The success of a newly founded firm depends on various initial risk factors or start-up conditions such as the market that the business is aiming for, the experience and the age of the founder, the preparation before the launch, the financial frame and the legal form of the firm. These risk...

A new diagnostic tool for the identification of differential item functioning (DIF) is proposed. Classical approaches to DIF allow to consider only few subpopulations like ethnic groups when investigating if the solution of items depends on the membership to a subpopulation. We propose an...

<Para ID="Par1">A general paired comparison model for the evaluation of sport competitions is proposed. It efficiently uses the available information by allowing for ordered response categories and team-specific home advantage effects. Penalized estimation techniques are used to identify clusters of teams that...</para>