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Online peer-to-peer (P2P) sales of used and or high-value goods are gaining more and more relevance today. However, since potential buyers cannot physically examine the product quality during online sales, information asymmetries and consequently uncertainty and mistrust that already exist in offline sales are exacerbated in online markets. Authenticated data platforms have been proposed to solve these problems by providing authenticated data about the negotiation object, integrating it into text-based channels secured by IT. Yet, we know little about the dynamics of online negotiations today and the impact of the introduction of authenticated data on online negotiation behaviors. We address this research gap based on two experimental studies along with the example of online used car trade. We analyze users’ communicative and strategic actions in current P2P chat-based negotiations and examine how the introduction of authenticated data affects these behaviors using a conceptional model derived from literature. Our results show that authenticated data can promote less complex negotiation processes and more honest communication behavior between buyers and sellers. Further, the results indicate that chats with the availability of authenticated data can positively impact markets with information asymmetries. These insights provide valuable contributions for academics interested in the dynamics of online negotiations and the effects of authenticated data in text-based online negotiations. In addition, providers of trade platforms who aim to advance their P2P sales platforms benefit by achieving a competitive advantage and a higher number of customers.

This article offers a functionalist account of trust. It argues that a particular form of trust—Communicated Interpersonal Trust—is paradigmatic and lays out how trust as a social practice in this form helps to satisfy fundamental practical, deliberative, and relational human needs in mutually reinforcing ways. We then argue that derivative (non-paradigmatic) forms of trust connect to the paradigm by generating a positive dynamic between trustor and trustee that is geared towards the realization of these functions. We call this trust’s proleptic potential. Our functionalist approach does not only provide important insights into the practice of trust and its place in the broader web of social life, but also illuminates existing philosophical debates. First, pointing out how opposing theoretical accounts of trust each capitalise on only one of its functions, our paradigm-based approach reveals why they each contain a kernel of truth but are also deficient: the optimal realization of each function is tied to the existence of the other functions as well. Second, we show how a functionalist re-orientation can illuminate two recent disputes regarding (i) the question whether trust is explanatorily two- or three-place and (ii) whether (and to what extent) we can decide to trust others.

Since the early days of economics, the rationality principle has been a core element of economic theorizing. It is part of almost any theoretical framework that economists use to generate knowledge. Despite its central role, the principle’s epistemic status and function continue to be debated between empiricists and rationalists, and a clear winner is yet to emerge. One point of contention is that we cannot explain the principle’s special status in light of clear evidence against its empirical validity and the continuous conceptual changes it undergoes. In this paper, I argue that we should think of the rationality principle as a functional a priori principle along the lines of a pragmatic theory of constitutive elements recently put forward by David Stump. Such an approach would explain the principle’s persistence and changing status. More generally, the pragmatic theory of constitutive elements in science offers a viable alternative to rationalism and empiricism that allows for approaching the debate about the status and function of the rationality principle in economics. It provides a new framework and starting point to think about the usefulness of a central first principle in economics in a constructive way.

Political consumerism features prominently as an increasing form of non-institutionalized and individualized political participation. The main challenge of empirical participation research is to integrate emerging alternative forms such as political consumerism into standard measurement instruments of participation. So far, serious deficits of existing survey instruments prevent political scientists to adequately assess the role of political consumerism within the repertoire of political participation. Originally apolitical activities such as conscious purchasing behaviour are all too easily interpreted as political participation, which undermines the political science concept of political participation. The aim of this article therefore is the presentation of an empirical research strategy to analyse political consumerism as an emerging form of political participation. I use a purposively designed online survey with more than 3500 randomly selected participants to analyse and reconcile current deficits of the empirical measurement of political consumerism as emerging form of political participation. Based on the empirical insights gained by our survey, I propose an innovative measurement instrument for political consumerism to be used in international comparative survey research.

