Price Delegation in Sales Organizations: An Empirical Investigation

The allocation of decision rights is an integral component of designing organizational architecture. Economists have long understood the importance of co-locating decision rights with the knowledge that is valuable to those decisions. Following this prescription, marketing scholars have developed strong theoretical arguments in favor of delegating pricing authority to the sales force. Empirical work, however, reveals a significant number of sales organizations yielding only minimal authority to their salespeople. Given this divergence between theory and practice, we develop and empirically test two mitigating factors that could potentially explain why firms restrict pricing authority. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 222 German sales organizations and find that the data are generally consistent with our conceptualization.

Modernity Strikes Back? A Historical Perspective on the Latest Increase in Interpersonal Violence (1960-1990)

There is a plethora of criminological explanations why criminal violence increased during the three decades between the early 1960s and the early 1990s. This paper argues that most available interpretations are lacking in three respects: they lack a historical perspective that anchors the three critical decades in a wider understanding of long-term trends; they take the nation-state as their unit of analysis and disregard important commonalities across the Western world; and they pay insufficient attention to different trends in broad categories of physical violence.This paper therefore takes a macro-level and long-term perspective on violent crime, focussing on European homicide during the past 160 years. It demonstrates that the period of increase was preceded by a long-term decline and convergence of homicide rates from the 1840s to the 1950s. Also, it shows that both the decline and the increase primarily resulted from temporal variation in the likelihood of physical aggression between men in public space. It argues that explanations of these common trends need to take into account broad long-term cultural change common to Western societies. In particular, the paper suggests that shifts in culturally transmitted and institutionally embedded ideals of the conduct of life may provide an explanation for long-term change in levels of interpersonal violence.

Klassifizierung der Methoden eines Ganzheitlichen Produktionssystems unter Berücksichtigung der Anforderungen indirekter Bereiche

Seit den 50er Jahren des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts erfährt das Konzept der schlanken Produktion stetig Erweiterungen und Renaissancen [Fau09]. Zielt das Ursprungskonzept noch überwiegend auf eine Effizienzsteigerung im Bereich der Fertigung ab, so werden im Rahmen eines Ganzheitlichen Produktionssystems verstärkt auch die indirekten Bereiche, wie z. B. Konstruktion, Forschung und Entwicklung, Planung oder Vertrieb einbezogen. Im folgenden Beitrag werden die Rahmenbedingungen eines Produktionssystems im indirekten Bereich dargestellt und Empfehlungen hinsichtlich einer strukturellen Erweiterung aktuell bestehender Ordnungsrahmen gegeben.