Householders’ Mental Models of Domestic Energy Consumption: Using a Sort-And-Cluster Method to Identify Shared Concepts of Appliance Similarity

If in-home displays and other interventions are to successfully influence people's energy consumption, they need to communicate about energy in terms that make sense to users. Here we explore householders' perceptions of energy consumption, using a novel combination of card-sorting and clustering to reveal shared patterns in the way people think about domestic energy consumption. The data suggest that, when participants were asked to group appliances which they felt naturally 'went together', there are relatively few shared ideas about which appliances are conceptually related. To the extent participants agreed on which appliances belonged together, these groupings were based on activities (e.g., entertainment) and location within the home (e.g., kitchen); energy consumption was not an important factor in people's categorisations. This suggests messages about behaviour change aimed at reducing energy consumption might better be tied to social practices than to consumption itself

Enabling augmented sense-making (and pure experience) with wearable technology

The paper explores how a post-cognitive approach to human perception can help the design of wearable technologies that augment sense-making. This approach relies on the notion of pure experience to understand how we can make sense of the world without interpreting it, for example through our body, as claimed by phenomenology. In order to understand how to design wearable technologies for pure experience, we first held interviews with experts from different domains, all investigating how to express and recognise pure experience. Subsequently, we had a focus group with professional dancers: given their heightened sense of bodily cognition in their experience, we wanted to verify the extent to which the experts’ practice could be claimed back into the dancers’ experience. In this paper, we will present our preliminary findings

Tax Treaties and the Allocation of Taxing Rights with Developing Countries

Worldwide income taxation in the country of residence is a legal dogma of international taxation. We question this dogma from the perspective of relations between developed and developing countries from a legal and economic perspective, and make a modern and fair proposal for tax treaties. We will show under which conditions a developing and a developed country will voluntarily sign a tax treaty where information is exchanged truthfully and whether they should share revenues. Moreover, we will demonstrate how the conclusion of a tax treaty can assist in the implementation of a tax audit system.Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie

Dynamorph: Montessori inspired design for seniors with dementia living in long-term care facilities

Seniors with dementia living in nursing homes are often faced with boredom and loneliness due to lack of meaningful engagement and personalized activities. We applied Montessori method to design an interactive table for elderly home residents and evaluated the design with four female residents and a nurse. This method offers a range of levelled interactions to meet the needs at different stages and cognitive decline levels of the residents with dementia. The table initiates interaction with an increasing level of complexity that magnifies the rewarding effects and social connectedness among the residents. The qualitative evaluation during a pilot study indicated that the interactions with the table reduced agitation of the elderly participants and increased the instances of positive social behaviours

FDI Determination and Corporate Tax Competition in a Volatile World

This paper investigates the impact of economic and political volatility on corporate tax rates on a large dataset of countries over the 1983–2003 period. Estimation of a dynamic tax rate equation supports the hypothesis that economic volatility negatively affects statutory corporate tax rates, while political volatility has no significant effect. In order to identify the channels through which volatility works, we estimate a structural model allowing for simultaneous determination of corporate tax rates and FDI inflows, and find that economic volatility affects the corporate tax setting process through its impact on FDI inflows