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Prediction markets are online trading platforms where contracts on future events are traded with payoffs being exclusively linked to event occurrence. Scientific research has shown that market prices of such contracts imply high forecasting accuracy through effective information aggregation of dispersed knowledge. This phenomenon is related to incentives for truthful aggregation in the form of real-money or play-money rewards. The question whether real- or play-money incentives enhance higher relative forecast accuracy has been addressed by previous works with diverse findings. The current state of empirical research in his field is subject to two inherent deficiencies. First, inter-market studies suffer from market disparities and differences in the definition of underlying events. Comparisons between two different platforms (one for play-money contracts, one for real-money contracts) are potentially biased by different trading behaviour. Second, the majority of studies are based upon identical datasets of market platforms (IOWA stock exchange, Tradesports/Intrade, NewsFutures).

Nowadays, single companies are confronted with great difficulties. The progress of the information technology and the distribution of the Internet as well as the changing demand of customers, especially for no-standardised products force them to react immediately.In order to solve these problems, the companies should work on the following aspects:How can they reach the state of flexibility to meet the changing demand? How can they compete within a market with increasing innovations of products and decreasing product life-cycl? How can they acquire the necessary capital, technology and know-how to compete? How is it possible to optimise their corporate structures and achieve synergetic effects?

The marketing of luxury brands is a highly complex and difficult task and differs strongly from the management of ordinary brands. At the heart of the difficulty lies a paradox: To increase sales and at the same time to preserve exclusivity. A luxury brand has to be anchored in the heads of as many people as possible and be desired but it must remain inaccessible to most of them. The more a luxury brand or good gets actually purchased, the more it loses ist aura of exclusivity, ist attractiveness and ist 'dream value'.The purpose of this book is to analyze the specificities of the management and marketing of luxury brands in comparison to ordinary brands. The analysis will mainly focus on the four elements of the marketing mix, namely product, place, price and promotion. A detailed analysis of the four elements will disclose the particularities of luxury brands and present the requirements of successful luxury brand management which is able to overcome the difficulties resulting from the mentioned paradox.

The study extends the literature on venture capital by examining whether entrepreneur's choice for an external investor and certain firm characteristics have an impact on venture success or not. The focus is set on the differences in value creation by venture capitalists and business angels for ventures of the high- and low-technology sector. The assessment of a data set including 252 Series A financing rounds by venture capitalist firms, business angels and collaborative investments of both investors conducted between 2005 and 2012 unveils value enhancing aspects for all three financing solutions. Overall, start-ups initially financed by venture capitalist firms perform best with regard to general venture success, whereas start-ups collaboratively supported by venture capitalists and business angels have the highest chances to exit successfully through a trade sale. It becomes further apparent that ventures located in one of the high-technology industries 'internet', 'pharmaceuticals' and 'high-tech', ventures that are longer established in the market and ventures whose Series A financing round was executed more recently indicate an enhanced likelihood of success.