Bücher der Reihe BestMasters

Roman Liedtke investigates the causes of the failure of business incubators in developing countries. Based on the insights of an incubator program in Namibia, he develops a new absorptive capacity model which enables incubators in developing countries to improve their processes in order to better benefit from external resources.

Lukas Pehle beschäftigt sich mit der transienten thermischen und strukturmechanischen Analyse einer 19-stufigen Mitteldruck-Dampfturbine. Dafür errechnet und bewertet er Zeitdauern und auftretende Spannungen, um ein breites Spektrum an Vorwärm-Szenarien beschreiben zu können. Das dabei verwendete und weiterentwickelte Festkörpermodell wird an experimentellen Daten kalibriert, um im Anschluss eine Parameterstudie durchführen zu können. Mithilfe des untersuchten Konzepts des Vorwärmens von Dampfturbinen können thermisch induzierte Spannungen beim Kraftwerksstart verringert werden. Dieses Buch leistet aufgrund der dadurch flexibleren Kraftwerke einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Versorgungssicherheit nach der Energiewende, also für den Übergang von fossilen Energieträgern und der Kernenergie zu einer nachhaltigen Energieversorgung mittels erneuerbarer Energien.

Marco Schroter investigates the influence of the local environment on the exciton dynamics within molecular aggregates, which build, e.g., the light-harvesting complexes of plants, bacteria or algae by means of the hierarchy equations of motion (HEOM) method. He addresses the following questions in detail: How can coherent oscillations within a system of coupled molecules be interpreted? What are the changes in the quantum dynamics of the system for increasing coupling strength between electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom? To what extent does decoherence govern the energy transfer properties of molecular aggregates?.

Joerg Sesselmann presents the first comprehensive guide to customer integration from a branding perspective. The author establishes a classification of the vast landscape of co-creation, co-design, co-production, interactive value creation and mass customization and evaluates benefits and success factors for brands.

The master thesis of Susanne Gobel generates the deep understanding of the Mobile Ambient (MA) calculus that is necessary to use it as a modeling language. Instead of calculus terms a much more convenient representation via MA trees naturally maps to the application area of networks where processes pass hierarchical protection domains like firewalls. The work analyses MA's function principles and derives a translation into Safe Petri nets. It extends to arbitrary MA processes but finiteness of the net and therefore decidability of reachability is only guaranteed for bounded processes. The construction is polynomial in process size and bounds so that reachability analysis is only PSPACE-complete.   

The master thesis of David Roos Launchbury deals with the implementation and validation of a numerical solver for incompressible large eddy simulation (LES) with heat transfer in OpenFOAM. Academic and industrial cases, ranging from flow between parallel plates to film cooling, are investigated utilising existing and newly-implemented turbulence models. Simulations using no turbulence models, i.e. under-resolved DNS (UDNS) simulations, are performed for comparison. Very good results are obtained in all cases with variations among the individual models, with the UDNS simulations performing surprisingly well. The study shows that the developed software is able to simulate complex cases reliably and accurately.

In this thesis, Orlando Zaddach applies a discounting scheme derived by Krysiak (2010) in the latest DICE model and presents its implications for optimal climate policy. It turns out that the proposed discounting scheme fails in incorporating consumer sovereignty and intergenerational equity sufficiently.

Johannes Schotz presents the first measurements of optical electro-magnetic near-fields around nanostructures with subcycle-resolution. The ability to measure and understand light-matter interactions on the nanoscale is an important component for the development of light-wave-electronics, the control and steering of electron dynamics with the frequency of light, which promises a speed-up by several orders of magnitude compared to conventional electronics. The experiments presented here on metallic nanotips, widely used in experiments and applications, do not only demonstrate the feasibility of attosecond streaking as a unique tool for fundamental studies of ultrafast nanophotonics but also represent a first important step towards this goal.

Luisa Wolter examines the travel motivations and interests of natural park visitors to Mallorca with a special focus on sustainable tourism development.