Measures of research productivity have become widely used for obtaining tenure, third-party funding, and additional resources from universities. However, previous studies indicate that men might have a higher research output than women, with mixed conclusions about the factors that drive these differences. This study explores to what extent the research productivity of psychology professors in Germany is related to gender and, furthermore, how any gender gaps can be explained by controlling for individual and organizational factors. In addition, three publication dimensions (publications in top 10% journals, journal articles, and book and collection chapters) are distinguished to determine the effect of gender on research productivity as precisely as possible. A unique data set based on all full professors in psychology in Germany and their publication record in 2013 and 2014 is used ( $$N_\mathrm{authors}$$ = 294; $$N_\mathrm{articles}$$ = 2252, $$N_\mathrm{chapters}$$ = 439). Thus, this study provides a current overview of the state of research productivity in an entire discipline after researchers receive tenure and external restrictions are lessened. Our research helps to further locate the point at which gender differences in publication numbers occur. As we are the first to systematically to analyze different publication types, we are able to show that there is no difference in publication numbers for less-prestigious book chapters. However, we find significant gender differences for research productivity in academic journals that are more important for career advancement and peer recognition, even after we control for the most important individual and organizational factors that might explain gender differences. Our results point to the direction that women do research and write manuscripts, but may have different publication patterns: instead of submitting to competitive journals, they may be satisfied with less-prestigious book chapters. As publications in peer-reviewed journals are especially important for career advancement as well as peer recognition, this publication pattern may be disadvantageous for women. Overall, we conclude that additional research to understand these developments is needed that focuses on the motives and beliefs of researchers, both to improve gender equality in academia and to give women better chances to gain recognition and prestige.

The requirement of bottom-up action from all the countries to deal with climate change makes it necessary to analyze the factors influencing policy adoption. This article contributes to the policy literature by shedding light on the conditions, which incentivize countries to adopt more climate mitigation policies. The theoretical argument builds on the integrated approaches to study policy diffusion, which include both internal and external determinants as explanations for the adoption of policies. While previous applications typically operationalize the latter by regional proximity, this study highlights the added value of network dependencies capturing political and cooperative interactions across countries. The article finds that the adoption of climate policies is a matter of social influence. Countries are more likely to adopt policies if they cooperate with countries that have adopted more climate policies and are in a similar structural position to countries that are active in climate protection. This article not only is an important theoretical contribution to the policy literature but also enriches our methodological and empirical understanding of climate policy diffusion.

According to standard teleosemantics, intentional states are selectional states. This claim is put forward not as a conceptual analysis, but as a ‘theoretical reduction’—an a posteriori hypothesis analogous to ‘water = H2O’. Critics have tried to show that this meta-theoretical conception of teleosemantics leads to unacceptable consequences. In this paper, I argue that there is indeed a fundamental problem with the water/H2O analogy, as it is usually construed, and that teleosemanticists should therefore reject it. Fortunately, there exists a viable alternative to the water/H2O model which avoids the fundamental problem, while explaining the a posteriori character of teleosemantics equally well.

Using an exhaustive database on academic publications in mathematics, we study the patterns of productivity by world mathematicians over the period 1984-2006. We uncover some surprising facts, such as the absence of age related decline in productivity and the relative symmetry of international movements, rejecting the presumption of a massive ”brain drain” towards the U.S. Looking at the U.S. academic market in mathematics, we analyze the determinants of success by top departments. In conformity with recent studies in other fields, we find that selection effects are much stronger than local interaction effects: the best departments are most successful in hiring the most promising mathematicians, but not necessarily at stimulating positive externalities among them. Finally we analyze the impact of career choices by mathematicians: mobility almost always pays, but early specialization does not.

Die Soziologie interessiert sich fur die soziale Verteilung und Determinanten von Traurigkeit als Teil der Gefuhlskultur einer Gesellschaft. Sie eroffnet zugleich Potenziale fur das Themenfeld der sozialen Ungleichheit von Emotionen. Auf der Grundlage einer Querschnittsanalyse von Daten des Schweizer Haushalt-Panels (SHP) werden Zusammenhange zwischen der Haufigkeit der erlebten Traurigkeit und Merkmalen der sozialstrukturellen Position, des sozialen Kontextes sowie in Abhangigkeit von kritischen Lebensereignissen gepruft. Der Beitrag bestatigt Variationen von Traurigkeit entlang sozialer Merkmale wie Geschlecht, Einkommen, Alter, Nationalitat und Sprachregion.

Prospect Theory (PT) is widely regarded as the most promising descriptive model for decision making under uncertainty. Various tests have corroborated the validity of the characteristic fourfold pattern of risk attitudes implied by the combination of probability weighting and value transformation. But is it also safe to assume stable PT preferences at the individual level? This is not only an empirical but also a conceptual question. Measuring the stability of preferences in a multi-parameter decision model such as PT is far more complex than evaluating single-parameter models such as Expected Utility Theory under the assumption of constant relative risk aversion. There exist considerable interdependencies among parameters such that allegedly diverging parameter combinations could in fact produce very similar preference structures. In this paper, we provide a theoretic framework for measuring the (temporal) stability of PT parameters. To illustrate our methodology, we further apply our approach to 86 subjects for whom we elicit PT parameters twice, with a time lag of 1 month. While documenting remarkable stability of parameter estimates at the aggregate level, we find that a third of the subjects show significant instability across sessions.

