Berlin School of Economics and Law

Augmented Reality (AR) has witnessed significant growth in its applications, particularly in brand management, cause of its uniqueness of mapping virtual 3D elements with the real environment. Using AR, customers can try virtual products in real time on their own. Therefore, AR gives the consumer the feeling of self-reference. This paper addresses how dynamics and self-reference through AR experience affects consumers’ brand perception and evaluation, i.e., Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE). Furthermore, this paper addresses how self-referenced AR brand experiences are perceived by narcissists, as 1/20 individuals exhibit strong narcissistic traits. Drawing from our research questions, two empirical studies with German-speaking University students were conducted. Study 1 (N = 55) investigates the influence of dynamic interactions, whereas Study 2 (N = 46) explores the effects of self-referencing within AR on the perception of brand experience, extended by the influence of the personality trait narcissism. The results from Structural Equation Modeling show that in both studies pre-CBBE positively influences the AR brand experience and post-CBBE evaluation. However, our results partly support the effect of the brand experience on post-CBBE. One-way ANOVA identifies no effect from a higher dynamic level on the consumers’ perception of the AR brand experience and no significant tendency of user preference for high self-referencing AR. Results of an univariate ANOVA indicate a trend among narcissists to perceive AR brand experiences more positively compared to non-AR brand experiences, however, they reach no statistical significance. This paper provides a valuable contribution to research on the personality structure of narcissism in combination with the core characteristic of self-referencing in AR-induced brand experience. These findings and the results on the property of dynamic might help brand managers and developers design better AR brand experiences.

Despite the urgent need for ambitious national climate policies to reduce carbon emissions, their implementation lacks stringency. This lack of policy stringency is driven by a complex combination of a country’s numerous politico-economic, institutional and socio-economic characteristics. While extant studies aim at estimating causal effects between a selection of such characteristics and policy stringency, we examine the importance of a comprehensive set of predictors that underlie such empirical models. For this purpose, we employ machine-learning methods on a data set covering 22 potential predictors of policy stringency for 95 countries. Conditional random forests suggest that the most important predictors of policy stringency are of institutional nature: freedom (of press, media, associations, and elections), governmental effectiveness, and control of corruption. Further, accumulated local effects plots suggest that the relationship between some predictors, e.g. freedom or education, and policy stringency is highly non-linear.

Our paper examines what impact capital structure has on firms’ performance in selected firms listed on HCMC Stock Exchange. The data is collected from 147 listed companies during the period from 2006 to 2014. The study not only checks the impact the level of leverage has on firms’ performance, which is found to be negative in this study, but it also uses the short-term and long-term debt ratios to see the effect of debt maturity. However, there is no difference whether it is short-term or long-term. Tangibility is found to be negative with a very high proportion on average. With the suggestion that companies might invest too much in fixed assets and there is a lack of efficiency, this could be the alert for firms to improve their management process. Size and growth are found to be positive, since larger firms have lower costs of bankruptcy and higher growth rates associate with higher performance. Moreover, the study also adds the effects of industry and macroeconomics, and the result shows a correlation between the two factors and firms’ performance.

The paper investigates what effect Working Capital Management has on firms’ profitability by using the data from listed companies on Vietnamese Stock Exchange. The sample is collected from 127 public companies for the period of 9 years from 2006 to 2014. The research uses four variables to represent Working Capital Management, which are Day of Sales Outstanding (DSO), Day Sales of Inventories (DSI), Day of Payables Outstanding (DPO), and Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC). Moreover, in order to robust the result, the study also takes into the account the following variables: “Leverage, Growth, Tangibility, Size, Industrial Factors, and Macroeconomic Effects”, which were proven to have significant effects on firms’ profitability. The result implies that there is no correlation between Working Capital Management and firms’ profitability. Hence the conclusion is that Working Capital Management can help companies solve the short-term obligations and improve the efficiency by improving the supply chain and credit policies, however it has nothing to do with firms’ profitability of the companies in the sample.

This paper analyses how (i) corporate environmental policies and (ii) actual corporate environmental practices (carbon dioxide emissions) affect the number of negative campaigns corporations face from non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). The corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature suggests that CSR activities can provide reputational insurance against negative NGO attention but also come with reputational risk; we use theory and insights from the NGO literature to posit that these relationships are complex and context‐dependent. Consistent with this, our empirical analysis shows that corporate environmental policies and practices have different impacts on NGO campaigns; while the number of campaigns rises with improvements in policy, it also rises with increases in emissions. In other words, NGOs target companies that are big on words and/or bad in practice, suggesting that investing in CSR policy alone may be counterproductive in deflecting NGO attention. Finally, NGO strategies depend on their power and home country context, making nuanced analysis of their responses to CSR activities crucial.

Animal owners may increasingly rely on large language models for gathering animal health information alongside internet sources in the future. This study therefore aims to provide initial results on the accuracy of ChatGPT-4o in triage and tentative diagnostics, using horses as a case study. Ten test vignettes were used to prompt situation assessments from the tool, which were then compared to original assessments made by a veterinary specialist for horses. The most probable diagnosis suggested by ChatGPT-4o was found to be quite accurate in most cases, with the urgency to contact a veterinarian sometimes assessed as higher than necessary. When provided with all relevant information, the tool does not seem to compromise horse health by recommending excessively long waiting times, although there is still potential for improving the relief of veterinarians’ workload.

Providing replication code is an inexpensive way to facilitate reproducibility. However, little is known about the extent of replication code provision. Therefore, we examine the availability of replication code for over 2500 peer‐reviewed articles based on the German Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP), one of the most widely used datasets in economics and other social sciences. We find that only 6% of SOEP‐based studies have code available, but that this proportion has increased sharply over time. We provide evidence that the increase in code provision is driven by technological advances, individual researcher initiatives, and journal policies.

Deferred compensation is often proposed as an instrument to prevent managerial myopia. However, empirical studies show that its practical use is limited when it comes to managerial retirement. We study the optimal design of accounting‐based deferred compensation for retiring managers. While deferred compensation is useful in establishing long‐term incentives, it causes contracting frictions in subsequent periods. Deferred bonuses of retiring managers imply inefficiently weak incentives for incoming managers. This down‐scaling effect renders deferred compensation less useful in providing long‐term incentives. We also find that the down‐scaling effect has implications for the desirability of accounting timeliness—that is, the timely recognition of future cash flows in current accounting earnings—from a stewardship perspective. If managers' long‐term actions are sufficiently important, higher timeliness can cause more myopic managerial incentives.