The aim of this project is the evaluation of alternative financing structures for kick-backs. Legal, operating as well as strategic aspects of a life insurance company are analysed to implement a tailor-made kick-back system in Liechtenstein.

Liechtenstein, the sixth smallest microstate on earth (after Vatican City, Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu and San Marino) is a very strong entrepreneurial marketplace. Family businesses dominate the vibrant economy of this micro state.
According to existing studies family businesses are less international oriented compared with their non-family benchmark companies. The aim of this project is to analyze the unused growth opportunities of family business in becoming more open to international activities and the implication for their financial risks.

The main objectives of this project are educating highly qualified information systems specialists, meeting the requirements of a modern, fast developing society, raising the quality of education through introducing modern information and communication technologies in education, developing a European Strategic Framework for Computing Education and Training 2020 and a European Evaluation Framework in Computing Education and Training 2020, sharing knowledge, discussing methodologies, and promoting exchange of experience and good practice between universities, institutes and companies.

This research comprises the conduction of field study including semi-structured expert interviews. The aim of this study is to close the gap between normative ethical discourses and the depiction of daily practices in the field of planning and construction. Moreover, this study seeks to build a framework for architectural firms to enhance their ability to work and act in a socially responsible manner in an international context.

This project takes place within the context of the Doctoral degree programme in Architecture and Planning.

The PhD-project "FAIR BUILDING" examines the question of how the concept of Fair Trade - fair production process - is extendable/ transferable on the construction industry. Can buildings be produced and used in a sustainable way with a focus on the social dimension? Starting from a social scientific discourse of social inequality within the global construction industry, the organization of the construction process is analyzed. The complex system of interaction focuses on the framework conditions for individual actors, who oscillate between dependence and interdependence. Furthermore, a process-oriented multi-level analysis of production, use and planning policies of buildings, combined with the question of the responsibility of individual actors in construction processes is carried out. The research project is divided into case studies of building and planning processes in several countries. Case studies are planned in a developed country, an emerging country and a developing country. Results from these will be combined with overarching processes and the following issues will be investigated: role, design, construction and use of buildings; role of politics; socio-economic aspects.

The role and capabilities of architects and architectural firms to act in a social responsible way in a globalized and multi-cultural context is investigated in this study. The underlying premise of this project is that architects and their firms do have a social responsibility both within and beyond their practice. It aims to close the gap between the normative ethical discourse and the descriptive daily practice and the enactment of ethics within and across the fields of building design and construction. The focus of this study is primarily on sustainable aspects within the process of producing architecture rather than on the evaluation of a building in its economic, ecological and social performance. Moreover, this study seeks to build a framework for architectural firms to enhance their ability to work and act in a socially responsible manner in an international context. Therefore, the research is theoretically founded on 1) Sustainability in the field of construction and the role of design service, and 2) the application of corporate governance and business ethics and, within it, Stakeholder Theory. Argumentative Discourse Analysis (ADA; Fischer, 1995; Hajer, 1995) provides an analytical framework for the investigation of the sustainability and responsibility discourse and the application of it in architectural firms. The objective is to contribute to underexplored areas in the international understanding of sustainable and responsible building processes.

Increasing digitalization and the associated variety of business models made possible by technology and the evaluation of data volumes pose great challenges to the current income and consumption tax systems. Traditional taxation concepts that focus on "conventional business models" are increasingly reaching their limits and appear unsuitable for taxing not only the income of the so-called "digital giants" companies such as the "FAANG" (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google). More generally, these concepts are also not appropriate for other companies operating and particulary rendering services online. In the recent past, individual states but also supranational organizations such as the OECD and EU have therefore addressed this problem and discussed different approaches to the future effective taxation of profits of digitalised companies with several individual jurisdictions implementing unilateral variations of the proposals discussed.
In the course of this research project, a systematic and detailed analysis of unilateral tax measures and proposals for International Tax Standards discussed at the level of the OECD, G7, G20, and EU on how to address the tax challenges arising from digitalisation was conducted and potential implications for the Principality of Liechtenstein were identified. The analysis made apparent that the so-called "taxes on digital services", create significant management and interpretation problems. Results are unrelieved double taxation, which makes them a serious threat to the legal stability of the International Tax System as they were found to violate the Double Taxation Conventions, WTO law, and even European Union law. Such taxes were thus found to harm a tax jurisdictions' capabilities of attracting innovation and investments.
The spread of unilateral measures was parallelled by several proposales entered at the level of the G20/OECD Inclusive Framework on BEPS as well as at the level of the EU. Especially the proposals discussed in the G20/OECD Inclusive Framework are significantly more far-reaching than simply taxing "digital giants" but rather concern the reallocation of taxing rights on corporate profits with a significant shift towards destination-based taxation. The research project's results indicate the importance of a tax jurisdiction's commitment to implementing the currently discussed International and European Tax Standards to avoid the threat of double taxation, double non-taxation, and of being regarded as a future tax haven for digitalised businesses.

Project results:

The amount of textual data in the world continues to grow rapidly. Unique insights attained through knowledge harvesting from large massifs of natural language text can enhance understanding, enable
the competitive advantage and foster innovation capabilities of a particular company and society as a whole. In contrast, inability to understand and efficiently manage this type of data turns out expensive in terms of data storage costs and unrealized opportunities.

