What is the fair wage? A model of as-if-co-operation

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Committing to Incentives: Should the Decision to Sanction be Revealed or Hidden?

Sanctions are widely used to promote compliance in principal-agent-relationships. While there is ample evidence confirming the predicted positive incentive effect of sanctions, it has also been shown that imposing sanctions may in fact reduce compliance by crowding-out intrinsic motivation. We add to the literature on the hidden costs of control by showing that these costs are restricted to situations where principals ex ante reveal their decision to sanction low compliance. If this decision is not revealed and agents do not know whether they will be sanctioned or not in case of low compliance, we do not find evidence of crowding-out - not even in those cases where agents firmly believe that they will be sanctioned in case of low performance.Intrinsic Motivation, Monetary Incentives, Job Performance

Intrafirm Conflicts and Interfirm Price Competition

We study interfirm price competition in the presence of horizontal and vertical intrafirm conflicts in each firm. Intrafirm conflicts are captured by a principal-agent framework with firms employing more than one agent and implementing a tournament incentive scheme. The principals offer premium incentives in the sense of revenue shares to which agents react by proposing a sales price. Introducing such intrafirm conflicts results in higher prices and lower effort levels. Increasing the number of agents lowers the optimal surplus share of the agents as well as the individual effort and the sales prices. Firm profits first increase and then decrease when employing more and more agents suggesting that principals should employ an intermediate number of agents.Price competition, Agency theory

Standortfaktor Arbeitsrecht: Die Bewertung durch ausländische Investoren

Die strikten Regulierungen im deutschen Arbeitsrecht gelten als Nachteil für Deutschland im internationalen Wettbewerb um Produktionsstandorte. Welche Bedeutung haben arbeitsrechtliche Faktoren bei der Standortentscheidung von Unternehmen? Wie bewerten US Investoren das deutsche Arbeitsrecht im Vergleich

Labour market regulation and foreign direct investment: US multinationals in Germany and the UK

At a time of intensifying uncertainty, managerial flexibility to adapt to changes in the economic environment is increasingly important. Different business loca-tions, it is frequently argued, offer this flexibility to differing degrees, and labour market regulations are held to be one essential factor in determining the resulting attractiveness of a country as a business location. This paper takes an options perspective in order to grasp the potential effect of labour market regulations on location decisions. The option value of an investment, it is argued, is influenced, among other factors, by labour market regulations. Depending on their prefer-ence for certain options, different investors will prefer different labour market settings. The ability of the options perspective to assess the role of labour market regulations for the attractiveness of international business locations is exempli-fied by a British-German comparison and then confronted with secondary data as well as with a unique data set derived from a survey of US multinationals in the UK and Germany

Non-Chemical Weed Management in Annual and Perennial Organic Cropping Systems

Weedy pests, especially perennial weeds, are among the most challenging barriers to organic crop production. Improving non-chemical weed management tactics for established organic productions systems, like cool-season grains, and emerging crops like perennial flax could benefit producers. We compared three crop sequences for creeping perennial weed suppression in organic grains. Three years of alfalfa was associated with reduced densities and aboveground biomass of perennial weeds compared to sequences that alternated grain and cover crops. Interseeding cover crops with perennial flax for weed management was attempted, but neither flax nor cover established well. Flame weeding and cultivation in perennial flax were assessed in response to the failure of these cover crops. Greenhouse trial results suggested flaming could eliminate weeds without damaging shallowly planted flax seed, but emerged flax seedlings suffered greater mortality. Massive perennial flax mortality in subsequent field trials suggested flaming is a risky weed management tactic for the crop

IST Austria Thesis

Contagious diseases must transmit from infectious to susceptible hosts in order to reproduce. Whilst vectored pathogens can rely on intermediaries to find new hosts for them, many infectious pathogens require close contact or direct interaction between hosts for transmission. Hence, this means that conspecifics are often the main source of infection for most animals and so, in theory, animals should avoid conspecifics to reduce their risk of infection. Of course, in reality animals must interact with one another, as a bare minimum, to mate. However, being social provides many additional benefits and group living has become a taxonomically diverse and widespread trait. How then do social animals overcome the issue of increased disease? Over the last few decades, the social insects (ants, termites and some bees and wasps) have become a model system for studying disease in social animals. On paper, a social insect colony should be particularly susceptible to disease, given that they often contain thousands of potential hosts that are closely related and frequently interact, as well as exhibiting stable environmental conditions that encourage microbial growth. Yet, disease outbreaks appear to be rare and attempts to eradicate pest species using pathogens have failed time and again. Evolutionary biologists investigating this observation have discovered that the reduced disease susceptibility in social insects is, in part, due to collectively performed disease defences of the workers. These defences act like a “social immune system” for the colony, resulting in a per capita decrease in disease, termed social immunity. Our understanding of social immunity, and its importance in relation to the immunological defences of each insect, continues to grow, but there remain many open questions. In this thesis I have studied disease defence in garden ants. In the first data chapter, I use the invasive garden ant, Lasius neglectus, to investigate how colonies mitigate lethal infections and prevent them from spreading systemically. I find that ants have evolved ‘destructive disinfection’ – a behaviour that uses endogenously produced acidic poison to kill diseased brood and to prevent the pathogen from replicating. In the second experimental chapter, I continue to study the use of poison in invasive garden ant colonies, finding that it is sprayed prophylactically within the nest. However, this spraying has negative effects on developing pupae when they have had their cocoons artificially removed. Hence, I suggest that acidic nest sanitation may be maintaining larval cocoon spinning in this species. In the next experimental chapter, I investigated how colony founding black garden ant queens (Lasius niger) prevent disease when a co-foundress dies. I show that ant queens prophylactically perform undertaking behaviours, similar to those performed by the workers in mature nests. When a co-foundress was infected, these undertaking behaviours improved the survival of the healthy queen. In the final data chapter, I explored how immunocompetence (measured as antifungal activity) changes as incipient black garden ant colonies grow and mature, from the solitary queen phase to colonies with several hundred workers. Queen and worker antifungal activity varied throughout this time period, but despite social immunity, did not decrease as colonies matured. In addition to the above data chapters, this thesis includes two co-authored reviews. In the first, we examine the state of the art in the field of social immunity and how it might develop in the future. In the second, we identify several challenges and open questions in the study of disease defence in animals. We highlight how social insects offer a unique model to tackle some of these problems, as disease defence can be studied from the cell to the society

Peak oil and the Apocalypse: Apocalyptic imaginaries as a threat to politics proper

This thesis will examine the discourse of peak oil understood from a post-political perspective and challenge the un-reflexive assumption of peak oil as a natural challenger to current hegemony. It will do so by constructing a theoretical framework for ‘politics proper’ through which the peak oil discourse will be assessed. The conclusion is that while peak oil offer the potential of a serious rupture with the current regime; the discourse is also infused with apocalyptical imaginaries and populist maneuvers threatening to render such a rupture insignificant. The thesis warns against letting apolitical infusion obscure and hinder the illumination of proper political subjects and diverse alternatives to our current regime