NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Reviving tourism industry post-COVID-19: A resilience-based framework

Opinion leaders often play key roles in online knowledge-sharing communities, which has intrigued a lot of researchers and practitioners worldwide. However, it is not clear how various characteristics of opinion leaders may affect different online groups’ knowledge-sharing engagement. This paper aims to answer this question by building upon social capital theory to examine the differential influences of opinion leaders’ characteristics (interactivity, authority, and activity) on online groups. In-groups and out-groups were distinguished, and the study used the context of an investment-oriented online knowledge-sharing community. By leveraging a unique aggregated group-level secondhand dataset collected from Snowball.com, we conducted log-linear and Poisson regression models. The results revealed that the intensity of online group knowledge-sharing engagement was heavily contingent upon the types of characteristics of opinion leaders. We found that in-group knowledge-sharing engagement (generating new knowledge) was driven by an opinion leader’s interactivity and authority, whereas out-group knowledge-sharing engagement (developing new members) could not be facilitated by these types of characteristics. Instead, the opinion leader’s activity hindered out-group users from joining in-groups. The study also identified a “mutual promotion” issue, which was generated from the association between in-group and out-group knowledge-sharing engagement.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/16/4461/pdf

Understanding the Impact of Opinion Leaders’ Characteristics on Online Group Knowledge-Sharing Engagement from In-Group and Out-GroupPerspectives: Evidence from a Chinese Online Knowledge-Sharing Community

The Strategy Process: Concept, Context, Cases

The literature on energy-growth nexus has consistently stated that economic development, which leads to environmental degradation in its early stages, is the only way to ensure environmental sustainability. The paper examines the interrelationships between the performance on sustainability indicators and economic growth in European Union. The data for sustainability indicators such as human development index, financial development index, urban population, renewable energy consumption, non-renewable energy consumption, ecological footprints, carbon emissions, and economic growth indicator that is gross domestic product are analyzed for 27 EU countries. The study employs Arellano-Bond dynamic panel data estimation, system dynamic panel data estimation, and Augmented Mean Group model. The results show a two-way positive relationship between economic growth and non-renewable energy and a two-way negative relationship between economic growth and renewable energy. Besides, ecological footprint, non-renewable energy consumption, and carbon emissions are shown to positively impact economic growth. In contrast, renewable energy consumption is shown to negatively impact economic growth. The results reveal explain the reasoning for unimpressive performance of Europe on the front of climate action, and average performance on clean energy, notwithstanding reasonable economic growth. The novelty of the study lies in finding out that the shift towards renewable energy may not seem economically viable in the short-run, but after a point of time, renewable energy consumption is bound to positively impact the economic growth in line with the Environmental Kuznets Curve.

Exploring the nexus between non-renewable and renewable energy consumptions and economic development: Evidence from panel estimations

This paper focuses on the knowledge problem of economics by discussing its current status in light of digitalization. This problem highlights the paradox of not having the necessary knowledge to take an economic decision, but pretending to have it and act, hence questioning the legitimacy of governmental decision-making and its impacts on the economy. Current technological developments are challenging this problem. Big Data has been a neglected phenomenon when it comes to its impact on the nature of knowledge and the decision-making processes associated with it, and it is easy to think that Big Data solves this problem. This research gap is evaluated by re-visiting the knowledge problem and evaluating whether the knowledge problem can still be valid in the digital era. The digital governance issue has been largely covered by literature in terms of technical possibilities. However, the main challenge is not the technical one, but rather how to create governance structures to involve people in decision-making processes, and at the same not fall into the trap of the knowledge problem. The sustainable transition from digital government to digital governance is a transition from a technical structure to multiple processes on different levels, and these processes have their own limits.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/3/860/pdf

From Digital Government to Digital Governance: Are We There Yet?

Unconditional and conditional analysis between COVID-19 cases, temperature, exchange rate and stock markets using wavelet coherence and wavelet partial coherence approaches

The World Economic Forum in Davos suggested that promoting entrepreneurship could be a solution to the problem of youth employment, which is a serious issue with 75 million young people out of work around the world. The entrepreneurial decisions of young people are especially important in regions where economic opportunities are restricted and people choose to move from that region. Two of such regions are East Germany and Northern Cyprus. In this article, the authors are interested in analyzing entrepreneurial tendencies of business and economics students from Northern Cyprus and East Germany in order to provide context-specific knowledge. For this purpose, a survey was conducted at the Technische Universitat Dresden and the Near East University with n = 293 participants in 2016. The results were analyzed by using a logistic regression analysis. The study includes with policy implications on the transformation towards entrepreneurial universities to meet the different needs of small and poor cities.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/5/1437/pdf

Entrepreneurial Intentions of Business and Economics Students in Germany and Cyprus: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

In this empirical research, the author focuses on the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market. Based on a contingent perspective of how markets emerge and can be shaped, the author asks the research question of whether the emergence of the ERP market was a necessary, strong, or weak consequence of the product innovation of Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing (SAP), which was the pioneer innovator in this specific market. This question is answered with a graph theoretical model of contingency and causality in order to measure the causality between events occurring over historical time. In this sense, the research article provides an application of the method proposed by Lehmann-Waffenschmidt. The author finds that the emergence of the ERP software market is contingent and was not predetermined; path dependencies play a big role in the way how this market segment emerged. With respect to both entrepreneurial and economic factors of relevance, the case of the SAP is far from a predetermined success story. The results are relevant for a number of reasons. First, the results indicate that instead of talking about success stories, a new perspective in market shaping can highlight a more realistic way of the contingent nature of entrepreneurial activity and product innovations. Second, the results aim to bridge the gap between marketing and the emergence of markets, as it was indicated as a research gap by recent contributions in marketing science. Third, the introduction of counterfactual events in the business history of SAP indicate a methodological innovation that has not yet been considered by marketing and entrepreneurship scholars, which may be helpful regarding recognizing patterns from the past and also regarding contingent planning for the future.

https://www.mdpi.com/2199-8531/4/3/23/pdf

Burak Erkut

Papers

Exploring the nexus between non-renewable and renewable energy consumptions and economic development: Evidence from panel estimations

From Digital Government to Digital Governance: Are We There Yet?

Unconditional and conditional analysis between COVID-19 cases, temperature, exchange rate and stock markets using wavelet coherence and wavelet partial coherence approaches

Entrepreneurial Intentions of Business and Economics Students in Germany and Cyprus: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

The Emergence of the ERP Software Market between Product Innovation and Market Shaping