1 Journal of Business Economics in Scopus®

We are happy to inform that starting this year, the Journal of Business Economics will be indexed by the abstracting and citation database Scopus®. In reaching this decision, the Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) of Scopus® has commented that “the journal publishes original and rigorous research in areas of business and economics…, promotes scientific research and makes good contributions to the field of economics and business. Hope the inclusion into Scopus can further help the journal improve its international recognition.”

We, the editors, the editorial board and the publisher, convey our heartfelt thanks to all the authors, reviewers and readers, for supporting the journal with excellent articles, reviews and feedback.

2 Best Paper Award 2016

In continuing the tradition of appreciating the excellent research being published in the journal, the editors have selected the best paper of 2016. We are happy to announce that the Journal of Business Economics Best Paper Award 2016 is given to Salvatore Corrente, Salvatore Greco, Benedetto Matarazzo and Roman Słowiński for their contribution “Robust ordinal regression for decision under risk and uncertainty” published in the Volume 86, Issues 1–2, January 2016, pp. 55–83.Footnote 1 By this the editors like to recognize a qualitatively outstanding publication which enhances the decision oriented theory of business administration, contributes to its microeconomic foundation, and opens new avenues in management. The editors and the publisher cordially congratulate the authors on receiving this award.

The abstract of their paper reads: “We apply the Robust Ordinal Regression (ROR) approach to decision under risk and uncertainty. ROR is a methodology proposed within multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA) with the aim of taking into account the whole set of instances of a given preference model, for example instances of a value function, which are compatible with preference information supplied by the Decision Maker (DM) in terms of some holistic preference comparisons of alternatives. ROR results in two preference relations, necessary and possible; the necessary weak preference relation holds if an alternative is at least as good as another one for all instances compatible with the DM’s preference information, while the possible weak preference relation holds if an alternative is at least as good as another one for at least one compatible instance. To apply ROR to decision under risk and uncertainty we have to reformulate such a problem in terms of MCDA. This is obtained by considering as criteria a set of quantiles of the outcome distribution, which are meaningful for the DM. We illustrate our approach in a didactic example based on the celebrated newsvendor problem”.

Salvatore Corrente was born on November 28, 1982 in Bronte, Italy. He has received a Bachelor degree in Applied Mathematics in 2005, a Master degree in Mathematics in 2008 and a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 2012 all from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Catania. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics and Business of the University of Catania and lecturer of General Mathematics in the same department. His research interests concern Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding and, in particular, Robust Ordinal Regression and Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization. He is a permanent collaborator for the MCDA newsletter.

Salvatore Greco was born on August 16, 1965 in Catania, Italy. He obtained the degree (with honors) in Economics from Catania University, where he has been full professor at Department of Economics and Business since 2001. He was visiting professor at Technical University of Poznań, Université Paris Dauphine, Ecole Central Paris and, since 2013, he is also affiliated to the Business School of Portsmouth University. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Italian Association for Mathematics Applied to Social and Economic Sciences, of which currently he is the vice-president. He was a member of the executive committee of the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making for the years 2006–2009 and 2011–2013. He is one of the three coordinators of the EURO Working Group in Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding. His research is mainly focused on Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding and Rough Set Theory. He has coedited a state of the art surveys collection in Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis that has become a reference text in the domain. In 2013 he received the Gold Medal of International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making.

Benedetto Matarazzo was born on March 10, 1946 in Catania, Italy. He obtained the degree (with honors) in Economics from Catania University, where he has been full professor at Department of Economics and Business since 1986, and was Dean and Chairman of the degree course in Corporate Finance. He was also Director of International Master in Financial Management, Scuola Superiore of Catania University. He was visiting professor at Bocconi University, Milan, and guest professor in a number of European Universities. He has been member of the scientific committee of Italian Operational Research and Applied Mathematics Societies, and he is a IEEE Fellow. He has been chairman of the Programme Committee of EURO XVI (Brussels, 1998), and organized the first (Catania, 1983) and the VII (Catania, 2000) editions of the International Summer School on MCDA. His main research is in the fields of MCDA and Rough Sets. In 2009 he was awarded the Gold Medal of International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, and in 2015 he received the prestigious annual Medal of Merits of the University of Technology of Poznań (Poland).

Roman Słowiński was born on March 16, 1952 in Poznań, Poland. In 1974, he obtained an MSc degree (with honors) in Control Engineering from Poznań University of Technology, and in 1977, a PhD in Operational Research from the same university. In 1981, he obtained a habilitation in Computer Science, and in 1989, he received the Professor’s title from the President of the Republic of Poland. Since 1991, he is the founding chair of the Laboratory of Intelligent Decision Support Systems at Poznań University of Technology. He is also a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and elected president of the Poznań Branch of the Academy (2011–2018), Member of Academia Europaea, and IEEE Fellow. In his research, he combines Operational Research and Computational Intelligence. He was the recipient of the EURO Gold Medal (1991), and Doctor HC of Polytechnic Faculty of Mons (2000), University Paris Dauphine (2001), and Technical University of Crete (2008). In 2005 he received the Annual Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science—the highest scientific honor awarded in Poland. Since 1999, he is the principal editor of the European Journal of Operational Research.

3 Best Reviewer Award 2016

The editors and the publisher would like to take this opportunity to thank all the reviewers for their support in providing their services to ensure high-quality publications in the Journal of Business Economics. We are pleased to announce that the editors have chosen Katrin Scharfenkamp from the Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen (Germany) as the recipient of the Best Reviewer Award 2016. The editors and the publisher cordially congratulate her on this honor.

Katrin Scharfenkamp was born in 1983 in Oberhausen. From 2002 to 2008, she studied Business Administration and Economics at the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany). From 2008 to 2013, Katrin Scharfenkamp worked as a research associate and doctoral student of Alexander Dilger at the Institute for Organizational Economics at the University of Münster (Germany). In April 2013, she received a summa cum laude for her doctoral thesis “Effects of Human Capital in Politics and Sports”. Since May 2013, Katrin Scharfenkamp has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the chair of Human Resource Management and Organization (chaired by Kerstin Pull) at the University of Tübingen (Germany). Her research focuses on the effects of gender diversity on peer evaluations, teamwork, or performance in firms as well as sports, or TV shows, among others. Katrin’s research interests span across the fields of Corporate Governance, Higher Education, Behavioral Economics, and Sports Economics.

Günter Fandel

Editor-in-Chief