Elektronische Marktwirtschaft?: Grundlegende Veränderungen durch den Electronic Commerce

Electronic commerce has become an important factor in present-day business. The reflection ofbusiness ethics asks four questions: - To what extent does e-commerce improve the ethical quality of decision making and performing in the sphere of commerce? - Does e-commerce promote the >>reason>needs oflife<

B2B or Not to Be: Does B2B E-Commerce Increase Labour Productivity?

We implement an endogeneous switching-regression model for labour productivity and firms' decision to use business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Our approach allows B2B usage to affect any parameter of the labour productivity equation and to properly take account of strategic complementarities between the input factors and B2B usage. Empirical evidence from 1,394 German firms shows that firms using B2B e-commerce have a significantly higher output elasticity with respect to ICT-investment and produce significantly more efficiently than firms that do not use B2B. Firms' labour productivity is enhanced by using B2B. --Business-to-business e-commerce,labour productivity,endogenous switching regression model,survey data

Environmental Innovations: Institutional Impacts on Co-operations for Sustainable Development

A suitable strategy for achieving sustainable development is to foster environmental innovations. Environmental innovations, however, suffer from so-called "double externalities", because apart from innovation spillovers they also improve the quality of public environmental goods, which can be used without cost by free riders. Those innovation spillovers can be avoided through co-operation. Furthermore co-operations can be considered as advantageous because environmental innovations often depend on interaction in research and development, production, selling and disposal. This paper analyzes as to what extent institutional factors impact co-operative arrangements of innovative organizations in the development of new environmental technologies. It applies a multi-dimensional institutional analysis focusing not only on institutional arrangements which exist among organizations but also on opportunities and constraints provided by the institutional environment in which these organizations are embedded. Expanding the existing research we will conclude what kind of policy measure may support the success within networks of environmental oriented innovators.Environmental innovation, Co-operation, Sustainability, Institutional analysis, Policy measures

B2B or Not to Be: Does B2B E-Commerce Increase Labour Productivity?

We implement an endogeneous switching-regression model for labour productivity and firms' decision to use business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Our approach allows B2B usage to affect any parameter of the labour productivity equation and to properly take account of strategic complementarities between the input factors and B2B usage. Empirical evidence from 1,394 German firms shows that firms using B2B e-commerce have a significantly higher output elasticity with respect to ICT-investment and produce significantly more efficiently than firms that do not use B2B. Firms' labour productivity is enhanced by using B2B

Role of organic components in sol-gel glasses

Organic groupings play an important role for the preparation of glasses by the sol-gel route. They are responsible for the solubility of precursors, interact during the polycondensation process, the drying and ageing step and during firing. For processing, important parameters e.g. hydrolysis rates and the SiOH formation can be controlled by proper choice of the hydrolysable group. If organics remain in the glass network, remarkable changes of properties (density, hardness, refractive index) occur

Inertia of Intrinsic Spin

The state of a particle in space and time is characterized by its mass and spin, which therefore determine the inertial properties of the particle. The coupling of intrinsic spin with rotation is examined and the corresponding inertial effects of intrinsic spin are studied. An experiment to measure directly the spin-rotation coupling via neutron interferometry is analyzed in detail.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, contribution to Festschrift honoring Samuel A. Werner; v2: slightly expanded version accepted for publication in Proc. Int. Conf. Neutron Scattering 2005 (scheduled for publication in the regular edition of Physica B, July 2006

Exposure-lag-response associations between lung cancer mortality and radon exposure in German uranium miners.

Exposure-lag-response associations shed light on the duration of pathogenesis for radiation-induced diseases. To investigate such relations for lung cancer mortality in the German uranium miners of the Wismut company, we apply distributed lag non-linear models (DLNMs) which offer a flexible description of the lagged risk response to protracted radon exposure. Exposure-lag functions are implemented with B-Splines in Cox models of proportional hazards. The DLNM approach yielded good agreement of exposure-lag-response surfaces for the German cohort and for the previously studied cohort of American Colorado miners. For both cohorts, a minimum lag of about 2 year for the onset of risk after first exposure explained the data well, but possibly with large uncertainty. Risk estimates from DLNMs were directly compared with estimates from both standard radio-epidemiological models and biologically based mechanistic models. For age > 45 year, all models predict decreasing estimates of the Excess Relative Risk (ERR). However, at younger age, marked differences appear as DLNMs exhibit ERR peaks, which are not detected by the other models. After comparing exposure-responses for biological processes in mechanistic risk models with exposure-responses for hazard ratios in DLNMs, we propose a typical period of 15 year for radon-related lung carcinogenesis. The period covers the onset of radiation-induced inflammation of lung tissue until cancer death. The DLNM framework provides a view on age-risk patterns supplemental to the standard radio-epidemiological approach and to biologically based modeling