Procrastination and projects

Külpmann P. Procrastination and projects. Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers. Vol 544. Bielefeld: Center for Mathematical Economics; 2015.In this paper I analyze a dynamic moral hazard problem in teams with imperfect monitoring in continuous time. In the model, players are working together to achieve a breakthrough in a project while facing a deadline. The effort needed to achieve such a breakthrough is unknown but players have a common prior about its distribution. Each player is only able to observe their own effort, not the effort of others. I characterize the optimal effort path for general distributions of breakthrough efforts and show that, in addition to free-riding, procrastination arises. Furthermore, in this model, procrastination is not a result of irrational behavior and is even present in the welfare-maximizing solution

Essays on teamwork

Külpmann P. Essays on teamwork. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2016

It Takes Two to Tango : Building Intercultural Coaching Relationships : a German-Mexican Context

In the past decades coaching as a human resource development tool has gained significant attention. In many countries around the world it is a flowering industry with many practitioners constantly entering the field, causing the amount intercultural coaching dyads to rise. The existing research corpus explores the coaching service from different angles, e.g. with regards to techniques or effectiveness. Most literature underscores the importance of the coach-coachee relationship; however, few studies transform this into an investigation topic. Even less attention is paid to this topic in an intercultural setting. This research shall consequently identify the aspects that act in the establishment of a coach-coachee relationship within a German-Mexican context. Furthermore, the influence of culture, especially national culture, will be examined. The thesis has three central aims. Firstly, this investigation shall enlarge the scarce research on the topic. Secondly, the data is examined from a modern cultural paradigm where culture is understood as a not self-evident or structured attribute, but a constructed creation between individuals. Thirdly, implications for practitioners in intercultural coaching shall be brought forwards. In accordance with the ontological understanding of human interaction and in line with the understanding of the concept of culture, the exploration of this thesis’s topic is done with the help of qualitative research methods. Semi-structured interviews with an interpretivist-constructivist thematic content analysis technique lead to meaningful results. As a core result, this research shows a large variety of relationship-building aspects in intercultural coaching which is due to a subjective assessment of the influence of culture on relationship, coaching and intercultural encounters. In this regards, a cultural lens was identified that has a predominantly positivistic, essentialist and static understanding of culture. Moreover, correlations between cultural understanding, the understanding of coaching and the depth of relationship are shown. All research participants further build and assess the coaching relationship with the help of multicollective, dynamic and interpersonal factors, indicating a modern cultural understanding, to co-create the reciprocal relationship and coaching culture. Practitioners may consequently want to courageously, and willingly, reconsider and ‘un-learn’ cultural concepts in order to avoid an overestimation of cultural influence in interactions, to meet the client’s needs and to live up to the diversification of culture

Information Provision for Informed Consent Procedures in Psychological Research Under the General Data Protection Regulation: A Practical Guide

Psychological research often involves the collection and processing of personal data from human research participants. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies, as a rule, to psychological research conducted on personal data in the European Economic Area (EEA)—and even, in certain cases, to psychological research conducted on personal data outside the EEA. The GDPR elaborates requirements concerning the forms of information that should be communicated to research participants whenever personal data are collected directly from them. There is a general norm that informed consent should be obtained before psychological research involving the collection of personal data directly from research participants is conducted. The information required to be provided under the GDPR is normally communicated in the context of an informed consent procedure. There is reason to believe, however, that the information required by the GDPR may not always be provided. Our aim in this tutorial is thus to provide general practical guidance to psychological researchers allowing them to understand the forms of information that must be provided to research participants under the GDPR in informed consent procedures

Identifying the reasons for coordination failure in a laboratory experiment

Külpmann P, Khantadze D. Identifying the reasons for coordination failure in a laboratory experiment. Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers. Vol 567. Bielefeld: Center for Mathematical Economics; 2016.We investigate the effect of absence of common knowledge on the outcomes of coordination games in a laboratory experiment. Using cognitive types, we can explain coordination failure in pure coordination games while differentiating between coordination failure due to first- and higher-order beliefs. In our experiment, around 76% of the subjects have chosen the payoff-dominant equilibrium strategy despite the absence of common knowledge. However, 9% of the players had first-order beliefs that lead to coordination failure and another 9% exhibited coordination failure due to higher-order beliefs. Furthermore, we compare our results with predictions of commonly used models of higher-order beliefs

