The implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, rather than the regulation itself, is holding back technological innovation. The EU’s data protection governance architecture is complex, leading to contradictory interpretations among Member States. This situation is prompting companies of all kinds to halt the deployment of transformative projects in the EU. The case of Meta is paradigmatic: both the UK and the EU broadly have the same regulation (GDPR), but the UK swiftly determined that Meta could train its generative AI model using first-party public data under the legal basis of legitimate interest, while in the EU, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) took months to issue an Opinion that national authorities must still interpret and implement individually, leading to legal uncertainty. Similarly, the case of Deepseek has demonstrated how some national data protection authorities, such as the Italian Garante, have moved to ban the AI model outright, while others have opted for investigations. This fragmented enforcement landscape exacerbates regulatory uncertainty and hampers EU’s competitiveness, particularly for startups, which lack the resources to navigate an unpredictable compliance framework. For the EU to remain competitive in the global AI race, strengthening the EDPB’s role is essential.

We look at gender differences among adolescents in Sweden in preferences for competition, altruism and risk. For competitiveness, we explore two different tasks that differ in associated stereotypes. We find no gender difference in competitiveness when comparing performance under competition to that without competition. We further find that boys and girls are equally likely to self-select into competition in a verbal task, but that boys are significantly more likely to choose to compete in a mathematical task. This gender gap diminishes and becomes non-significant when we control for actual performance, beliefs about relative performance, and risk preferences, or for beliefs only. Girls are also more altruistic and less risk taking than boys.

Experiments have demonstrated that men are more willing to compete than women. We develop a new instrument to “price” willingness to compete. We find that men value a $2.00 winner-take-all payment significantly more (about $0.28 more) than women; and that women require a premium (about 40 %) to compete. Our new instrument is more sensitive than the traditional binary-choice instrument, and thus, enables us to identify relationships that are not identifiable using the traditional binary-choice instrument. We find that subjects who are the most willing to compete have high ability, higher GPA’s (men), and take more STEM courses (women).

Recent studies find that women are less competitive than men. This gender difference in competitiveness has been suggested as one possible explanation for why men occupy the majority of top positions in many sectors. In this study we explore competitiveness in children, with the premise that both context and gendered stereotypes regarding the task at hand may influence competitive behavior. A related field experiment on Israeli children shows that only boys react to competition by running faster when competing in a race. We here test if there is a gender gap in running among 7-10 year old Swedish children. We also introduce two female sports, skipping rope and dancing, to see if competitiveness is task dependent. We find no gender difference in reaction to competition in any task; boys and girls compete equally. Studies in different environments with different types of tasks are thus important in order to make generalizable claims about gender differences in competitiveness.

India is a leading producer as well as one of the largest exporters of rice. Export competitiveness of rice thus plays a crucial role in India’s overall trade scenario, particularly in bridging the gaps in country’s soaring trade deficits. The study investigates the impact of key determinants on India’s rice export competitiveness for the period 1990–2020 using the autoregressive distributed lag model. The results reveal that increasing yield of rice and depreciated exchange rate have significant positive impact on India’s rice export competitiveness. In the long run, production cost and export price have a detrimental effect on export of rice from India. However, India’s trade openness and export price do have a mixed effect on export competitiveness of rice in the short run. Moreover, the findings of this study offer some important policy implications for the stakeholders like farmers, exporters, and the government to improve export competitiveness of Agri-products including rice.

Organizations are utilizing digital technologies to modernize their innovations in today’s competitive and rapidly changing market environment. This study’s goal is to explore the influence of open innovation on firms’ digital technology integration, aiming to enhance their innovation skills and produce competitive, adaptable digital solutions. The methods used include analysis, synthesis, and generalization. Organizations can enhance open innovation by acquiring knowledge, capabilities, ideas, technologies, and information for new products and services, with the relationship between open innovation and digital innovation accelerating their capabilities. The study emphasizes the challenges organizations face in modern IT, emphasizing open innovation, access to external knowledge, and the need for improved internal production efficiency and competitiveness. The practical value of this study is manifested in the identification of strategies for optimizing open innovation for their transformation into digital solutions.

This article investigates the relationship between intra-party leadership contestations on levels of satisfaction with democracy among party voters, trying to identify the impact of the former on the latter. The article draws on empirical data for a cross-sectional analysis from three different data sets that cover 11 countries, including a more case-specific analysis that utilizes panel data from Germany. Overall, the study aims to capture the dynamics of intra-party politics and the magnitude of its effect on perceptions of democracy among parties' voters. We find that intra-party politics at its probably most competitive version, that is elections for the head of the party, does not seem to exercise any significant influence on voters' satisfaction with democracy.

In this contribution, we exploit machine learning techniques to evaluate whether and how close firms are to become successful exporters. First, we train various algorithms using financial information on both exporters and non-exporters in France in 2010–2018. Thus, we show that it is possible to predict the distance non-exporters are from export status. In particular, we find that a Bayesian Additive Regression Tree with Missingness In Attributes (BART-MIA) performs better than other techniques with an accuracy of up to 0.90. Predictions are robust to changes in definitions of exporters and in the presence of discontinuous exporting activity. Eventually, we discuss how our exporting scores can be helpful for trade promotion, trade credit, and assessing aggregate trade potential. For example, back-of-the-envelope estimates show that a representative firm with just below-average exporting scores needs up to 44% more cash resources and up to 2.5 times more capital to get to foreign markets.

Theoretical equivalence exists among various auction mechanisms, specifically the Second-Price-Auction (SPA), a competitive environment, and the BDM mechanism, a non-competitive environment. Yet, empirical studies suggest that behavior in these mechanisms may diverge. Our experimental study examines the WTP and the WTA of individuals by analyzing buying and selling bidding patterns both for a physical product (mugs) and for two types of lotteries (regular lotteries and extreme lotteries) in these two auctions mechanism: SPA and BDM. We found that the WTP in the SPA is higher than the WTP in the BDM for mugs and for regular lotteries, while the mechanisms do not differ significantly for extreme lotteries. In addition, the WTA in the SPA is lower than in the BDM for regular lotteries only. These results indicate that the WTP and WTA, as well as the WTA-WTP gap, tend to differ in the SPA and in the BDM as a result of the interaction between the competitiveness effect and other psychological effects on bidding patterns for riskless and risky assets. In addition, the current study suggests that the competitiveness effect depends not only on the type of mechanism (SPA), but also on the type of item (physical assets or lotteries) and the type of lottery. In addition, the influence of the competitiveness effect may vary between buying and selling positions.

In this paper, we document a violation of normative and descriptive models of decision making under risk. In contrast to uncertainty effects found by Gneezy, List and Wu (2006), some subjects in our experiments valued lotteries more than the best possible outcome. We show that the overbidding effect is more strongly related to individuals’ competitiveness traits than comprehension of the lottery’s payoff mechanism.

This paper investigates the benefits of incorporating diversification effects into the pricing process of insurance policies from two different business lines. The paper shows that, for the same risk reduction, insurers pricing policies jointly can have a competitive advantage over those pricing them separately. However, the choice of competitiveness constrains the underwriting flexibility of joint pricers. The paper goes a step further by modelling explicitly the relationship between premiums and the number of customers in each line. Using the total collected premiums as a criterion to compare the competing strategies, the paper provides conditions for the optimal pricing decision based on policyholders’ sensitivity to price discounts. The results are illustrated for a portfolio of annuities and assurances. Further, using non-life data from the Brazilian insurance market, an empirical exploration shows that most pairs satisfy the condition for being priced jointly, even when pairwise correlations are high.