The Tech Company: On the neglected second nature of platforms

The unprecedented rise of startups such as Google or Amazon has spurred an ongoing debate on the conceptualization of the corporate model these firms represent. Thus far, attention has centered on the analysis of their product and market strategies highlighting their platform nature as common feature and its defining characteristic. By applying and scaling the platform business model these companies have been able to capture value created outside the firm. The focus on the platform nature and the evolution of their external ecosystems, however, has left the work that is done inside these companies to create and provide online platforms largely unnoticed. Against this background, the article seeks to contribute to the debate by analyzing the inner mode of production as an essential component of their corporate model. The second nature of online platform firms, it is argued, is that they are tech companies. Building on this, the article aims to reconstruct how as tech companies they have learned and perfected to continuously develop and operate the internet applications that power their online platforms at global scale

Visibility of Cold Atomic Gases in Optical Lattices for Finite Temperatures

In nearly all experiments with ultracold atoms time-of-flight pictures are the only data available. In this paper we present an analytical strong-coupling calculation for those time-of-flight pictures of bosons in an optical lattice in the Mott phase. This allows us to determine the visibility, which quantifies the contrast of peaks in the time-of-flight pictures, and we suggest how to use it as a thermometer.Comment: Author Information under http://www.theo-phys.uni-essen.de/tp/ags/pelster_dir

CONSUMER EMBARRASSMENT – A META-ANALYTIC REVIEW AND EXPERIMENTAL EXAMINATION

This dissertation consists of two essays that discuss the influence of embarrassment on consumers. In the first essay, I examine consumers’ coping responses to embarrassment in a meta-analytic review. In essay two, I utilize an experimental approach to investigate the impact of embarrassing encounters on unrelated consumers who merely observe the situation. In the first essay, the meta-analysis is guided by findings in the literature that demonstrate embarrassment can both promote and detract from consumer well-being. However, despite being investigated for decades, little is known about how consumers cope with embarrassing situations, and when and why consumers respond in positive and negative ways. The meta-analysis draws on the transactional framework of appraisals and coping to analyze the extant literature, construing positive responses as problem-focused coping, and negative responses as emotion-focused coping. I examine both situational and trait factor moderators to explain variance in these divergent outcomes and to resolve competing findings. A meta-analysis of 93 independent samples (N = 24,051) revealed that embarrassment leads to both problem-focused coping (r = 0.21), which can promote consumer well-being, and emotion-focused coping (r = 0.23), which can detract from consumer well-being. The relationship between embarrassment and emotion-focused coping was particularly strong in emotionally intense situations that were out of a transgressor’s control, for female consumers, and for consumers with an individualist orientation. The relationship between embarrassment and problem-focused coping was particularly strong in emotionally intense situations for male and young consumers. The second essay investigates the influence of embarrassing situations on neutral observers of the situation. The extant literature suggests that a consumer who commits a social transgression will experience embarrassment if real or imagined others are present to witness the transgression. However, the parallel embarrassment experienced, in turn, by those observers lacks a theoretical account, since observers have committed no transgression and are not the subject of appraisal by others. I label this phenomenon observer embarrassment, and introduce perspective taking as the underlying process that leads to observer embarrassment. Across six studies, I use physiological, behavioral, and self-report measures to validate the presence of observer embarrassment, as well as the underlying perspective-taking mechanism. Specifically, the results demonstrate that observers are more likely to experience embarrassment when they imagine themselves as the transgressor (versus experience empathy for the transgressor), something more likely to occur when the observer and actor share a common identity. Thus, observer embarrassment is not an empathetic response to witnessing a social transgression, but rather an experience parallel to personal embarrassment of others

A parallel and adaptive space-time discontinuous Galerkin method for visco-elastic and visco-acoustic waves

We develop an adaptive discontinuous Galerkin space-time discretization for elastic and acoustic waves with attenuation, described by retarded material laws for generalized standard linear solids. The linear system is solved with a parallel multigrid method. Numerically the method is evaluated for a benchmark configuration in geophysics, where the convergence is tested with respect to seismograms. We show that the adaptive method based on goal-oriented error estimation is able to reduce the computational effort substantially