Probabilistic Transitivity in Sports

Tiwisina J, Külpmann P. Probabilistic Transitivity in Sports. Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers. Vol 520. Bielefeld: Center for Mathematical Economics; 2014.We seek to find the statistical model that most accurately describes empirically observed results in sports. The idea of a transitive relation concerning the team strengths is implemented by imposing a set of constraints on the outcome probabilities. We theoretically investigate the resulting optimization problem and draw comparisons to similar problems from the existing literature including the linear ordering problem and the isotonic regression problem. Our optimization problem turns out to be very complicated to solve. We propose a branch and bound algorithm for an exact solution and for larger sets of teams a heuristic method for quickly finding a „good“ solution. Finally we apply the described methods to panel data from soccer, American football and tennis and also use our framework to compare the performance of empirically applied ranking schemes

Argument Omission between Valency and Construction

Our paper deals with the omission of direct arguments in non-elliptical contexts. We argue that valency requirements do not suffice to explain argument omission and that sentence type also plays a crucial role. Our argumentation is based on a set of acceptability rating studies. We conclude with a proposal how our results could be modeled in the grammar

Probabilistic Transitivity in Sports

Tiwisina J, Külpmann P. Probabilistic Transitivity in Sports. Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers. Vol 520. Bielefeld: Center for Mathematical Economics; 2014.We seek to find the statistical model that most accurately describes empirically observed results in sports. The idea of a transitive relation concerning the team strengths is implemented by imposing a set of constraints on the outcome probabilities. We theoretically investigate the resulting optimization problem and draw comparisons to similar problems from the existing literature including the linear ordering problem and the isotonic regression problem. Our optimization problem turns out to be very complicated to solve. We propose a branch and bound algorithm for an exact solution and for larger sets of teams a heuristic method for quickly finding a „good“ solution. Finally we apply the described methods to panel data from soccer, American football and tennis and also use our framework to compare the performance of empirically applied ranking schemes

Better operating room ventilation as determined by a novel ventilation index is associated with lower rates of surgical site infections

OBJECTIVE: The aim was to assess the impact of operating room (OR) ventilation quality on surgical site infections (SSIs) using a novel ventilation index. BACKGROUND: Previous studies compared laminar air flow with conventional ventilation, thereby ignoring many parameters that influence air flow properties. METHODS: In this cohort study, we surveyed hospitals participating in the Swiss SSI surveillance and calculated a ventilation index for their ORs, with higher values reflecting less turbulent air displacement. For procedures captured between January 2017 and December 2019, we studied the association between ventilation index and SSI rates using linear regression (hospital-level analysis) and with the individual SSI risk using generalized linear mixed-effects models (patient-level analysis). RESULTS: We included 47 hospitals (182 ORs). Among the 163,740 included procedures, 6791 SSIs were identified. In hospital-level analyses, a 5-unit increase in the ventilation index was associated with lower SSI rates for knee and hip arthroplasty (-0.41 infections per 100 procedures, 95% confidence interval: -0.69 to -0.13), cardiac (-0.89, -1.91 to 0.12), and spine surgeries (-1.15, -2.56 to 0.26). Similarly, patient-level analyses showed a lower SSI risk with each 5-unit increase in ventilation index (adjusted odds ratio 0.71, confidence interval: 0.58-0.87 for knee and hip; 0.72, 0.49-1.06 for spine; 0.82, 0.69-0.98 for cardiac surgery). Higher index values were mainly associated with a lower risk for superficial and deep incisional SSIs. CONCLUSIONS: Better ventilation properties, assessed with our ventilation index, are associated with lower rates of superficial and deep incisional SSIs in orthopedic and cardiac procedures. OR ventilation quality appeared to be less relevant for other surgery types