In this study we examine the cross-cultural equivalence of two scales that measure attitudes toward democracy across 36 countries in the World Value Survey (WVS) 2000. We examine the equivalence of these scales in order to explore if we can meaningfully compare democratic attitudes across countries. Multiple group confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFA) is applied to answer this question. The analyses indicate that the scales may be compared but only to a certain extent and not across all the countries. We close this article by discussing the implications of the findings.

This paper explores the possibilities of method triangulation between two methodological approaches for assessing the validity performance of survey items: cognitive interviewing and factor analytic techniques. Although their means of approaching validity differ, both methods attempt to prove whether a measure corresponds to a theoretical (latent) concept (e.g. patriotism vs. nationalism), thus both are concerned with the question, whether an indicator measures what it is supposed to measure. Based on two representative samples for Austria [data gathered within the framework of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) on National Identity in 1995 and 2003] and 18 cognitive interviews conducted between 2003 and 2005, the paper shows the considerable advantages of using a multi-method approach for ensuring the quality of survey items. On the one hand, we apply exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis in order to identify poorly performing indicators with regard to validity and reliability. On the other hand, the analysis of the cognitive interviews reveals the substantial sources of response error. Results show that to a large extent, respondents do not understand the items that have been defined to measure national identification and related concepts in Austria the way intended by the drafting group of this ISSP Module, a fact that has considerable implications on the scales’ predictive power.

Elicitation methods in decision-making under risk allow us to infer the utilities of outcomes as well as the probability weights from the observed preferences of an individual. An optimally efficient elicitation method is proposed, which takes the inevitable distortion of preferences by random errors into account and minimizes the effect of such errors on the inferred utility and probability weighting functions. Under mild assumptions, the optimally efficient method for eliciting utilities and probability weights is the following three-stage procedure. First, a probability is elicited whose subjective weight is one half. Second, the utility function is elicited through the midpoint chaining certainty equivalent method using the probability elicited at the first stage. Finally, the probability weighting function is elicited through the probability equivalent method.

In binary choice between discrete outcome lotteries, an individual may prefer lottery L1 to lottery L2 when the probability that L1 delivers a better outcome than L2 is higher than the probability that L2 delivers a better outcome than L1. Such a preference can be rationalized by three standard axioms (solvability, convexity and symmetry) and one less standard axiom (a fanning-in). A preference for the most probable winner can be represented by a skew-symmetric bilinear utility function. Such a utility function has the structure of a regret theory when lottery outcomes are perceived as ordinal and the assumption of regret aversion is replaced with a preference for a win. The empirical evidence supporting the proposed system of axioms is discussed.

My paper takes issue both with the standard view that the Tractatus contains a correspondence theory and with recent suggestions that it features a deflationary or semantic theory. Standard correspondence interpretations are mistaken, because they treat the isomorphism between a sentence and what it depicts as a sufficient condition of truth rather than of sense. The semantic/deflationary interpretation ignores passages that suggest some kind of correspondence theory. The official theory of truth in the Tractatus is an obtainment theory – a sentence is true iff the state of affairs it depicts obtains. This theory differs from deflationary theories in that it involves an ontology of states of affairs/facts; and it can be transformed into a type of correspondence theory: a sentence is true iff it corresponds to, i.e. depicts an obtaining state of affairs (fact). Admittedly, unlike correspondence theories as commonly portrayed, this account does not involve a genuinely truth-making relation. It features a relation of correspondence, yet it is that of depicting, between a meaningful sentence and its sense – a possible state of affairs. What makes for truth is not that relation, but the obtaining of the depicted state of affairs. This does not disqualify the Tractatus from holding a correspondence theory, however, since the correspondence theories of Moore and Russell are committed to a similar position. Alternatively, the obtainment theory can be seen as a synthesis of correspondence, semantic and deflationary approaches. It does justice to the idea that what is true depends solely on what is the case, and it combines a semantic explanation of the relation between a sentence and what it says with a deflationary account of the agreement between what the sentence says and what obtains or is the case if it is true