Two-armed response-adaptive clinical trials are modelled as Markov decision problems to pursue two overriding objectives: Firstly, to identify the superior treatment at the end of the trial and, secondly, to keep the number of patients receiving the inferior treatment small. Such clinical trial designs are very important, especially for rare diseases. Thomas Ondra presents the main solution techniques for Markov decision problems and provides a detailed description how to obtain optimal allocation sequences.

Matthias Kaeding discusses Bayesian methods for analyzing discrete and continuous failure times where the effect of time and/or covariates is modeled via P-splines and additional basic function expansions, allowing the replacement of linear effects by more general functions. The MCMC methodology for these models is presented in a unified framework and applied on data sets. Among others, existing algorithms for the grouped Cox and the piecewise exponential model under interval censoring are combined with a data augmentation step for the applications. The author shows that the resulting Gibbs sampler works well for the grouped Cox and is merely adequate for the piecewise exponential model.

In his master thesis Thorsten Will proposes the substantial information content of protein complexes involving transcription factors in the context of gene regulatory networks, designs the first computational approaches to predict such complexes as well as their regulatory function and verifies the practicability using data of the well-studied yeast S.cereviseae. The novel insights offer extensive capabilities towards a better understanding of the combinatorial control driving transcriptional regulation.

Vadim Kufenko provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of various aspects of economic growth and income inequality in the Russian regions using different estimation techniques from the cross-section OLS and logistic models to dynamic panel data system GMM.

Christoph Samitsch investigates whether decision-making efficiency is being influenced by the quality of data and information. Results of the research provide evidence that defined data quality dimensions have an effect on decision-making performance as well as the time it takes to make a decision.

Verena Puchner evaluates and compares statistical matching and selected SAE methods. Due to the fact that poverty estimation at regional level based on EU-SILC samples is not of adequate accuracy, the quality of the estimations should be improved by additionally incorporating micro census data. The aim is to find the best method for the estimation of poverty in terms of small bias and small variance with the aid of a simulated artificial "e;close-to-reality"e; population. Variables of interest are imputed into the micro census data sets with the help of the EU-SILC samples through regression models including selected unit-level small area methods and statistical matching methods. Poverty indicators are then estimated. The author evaluates and compares the bias and variance for the direct estimator and the various methods. The variance is desired to be reduced by the larger sample size of the micro census.

Lukas Heim evaluates the performance of a price-level targeting rule compared to that of a standard inflation targeting rule.

Bettina Hauser develops a research model, which encompasses entrepreneurial leadership as a major success factor during post-merger integration.

In light of the 20th anniversary of the ruling in Francovich, Michael Haba analyzes the principle of Member State Liability, which provides a right to damages whenever EU law is breached by Member States.

Recent literature on international entrepreneurship hints toward an increasing number of firms engaging in business activities across national borders from or near their inception.

Verena Schwaighofer analyses the currently transferred image of the United Arab Emirates as a tourist destination and to what extent the traditional Arabian culture is integrated into the image strategies of image developers in this country.

This research study brings theoretical insights on real-life negotiations in sales of professional services in Spain and Germany.

Previous research focused either on the relationship between strategic planning and performance or coordination mechanisms and performance.

Due to the purchase of many companies in recent years and a still growing Automotive Aftermarket business sector, it was moreover indicated that a reorganization of the Process Map is unavoidable.

The Libor Market Model (LMM) is a mathematical model for pricing and risk management of interest rate derivatives and has been built on the framework of modelling forward rates.

Speculative currency crises seem to have become a common and inevitable phenomenon in the international monetary system. Anja Zenker provides a comprehensive insight into the body of theoretical and empirical literature about currency speculation in fixed exchange rate regimes.

The author focuses on a method to price Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) tranches. By comparing the tranches prices, it is possible to notice that the Clayton approach leads to smaller equity and mezzanine tranches. The senior and super senior tranches levels are higher when the dependence is modeled by a Clayton copula.

As rare earth elements represent the most critical materials, Anja Brumme provides a market analysis of rare earths, ascertaining that geological scarcity is not the main problem.