Special interest groups (SIGs) provide substantial benefits to other academic and professional organizations, helping their members exchange ideas and keep up to date. To foster the development of SIGs with the unique perspective only available from our discipline, AIS funded the first group of six SIG proposals . The funding is designed to provide seed money for the development of electronic r...

Interest groups are known to exert a sclerotic impact on mean growth, à la Olson (1982). It is unknown, however, what impact (if any) groups exert on the volatility of growth—an important hindrance to development. In this article, we first consider what impact we should expect Olson groups to have on the volatility of growth. We then estimate the relation between groups and growth volatility in...

Market segmentation of an online auction site is studied by analyzing the users’ bidding behavior. The distribution of user activity is investigated and a network of bidders connected by common interest in individual articles is constructed. The network’s cluster structure corresponds to the main user groups according to common interest, exhibiting hierarchy and overlap. Key feature of the anal...

In group decision-making problems that involve selfinterested agents with private information, reaching socially optimal outcomes requires aligning the goals of individuals with the welfare of the entire group. The well-known VCG mechanism achieves this by requiring specific payments from agents to a central coordinator. However, when the goal of coordination is to allow the group to jointly re...

Although EU institutions and policies create additional opportunities for national interest groups to influence policy-making, not all domestic interest groups make use of the extended niche that is provided by the EU. Lagging Europeanization has often been explained by resource-based accounts, i.e. the wealth of interest groups determines their ability to Europeanize. This article explores an ...

Die Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät der Universtität Zürich gestattet hierdurch die Drucklegung der vorliegen-den Dissertation, ohne damit zu den darin ausgesproch-enen Anschauungen Stellung zu nehmen.

While the textual chat is a highly popular tool for various kinds of social interactions, its extension to the visual three-dimensional domain remains almost untouched and without practical utilization yet. This paper discusses advantages and disadvantages of spatial virtual environment when used as a platform for connecting people and serving for social and cultural interaction. The difference...

We consider dynamic decision making in a legislature, in which in each period legislators vote between the status quo (previous period’s policy) and a new bill. However, the agenda formation process is captured by interest groups, that is, the new bill on the agenda is determined by an all-pay auction among these groups. We show that convergence to the median voter of the legislature arises if ...