University of Mannheim

About: University of Mannheim is a education organization based out in Mannheim, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & European union. The organization has 4448 authors who have published 12918 publications receiving 446557 citations. The organization is also known as: Uni Mannheim & UMA.

About voting and non‐voting in the European elections of June 1989

Abstract: This article reviews conventional wisdom about determinants of electoral participation in general, and of participation in European elections in particular. A model of European electoral participation is proposed which relates indicators of general political involvement, European attitudes and orientations and social-structural background characteristics to both intended and reported participation. In contrast to the findings of earlier research, it appears that the participation of EC citizens in the European elections of June 1989 - as reported in the post-electoral surveys of the European Elections Study 1989 - was primarily the result of ‘habitual voting’. Irrespective of their EC related attitudes and more general political involvement, those who participated went to the polls just because they are used to doing so on election day.

Why Do SMEs File Trademarks? Insights from Firms in Innovative Industries

Abstract: Trademark filings have increased markedly over time. Although prior research has investigated the outcomes of trademark registration, including its effects on firm market valuation and productivity, little is known about why firms file trademarks. However, to interpret the increase in trademark filings and its economic effects, it is important to know and understand why firms file trademarks. Because trademarks are particularly important to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this study analyzes trademarking motives using a survey of 600 SMEs in innovative industries. An exploratory factor analysis yields three distinct motives: protection, marketing, and exchange. A cluster analysis reveals four distinct clusters of firms with respect to the three trademarking motives. A comparison of these clusters reveals significant differences in several industry- and firm-level characteristics, including participation in service industries and relationships with external parties. Implications for research on SMEs, trademarks, and intellectual property management are discussed.

A large database of hypernymy relations extracted from the Web

Abstract: Hypernymy relations (those where an hyponym term shares a “isa” relationship with his hypernym) play a key role for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, e.g. ontology learning, automatically building or extending knowledge bases, or word sense disambiguation and induction. In fact, such relations may provide the basis for the construction of more complex structures such as taxonomies, or be used as effective background knowledge for many word understanding applications. We present a publicly available database containing more than 400 million hypernymy relations we extracted from the CommonCrawl web corpus. We describe the infrastructure we developed to iterate over the web corpus for extracting the hypernymy relations and store them effectively into a large database. This collection of relations represents a rich source of knowledge and may be useful for many researchers. We offer the tuple dataset for public download and an Application Programming Interface (API) to help other researchers programmatically query the database.

Modeling innovation processes for decision support and management simulation

Abstract: The article describes results from an ongoing research project that was started several years ago. It outlines the concepts of computer-based decision support and the role of management simulators for innovation management. It presents a modularly composed model of the innovation process which reflects the tight relationships between corporate actions and competitors' response. The model explains how the dynamics of a product life cycle are generated, and how the firm's performance influences market behavior. Different innovation strategies, such as pricing, capacity expansion and the role of effective quality control, are analyzed and evaluated. The model is then extended to include the processes of research and development and their relationships to resource allocation and market success. A management simulator—based on the comprehensive innovation model—is introduced which supports teaching and training and fosters organizational learning.

The German Public Pension System: How it Was, How it Will Be

Abstract: Germany still has a very generous public pay-as-you-go pension system. It is characterized by early effective retirement ages and very high effective replacement rates. Most workers receive virtually all of their retirement income from this public retirement insurance. Costs are almost 12 percent of GDP, more than 2.5 times as much as the U.S. Social Security System. The pressures exerted by population aging on this monolithic system, amplified by negative incentive effects, have induced a reform process that began in 1992 and is still ongoing. This paper has two parts. Part A describes the German pension system as it has shaped the labor market from 1972 until today. Part B describes the reform process which will convert the exemplary and monolithic Bismarckian public insurance system to a complex multipillar system. We provide a survey of the main features of the future German retirement system introduced by the so called “Riester Reform” in 2001 and an assessment in how far this last reform step will solve the pressing problems of the German system of old age provision.