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Purpose – The concept of equality of opportunity (EOp) goes back to Roemer (1993, 1998) who argues that a society should guarantee its members equal access to advantage regardless of their circumstances, while holding them responsible for turning that access into actual advantage by the application of effort. First, this chapter investigates how family background influences income acquisition in 17 European countries. Second, it particularly scrutinizes how governments affect EOp through redistributive policies.

Methodology – We apply two different methods in order to measure EOp: the Gini opportunity index defined by Lefranc et al. (2008) and a parametric estimation method. Effective redistribution is measured via income concepts at different stages of the tax-and-transfer schemes.

Findings – We find clear country clustering in terms of EOp for Nordic, Continental European, and Anglo-Saxon countries. For Eastern Europe our results are less definitive. By examining the impact of redistributive policies in the countries under analysis, it can be concluded that both taxes and transfers reduce inequality of opportunity (IOp), with social benefits typically playing a key role. Furthermore, the equalizing impacts of the tax-benefit system on IOp differ substantially from the ones observed in the traditional notion of inequality of outcomes.

Originality – We systematically compare two approaches used to identify the extent of EOp. Our results reveal that both methods yield rather robust country rankings for various circumstance sets. Furthermore, the impact of tax-benefit policies on EOp is rarely addressed in the existing literature. We contribute by focusing on effective redistribution directly related to different income concepts.

Individuals are completely responsible for their outcomes (income, utility, health and so on) and, therefore, total inequality is due to individual responsible choices. This view has been challenged by philosophers and economists for the last three decades since the magnum opus by John Rawls (1971). These authors have argued that individuals are only responsible for their own efforts, and, therefore, people should be compensated for a variety of circumstances beyond their control. The meritocracy approach rejects the existence of circumstances and, in accordance with this, considers that total inequality is due to inequality of effort. On the contrary, the equality of opportunity approach recognizes the existence of factors that affect individuals and over which they have no control. For the former approach, the relevant equilizandum is individual freedom of access to education, positions and jobs. For the latter approach, the relevant equilizandum is the set of available opportunities to acquire those attributes required to compete for a position or job.

This study examines the impact of different Balanced Scorecard (BSC) formats (table, graph without summary measure, graph with a summary measure) on various decision outcomes: performance ratings, perceived informativeness, and decision efficiency.

Using an original case developed by the researchers, a total of 135 individuals participated in the experiment and rated the performance of carwash managers in two different scenarios: one manager excelled financially but failed to meet targets for all other three BSC perspectives and the other manager had the opposite results.

The evaluators rated managerial performance significantly lower in the graph format compared to a table presentation of the BSC. Performance ratings were significantly higher for the scenario where the manager failed to meet only financial perspective targets but exceeded targets for all other nonfinancial BSC perspectives, contrary to the usual predictions based on the financial measure bias. The evaluators reported that informativeness of the BSC was highest in the table or graph without summary measure formats, and, surprisingly, adding a summary measure to the graph format significantly reduced perceived informativeness compared to the table format. Decision efficiency was better for the graph formats (with or without summary measure) than for the table format.

Ours is the first study to compare tables, graphs with and without a summary measure in the context of managerial performance evaluations and to examine their impact on ratings, informativeness, and efficiency. We developed an original case to test the boundaries of the financial measure bias.

This experimental study examined whether sustainability performance measures matter in managerial appraisal and bonus decisions. Participants received financial and non-financial information about four branch managers of a commercial bank, with different combinations of sustainability and financial performance. Participants perceived sustainability measures as being less important than financial ones; still, the experiment revealed that sustainability performance had some impact on appraisal and bonus decisions (albeit it mattered less than financial performance). Evaluators seemed to penalize inferior sustainability performance less than they penalized inferior financial performance. They also seemed to reward sustainability success less than financial success. These findings have practical implications for the implementation of sustainability measures in managerial evaluation systems. The experimental results indicated that incorporating these measures in evaluations does not necessarily mean they will have a sizable effect in decision-making. Results from a companion experiment suggested that organizations using a sustainability balanced scorecard for appraisal and bonus purposes might benefit from an increased emphasis on communication and evaluator training, with a focus on how sustainability performance impacts the attainment of strategic objectives.

Since the liberalization of electricity markets in the European Union, prices are subject to market dynamics. Hence, understanding the short-term drivers of electricity prices is of major interest to electricity companies and policymakers. Accordingly, this paper aims to study movements of prices in the combined German and Austrian electricity market.

This paper estimates an autoregressive model with exogenous variables (ARX) in a two-step procedure. In the first step, both time series, which inherently feature seasonality, are de-seasonalized, and in the second step, the influence of all model variables on the two dependent variables, i.e. the day-ahead and intraday European Power Energy Exchange prices, is measured.

The results reveal that the short-term market is largely driven by seasonality, consumer demand and short-term feed-ins from renewable energy sources. As a contribution to the existing body of literature, this paper specifically compares the price movements in day-ahead and intraday markets. In intraday markets, the influences of renewable energies are much stronger than in day-ahead markets, i.e. by 24.12 per cent for wind and 116.82 per cent for solar infeeds.

Knowledge on the price setting mechanism in the intraday market is particularly scarce. This paper contributes to existing research on this topic by deriving drivers in the intraday market and then contrasting them to the day-ahead market. A more thorough understanding is especially crucial for all stakeholders, who can use this knowledge to optimize their bidding strategies. Furthermore, the findings suggest policy implications for a more stable and efficient electricity market.

With a basis in the conservation of resources theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between employees’ experience of time-related work stress and their engagement in counterproductive work behavior (CWB), as well as the invigorating roles that different deviant personality traits might play in this process.

Two-wave survey data with a time lag of three weeks were collected from 127 employees in Pakistani organizations.

Employees’ sense that they have insufficient time to do their job tasks spurs their CWB, and this effect is particularly strong if they have strong Machiavellian, narcissistic or psychopathic tendencies.

This study adds to extant research by identifying employees’ time-related work stress as an understudied driver of their CWB and the three personality traits that constitute the dark triad as triggers of the translation of time-related work stress into CWB.

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.

A discretization technique is proposed for the multi‐dimensional, steady‐state hydrodynamic model of semiconductor devices, and a derivation of the model's appropriate boundary conditions is given. The model includes the complete balance equations for charge, momentum and energy, coupled with Poisson's equation, thus accounting for both diffusion and convection phenomena. The technique, like the Scharfetter—Gummel scheme for the simpler drift‐diffusion model, provides an efficient method for solving the hydrodynamic equations, allowing for a more detailed investigation of carrier dynamics in semiconductor devices.