are important drivers shaping the overall feature of a firm

Attentional effects on contrast detection in the presence of surround masks

We studied how attention affects contrast detection performance when the target is surrounded by mask elements. In each display quadrant we presented a hexagon of six vertical Gabor patches (the ‘surround’). Only one of the hexagons contained a central Gabor patch (the ‘target’) and the task was to report that quadrant (spatial four-alternative-forced choice). Attention was manipulated by means of a double-task paradigm: in one condition observers had to perform concurrently a central letter-discrimination task, and the contrast-detection task was then only poorly attended, while attention was fully available in the other condition. We find that under poorly attended conditions targets can be detected only when the target contrast exceeds the surround contrast (contrast popout) or when the target orientation differs from the surround orientation by more than 10–15° (orientation popout). When the target orientation is similar to the surround orientation, attention can reduce the contrast detection thresholds in some cases more than four-fold, demonstrating a very strong attentional effect

a short update on the Occasion of the 2019 AMR Decade Award

This discussion paper reports and reflects on the reception of our article “Organizational path dependence: Opening the black box”, which was published in 2009 in the Academy of Management Review and granted the AMR Decade Award in 2019. While we were invited by the editor of the journal to discuss the criticism evoked by that paper, to re-examine our original propositions in the light of advanced insights and to outline new avenues for future research on organizational path dependence, in this discussion paper we report in some detail and comment on the citation landscape of our original AMR piece

Spatial vision thresholds in the near absence of attention

It is well known that attention increases the discriminability of some types of spatial information. To ascertain more specifically which types of spatial information benefit from attention, we have measured spatial vision thresholds both in the presence and in the near absence of attention. To obtain near absence of attention, we induce subjects to focus attention elsewhere in the display by means of a suitably demanding concurrent visual task. We measure contrast and orientation thresholds for sine-wave gratings, as well uni- and bidirectional offset thresholds for vernier targets. The results suggest that attention selectively lowers some thresholds but not others: orientation thresholds are far more affected than contrast thresholds, and bidirectional vernier thresholds are far more affected than unidirectional thresholds

Cancer-Related Distress: How Often Does It Co-occur With a Mental Disorder? – Results of a Secondary Analysis

Objectives: The Distress Thermometer (DT) is a validated and widely used screening tool to identify clinically relevant distress in cancer patients. It is unclear, to which extend subjectively perceived distress measured by the DT is related to objective burden (mental disorder). We therefore examine the co-occurrence of a mental disorder for different DT thresholds and explore the diagnostic properties of the DT in detecting a mental disorder. Methods: In this multicenter cross-sectional study, we included 4,020 patients with mixed cancer diagnoses. After selection of relevant cases, weighting procedure and imputation of missing data we evaluated the data of N = 3,212 patients. We used the DT to assess perceived distress and the standardized Composite International Diagnostic Interview for Oncology (CIDI-O) to assess the 4-week prevalence of mental disorders. The association between distress and any mental disorder (MD) is calculated using Pearson correlations. Relative risks for MD in patients with/without distress and the co-occurrence of distress and MD were calculated with Poisson regression. To assess the operating characteristics between distress and MD, we present the area under the curve (AUC). Results: 22.9% of the participants had a cut-off DT level of 5 and were affected by MD. Each level of distress co-occurs with MD. The proportion of patients diagnosed with MD was not greater than the proportion of patients without MD until distress levels of DT = 6 were reached. The correlation between DT and MD was r = 0.27. The ROCanalysis shows the area under curve (AUC) = 0.67, which is classified as unsatisfactory. With increasing distress severity, patients are not more likely to have a mental disorder. Conclusion: Our results suggests viewing and treating cancer-related distress as a relatively distinct psychological entity. Cancer-related distress may be associated with an increased risk for a mental disorder and vice versa, but the overlap of both concepts is very moderate

Proactive handling of flight overbooking:How to reduce negative eWOM and the costs of bumping customers

This research examines the extent to which proactivity in handling flight overbooking reduces negative electronic word-of-mouth (NeWOM) and the required costs of compensation, thus increasing firm profitability. It answers recent calls to use a multimethod approach (i.e., we include archival data, qualitative interviews, seven experiments, and a Monte Carlo simulation for a total of ten studies), and to adapt recovery to specific contexts (i.e., airlines) and heterogeneous customers (i.e., voluntary/involuntary bumping or offloading). The preliminary studies indicate that overbooking and offloading are pervasive and that a proactive approach is both feasible and desirable. The experiments show that, compared to the default reactive approach (informing passengers at the gate), a proactive approach (informing them before they leave for the airport) substantially reduces NeWOM and the sought compensation. Further, a very reactive approach (informing them in the plane) significantly increases NeWOM and the sought compensation, especially when offloading occurs involuntarily. We also unveil the mechanism explaining the effects of proactivity on NeWOM, through the serial mediation of justice and betrayal. Finally, the results of a Monte Carlo simulation show that offering reduced compensation through a proactive approach allows more aggressive overbooking, higher capacity utilization and increased net revenue of up to 1.3%