Current Thesis Topics
As of 17.01.2012
Supervisor: Christoph Dehne
Work-Life-Balance and IT: Moderating Effects of Firm Strategies
Bachelor Thesis
The term Work-Life-Balance is omnipresent in today's media. One important point often raised concerns the increasing influence of the use of portable IT devices like laptops or smartphones in non-labour time on Work-Life-Balance (Boswell and Olson-Buchanan 2007; Robinson 2006). It is often assumed that such devices have an adverse effect by increasing the perceived workload. Nevertheless one could also argue that effects hinge on further aspects, for instance the firm strategy. Employees deciding to join a very innovative company for instance might perceive such modern work and communication devices as a chance to be able to contribute to innovation activities without being restricted by any kind of office hours. On the other hand, employees working for rather traditional companies could see such devices as stressful and negatively influencing private life. This thesis topic aims at two goals. First of all, hypotheses are to be derived based on a deliberate analysis of the existing literature in the relevant fields. Secondly, those hypotheses are to be tested econometrically.
Supervisor: Pascal Kober
Strategy in Platform-Based Markets
Bachelor Thesis
The operating system market, the market for video game consoles and the market for credit cards are only a few examples of platform-based markets. Although many economically highly relevant markets are platform-based, research only lately started to focus on the special characteristics of these markets. However, firms operating in these markets need to take into account the interdependencies between the different market sides, no matter if they are active as a platform (e.g. a video console manufacturer) or on one side of the market (e.g. a video game publisher/developer). Starting from a thorough analysis of the influence of indirect network effects on firm behavior, this thesis will give an overview of the literature on strategic choices of firms in platform-based markets [a recent example is Zhu, Iansiti (2012)]. Special focus will be on the identification of two points: First, how are the different findings connected? And second, where do theoretical implications and empirical findings coincide and where not?
Market Structure and Incentives to Invest
Bachelor Thesis
The relation between an industry's concentration and the incentive of firms to innovate has a long history in economic research, starting with Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). But looking only at the pure number of firms is a very narrow analysis of market structure. Therefore, researchers also focused on the impact of other structural characteristics of markets like the existence of intermediaries (Spulber 2002) or platforms (Belleflamme and Peitz 2010). In the first step, the thesis will give a short survey over the seminal papers in the Schumpeter series. In the second step, it will then focus on summarizing the main structural factors identified by the literature explaining firms' investment incentives. The emphasis is on theoretical work, what requires some background in economics to be able to read papers using formal models. However, mathematical details are not the focus of the thesis but the intuition of the publications.
Product Quality and Multihoming Decisions
Bachelor Thesis
Theoretical economic research suggests that the extent to which market sides in a platform market multihome crucially influences market outcomes like platform prices (e.g. Armstrong 2006). Building on a large sample in the video game industry, Landsman and Stremersch (2011) find, amongst others, a significant negative relation between the platform market share of a video console and the number of multihoming sellers. In addition, Bingen and Stemersch (2009), also in the video game industry, find that superstar games are positively related to console sales. Combining both studies, an unanswered question is the relation between multihoming seller and superstar games and the quality of games. The thesis has two major goals: First, to thoroughly summarize the existing literature about multihoming/singlehoming in several fields of research (mainly: economics, strategy, markting). And second, to test the derived hypotheses statistically on an existing dataset from the video game industry.
Supervisor: Christian Peukert
Interfirm Collaboration and Strategic Networks of Innovation
Bachelor Thesis
In response to dynamic market environments and increasing competitive pressure, firms rely on external partners to reach sustainable competitive advantage. Such interorganizational ties compose a network of accessible knowledge. Given the receiving organization's absorptive capabilities (Cohen and Levinthal 1990; Inkpen and Tsang 2005), a cumulative process of learning can then drive innovation. This thesis will provide an overview of research on strategic networks and knowledge spillovers, with a special focus on the resulting effects on innovation.
Outsourcing Innovation: Getting More by Doing Less?
Bachelor Thesis
In recent years, flexibility in response to globalized markets and increasingly individualized customer desires has gained much importance. Therefore, firms have changed the objective of outsourcing business activities from cost cutting to following strategic goals. When it comes to forming the innovative capabilities of the firm, cooperation in research and development (R&D) attracts more and more attention. The aim of this thesis is to give a critical evaluation of the relevant literature, both theoretical and empirical, to derive hypotheses for an empirical investigation using micro-level data. Arora and Gambardella (1990) provide a good starting point.
Strategic Information Technology Outsourcing: Make or Buy, or Even Sell?
Bachelor Thesis
A large body of literature has focused on make-or-buy decisions concerning the information technology (IT) requirements of firms. More recently, however, firms started to look at outsourcing of IT from a new perspective. Employing the technological possibilities of cloud computing, selling unused computing power is increasingly identified as a source of efficiency enhancement of internal IT capacity. Starting with a review of the established literature on outsourcing decisions, the thesis should formulate a theoretical analysis based on transaction cost economics as inspired by Stratopoulos et al. (2008). As an application, the model can be used to critically evaluate the computing power broker "spotcloud.com" or describe the business model of Amazon Web Services.
Supervisor: Dainis Zegners
Auctions and the Market for Online Ads
Bachelor Thesis
As more economic activity has shifted online over the last decades, there has been a burst of innovative market mechanisms and institutions in the internet (Levin 2011). One important example is the use of auctions to allocate the placement of advertisements (ads), the most prominent examples being Google and Facebook. This thesis should examine in detail how Google and Facebook organize the placement of ads using novel auction mechanisms. These mechanisms are interesting to study not only because they generate large amounts of revenues each year but also because they show the potential of online markets for more flexible and dynamic sales mechanisms than traditional posted prices. This thesis should 1) describe the market for online ads and the related business model, 2) look at the auction mechanisms used by Google and Facebook and 3) examine why their specific properties result in an advantage over alternative ways of organizing the market for ads.
Supervisor: Leon Zucchini
Competitive Dynamics Research: A Bibliometric Approach
Master Thesis
Since the early nineties, research on competitive dynamics has investigated the dynamic patterns of competitive interactions between rival firms. Scholars have deepened our understanding of when and how firms react to each other's attacks, and what causes competitive action in the first place. They have done so by focusing on the level of the individual competitive move, e.g. product introduction or price cut. At least three review articles of research on competitive dynamics exist (Smith et al. 2001; Ketchen et al. 2004; Hutzschenreuter and Israel 2009), however, to date there has been no attempt to map research on competitive dynamics and relate it to other research topics using quantitative techniques.
Bibliometric methods have recently been employed in management research, as they allow scholars to map research streams in an objective and reproducible way. A recent example is Acedo, Barroso and Galan (2006), who conducted a semi-quantitative analysis of research on the resource-based view of the firm.
This thesis will employ basic bibliometric methods to describe major research themes in competitive dynamics and identify links to related research areas. Based on this, it will generate ideas for potential directions for future research.