Recent Internet technologies and web-based applications, such as social software, are being increasingly applied in firms. Social software can be employed for knowledge management and for external communication enabling access to internal and external knowledge. Knowledge in turn constitutes one...

We analyze the performance of firms in the German business-related services sector. A quarterly business survey provides the panel data base of our study. Firm performance is measured by the survey respondents' ordinal indication of their changes in total sales. We use a firstorder Markov chain...

This paper examines the effects that purchased services and imported intermediate materials have on the labour demand for different skills in the manufacturing sector. We derive and estimate a factor demand system based on the generalised Box-Cox cost function nesting both the normalised...

This paper analyzes the relationship between service innovation and different types of enterprise software systems, i.e. standardized enterprise software designed to fit one certain business sector and enterprise software specifically customized for a single firm. Using firm-level data of a...

Wir diskutieren die Faktoren für eine erfolgreiche Umsetzung eines Systems des betrieblichen Vorschlagswesens und anderer Maßnahmen zur Stimulierung des Innovationserfolgs. Im Anschluss wird die Wirkung des betrieblichen Vorschlagswesens auf den Innovationserfolg empirisch überprüft. Als...

Although demographic change leaves pay-as-you-go pension systems unsustainable, reforms, such as a higher pension age, are highly unpopular. This contribution looks into the role of intrinsic motivation as a driver for pension reform acceptance. Theoretical reasoning suggests that this driver...

This paper reports the results from a controlled field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task. In a random sample of work groups, workers unexpectedly received...

We characterize a monopolist's optimal offer of service plans when only informed customers know already at the contracting stage whether their demand is high or low, while uninformed customers may learn their demand only after incurring some costs, if at all. While informed customers purchase...

Trademarks are often supposed to reduce substitutability and imitability of product innovations. Using German CIS data for 2010, we provide empirical evidence that trademarking firms assess easy product substitutability as less characteristic for their competitive environment. This is...

Social incentives like employee awards are widespread in the corporate sector and may be important instruments for solving agency problems. To date, we have little understanding of their effect on behavior. Unique panel data from the call center of a Fortune 500 financial services provider allow...