The goal of this dissertation is the development of guidelines that will enable efficient management of textual data repositories and support the automated knowledge extraction. These guidelines will be
based on the documented practices of research and industrial projects combined with the learning out-comes from several use cases that will serve as a context and motivation for application and evaluation of existing approaches, methods and tools in the concrete settings with practical goals. Overall, the research aims at the verification of the proposition that a combination of modern text mining technologies is able to provide meaningful insights, justify and give a push to decision making processes in the field of economics, business and politics. Revealing the limitations and surfacing the benefits of these technologies will summarize and encourage further development of the field.

Dieses Projekt folgt dem Verständnis von Charisma als Signal basierend auf einem sehr aktuellen Ansatz, der vorschlägt, das Charisma von Führungskräften durch die Linse der gut etablierten Signaling-Theory zu betrachten und damit eine erstmals messbare Definition des Konstrukts etablierte. Diese Definition weist darauf hin, dass beobachtbare verbale und nonverbale Verhaltensweisen als Grundlage für die Fähigkeit einer Führungskraft dienen, charismatisch zu erscheinen und so ihre Mitarbeitenden effektiver zu beein-flussen und zu motivieren. Der volle Umfang des charismatischen Beeinflussungsprozesses muss jedoch noch erforscht werden. Um einen ganzheitlichen Einblick in die Signal-Wirkung von Charisma zu erhalten, schlagen wir drei Forschungsfragen vor, die unseren drei unterschiedlichen Perspektiven auf diesen Pro-zess entsprechen. Unsere Fragen beziehen sich auf die kognitiven, emotionalen und verhaltensbezogenen Reaktionen, die Follower zeigen, wenn sie mit Charisma assoziierte Signale beobachten. Im Detail wollen wir untersuchen, wie charismatische Verhaltensweisen von Führungskräften die Eindrucksbildung der Empfänger, ihre Erregung und damit ihre motivationale Bereitschaft sowie tatsächliche Leistungsverände-rungen beeinflussen, die aus kognitiven Aufarbeitungen und einer erfolgreichen Übertragung von Erre-gung durch die Führungskraft resultieren. Die formellen Forschungsfragen sind die folgenden:
1. How does leaders’ charisma shape followers’ cognitive responses?
2. How does leaders’ charisma shape followers’ emotional responses?
3. How does leaders’ charisma shape followers’ behavioral responses?
Im Zuge des Projekts sollen insgesamt drei Studien durchgeführt werden. Um unsere Forschungsfragen umfassend und robust zu beantworten und sowohl die interne als auch die externe Validität unserer Er-gebnisse zu gewährleisten, werden wir für unsere erste Studie einen naturalistischen Feldstudienansatz anwenden, um tiefergehende Einblicke in die verbalen und nonverbalen charismatischen Signale von Poli-tikerInnen und Führungskräften zu erhalten. Diese Einblicke werden genutzt, um in der zweiten Studie Videos zu erstellen, die experimentell für ihren grad an Charisma varriiert und mit kognitiven sowie beha-vioralen Reaktionen von BetrachterInnen in verbindung gebracht werden, um einen möglichen too-much Effekt charismatischer Signale, sowie das Ausmass an Geschlechtseffekten auf charismatische Kommuni-kation zu explorieren. In der finalen Studie werden ebenfalls Videoaufnahmen erstellt, allerdings kontrol-liert hinsichtlich ihrer verbalen und nonverbalen Verhaltensweisen (niedrige/hohe Ausprägung an nonver-balen x niedrige/hohe Ausprägung an verbalen Signalen). Hier wird neben den kognitiven, erfasst über Fremdbewertungsfragebögen, und den behavioralen, erfasst über die Leistung in etablierten ökonomi-schen Kooperationsparadigmen, auch erstmals in der Forschung zu charismatischem Leadership auch physiologische Reaktionen erhoben. Hierbei kommen die innovativen Technologien Eye-Tracking und Pu-pillometriemessungen zum Einsatz. Dieses letzte Experiment soll erstmals den vollen Signal-Prozess von Charisma, beginnend bei einer kognitiven Einschätzung, über emotionale Veränderungen, bis hin zu beha-vioralen Leistungsveränderungen abbilden, um das Verständnis von Charisma als Signal robuste Evidenz zu geben.

Deep learning (DL) models offer an interesting alternative to classical statistical mod-els, as they often outperform classical statistical models by using a series of hierar-chical layers, or a hierarchy of concepts, to perform the process of machine learning. However, the disadvantage of DL models is, that the interpretability of the parameters and the explainability of the results is only possible to a limited extent. As DL models are being employed to make important predictions in critical contexts (such as healthcare, transport, insurance, finance), the demand for transparency is increasing. Hence, explanations supporting the output of a model are crucial.
This project will explore how Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods can be used to interpret and explain the solutions of DL models and allows for variable selection.
Since those methods can be used to disentangle complex interactive effects, it is used to study health trajectories of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), which are the result of a combination of genetic, physiological, environmental and behavioral factors and tend to be of long duration.