Over one million firms around the world have adopted a Quality Management System (QMS) that conforms to ISO 9001 certification in 2015 and recent figures show that certifications have rapidly increased in emerging economies. ISO 9001 is considered a signal of high quality for products or...

The existence of bitcoins and NFTs, and perhaps also the possibility of founding a company on a blockchain network, should have gotten around after 15 years. At present, software engineers continue to work on solutions in Web3, new business activities such as coin minting, blockchain...

In this paper we introduce flexibility as an economic concept and apply it to the firm’ssecurity issuance decision and capital structure choice. Flexibility is the ability to makedecisions that one thinks are best even when others disagree. The firm’s management valuesflexibility because it...

The literature on quality-management standards has generally focused on the drivers, motivations, and performance effects of adopting such standards. Yet the last decade has witnessed a substantial degree of decertification behavior, as organizations have increasingly decided to voluntarily...

Viele Unternehmen experimentieren mit Agilität. Gleichzeitig ist die Unsicherheit groß, wieviel Agilität ein QM-System nach ISO 9001 tatsächlich verträgt. Ein gemeinsames Forschungsprojekt der Hochschule Hannover und der DGQ hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, hier mehr Sicherheit zu geben. Aus...

Asymmetric information can distort market outcomes. I study how the online disclosure of information affects consumers' behavior and firms' incentives to upgrade product quality in markets where information is traditionally limited. I first build a model of consumer search with firms' endogenous...

In recent years, several countries have introduced non-monetary performance incentives for health care providers to improve the quality of medical care. Evidence on the effect of non-monetary feedback incentives, predominantly in the form of public quality reporting, on the quality of medical...

Since 2009, German nursing homes have been evaluated regularly with quality report cards published online. We argue that most of the information in the report cards does not reliably measure quality of care, but a subset of seven measures does. Using a sample of more than 3,000 nursing homes...

Innovation enhances other performance indicators of a firm beside productivity. Buyers are ready to pay higher price for higher quality or more suitable products due to innovation. Product prices, however, reflect the market position of the firm, too. Demand functions estimated using transaction...

Walter Andrew Shewhart is regarded as the founder of Statistical Quality Control (SQC), an approach to production inspection based on the application of statistical theory. He developed SQC in the 1920s while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories. During this period, he was tasked with training...