Webster University Vienna

About: Webster University Vienna is a education organization based out in Vienna, Austria. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Cognition. The organization has 60 authors who have published 168 publications receiving 3182 citations.

Putting Security Council Resolution 2098 on the Democratic Republic of Congo in Context: The Long Way of Peacekeeping

Abstract: This paper deals with the establishment of the so-called “Intervention Brigade” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Security Council Resolution 2098. In doing so, it outlines the history of Peacekeeping and how its fundamental principles – consent, impartiality and the restricted authorization to use force in self-defence only – have been re-interpreted along with the expansion of Peacekeeping mandates in order to show that the establishment of the Intervention Brigade is not as revolutionary as it seems at first. A closer inspection of how the Peacekeeping mission in the DRC evolved further supports this characterization since MONUSCO has operated on the basis of a “robust” mandate for long and thus has been involved in various military operations ever since. The specifically novelty of the Intervention Brigade is its explicitly “offensive” character, which challenges the traditional notions of Peacekeeping to a wide extent. The ultimate question, however, is whether this resolution is a mere exception or whether it constitutes a precedent for future Peacekeeping operations. Arguments in favour of both assumptions are presented, while it is clear that much will depend upon the success or failure of the Intervention Brigade in neutralizing the armed groups as envisaged by its mandate.

On Top Of The World, Down In The Dumps: Text Mining The Emotionality Of Online Consumer Reviews

Abstract: Emotionality of online reviews can reveal much knowledge about product perceptions and popularity. However, current emotion-related analyses of online reviews are mainly focused on sentiment and valence analysis. Based on the theory of discrete emotions, we differentiate between six different emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) and posit that they appear differently depending on product types. To assess emotions, we introduce two key measurement dimensions: emotional breadth (word variety) and emotional depth (total word counts). We hypothesize that the density of emotional breadth and depth is higher for hedonic goods than for utilitarian goods as well as that the densities of the six emotions differ between these product types. To test the hypotheses, we collected 10,087 reviews of 30 printers and 30 music CDs at Amazon.com. The text mining analyses on these reviews show that reviews on music CDs are much more emotional than those on printers. Joy is the dominant emotion in both product categories. However, the emotions of disgust (emotional breadth) and sadness (emotional depth) are more prominent for printers than for music CDs. Implications and future research avenues are discussed along with the challenges of textual keyword analyses on

Through the eyes of the traveler: consumer evaluation of hotels in eastern european capitals compared with western, southern, and northern europe

Abstract: With the movement of Russian troops into the Crimean peninsula, and the subsequent vote on secession from Ukraine and joining with Russia, many voices wanted to be heard. The focus of this study is to provide insight as to the views from an interested, but arguably neutral player in the discussion; the second largest country in the world, but one with the third largest population of those with Ukrainian heritage outside of Ukraine and Russia, Canada. Newspaper articles from the period of the crisis from February and March 2014 were collected and analyzed. The articles were published in three national newspapers and also three newspapers with a significant population of those with Ukrainian heritage. Evidence from this sample of suggests that there was a dominance of negative coverage as to the role of Russia consistent with prior research. The articles reviewed were found to present non-neutral coverage particularly through opinion pieces, which also tended to be both longer and more frequently published than neutral, or alternative articles.

The Relative Efficiencies of Higher Education in OECD Countries

Abstract: Studies of productivity of systems of Higher Education (HE) on the national level are of interest for two main reasons: education is an important factor for productivity growth for the macro-economy, and the efficiency of spending public resources on HE is of key interest in the context of accountability specifically relative efficiency compared with other developed countries. The objective of this study is to evaluate the relative efficiency of HE in OECD countries from the public viewpoint; how well OECD countries utilize their public resources to achieve their outputs relative to each other. For this study, two inputs are chosen reflecting the public investment in HE. Six outputs are chosen reflecting the main outcomes of HE in terms of: accessibility of tertiary education, employment level, earnings level relative to secondary education, net financial returns from HE, internal rate of return, and research articles level. The data is taken, mostly, from the OECD report on education in 2019. Out of 37 OECD countries 29 are considered in this study. Due to missing data 8 countries are not included. The stress on efficiency from the public viewpoint is a strength of this study in relation to previous OECD efficiency studies. The original Data Envelopment Analyses (DEA) basic models are, which provide dichotomy of the countries into two groups: efficient and inefficient. Moreover, several efficiency rank-scaling methods based on DEA, and several multivariate statistic methods are utilized here. The use of a variety of efficiency rank-scaling methods, while choosing the robust one, is another strength of this research. The results indicate that the robust method is cross efficiency, as it is significantly correlated with each of the other efficiency methods, and it has the highest average correlation with other efficient methods. From the 29 studied OECD countries, the USA is found to be the most efficient in HE. However, when we use only the first input versus the six above outputs, Italy became the most efficient country. The USA is ranked third in this case, while Italy is ranked fourth in the original case.