Public intervention in private rule-making: the role of the European Commission in industry standardization

The thesis investigates the role of public actors in private rule-making processes at the example of the European Commission’s interventions in private industry standardization in the mobile telecoms, high-definition television, digital broadcasting and intermodal transport industries. It demonstrates that, far from having replaced public rule-making or representing a form of ‘better’ regulation, the private development of technical standards is constrained by the same collective action and decision-making problems that constrain conventional policy-making processes. Without the facilitating interventions of public actors, private standard setters often struggle to overcome these constraints. The ability of public actors to facilitate the private development of technical standards, however, depends on a number of conditions. First they need to rely on entrepreneurial rather than conventional policy instruments based on hierarchical authority and the power of hard law. Hierarchical interventions—in addition to the well-known information problems—only tend to have the unintended effect of exposing technical standardization processes to political contestation, exacerbating the inherent decision-making problems. Entrepreneurial interventions, by contrast, may facilitate the private development of technical standards without exposing the standardization process to political contestation. While such interventions may raise serious legitimacy concerns, they also depend on a number of conditions, such as early intervention, the presence of industry crisis, and the availability of positive feedback mechanisms that drive compliance with the developed standards. With its focus on technical standardization, this thesis seeks to contribute to wider debates on self– and co–regulation and the transforming role of government in the governance of advanced market economies more broadly

EU break-up? Mapping plausible pathways into alternative futures. LEQS Discussion Paper No. 136/2018 August 2018

Following Brexit, the rise of populist Eurosceptics across the EU, Central Eastern Europe's flirtation with 'illiberal democracy' and the sovereign debt crisis, which essentially still remains unresolved ten years after it started, even some of the EU’s most enthusiastic supporters are today wondering whether the EU could actually break apart. In the paper, I propose the scenario-planning method to address this question and to think about the future of the EU in a structured way. While the method is already well established in the study of socio-technical systems, the paper tests its transferability to the political economy of the EU. Along two drivers, the material struggle to tame globalization and the ideational struggle to fill the void that is resulting from the deconstruction of neoliberalism, the paper maps four plausible pathways into alternative futures. I conclude with a discussion of the potential of scenario-planning to improve the transfer of knowledge from academia into practice

Can Chatbots Be Persuasive? How to Boost the Effectiveness of Chatbot Recommendations for Increasing Purchase Intention

Firms increasingly invest in chatbots that provide purchase recommendations. However, customers often reject recommendations by chatbots because they find neither the contents of the recommendation (message-level persuasiveness) nor the chatbot itself (source-level persuasiveness) persuasive. To overcome these barriers and increase purchase intention, this study examines how the content of recommendation messages should be designed and which communication style the chatbot should use to provide recommendation messages. Results of a 2 (two-sided vs. one-sided recommendation message) ✕ 3 (warm vs. competent vs. neutral communication style) between-subject online experiment show that a two-sided recommendation message increases purchase intention, but only for chatbots using a warm or competent communication style. Whereas a warm chatbot leads to higher purchase intentions of a recommendation through promoting its source persuasiveness, a competent chatbot increases recommendation effectiveness by promoting message persuasiveness. Therefore, firms should refine a chatbot’s communication style for providing recommendations that persuade customers to purchase

International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd