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Global university rankings influence students' choices and higher education policies throughout the world. When rankers not only evaluate universities but also provide them with consulting, analytics, or advertising services, rankers are vulnerable to conflicts of interest that may potentially distort their rankings. The paper assesses the impact of contracting with rankers on university ranking outcomes using a difference-in-difference research design. The study matches data on the positions of 28 Russian universities in QS World University Rankings between 2016 and 2021 with information on contracts these universities had for services from QS—the company that produces these rankings. The study compares the fluctuations in QS rankings with data obtained from the Times Higher Education rankings and data recorded by national statistics. The results suggest that the universities with frequent QS-related contracts had an increase of 0.75 standard deviations (~ 140 positions) in QS World University Rankings and an increase of 0.9 standard deviations in reported QS faculty-student ratio scores over 5 years, regardless of changes in the institutional characteristics. The observed distortions could be explained by university rankers' self-serving bias that benefits both rankers and prestige-seeking universities and reinforces the persistence of rankings in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors introduce mutual insurance as a constructive component of the modern entrepreneurial landscape aimed at the protection of the wealth-related interests of the participants of the mutual insurance company (mutual insurance society, friendly society, etc.). Analyzing mutual insurance, the authors display it from the standpoint of entrepreneurship and assume that such companies (MICs) are among the insurance market actors. The specific feature of MICs is that they form the community of their members-policyholders. As far as members of each organization of this kind are its co-owners, they carry out some critical entrepreneurial activity functions. The object of this research is represented by the insurance market of the Russian Federation, through the prism of which the degree of development of MICs was demonstrated, and the barriers to its infrastructure growth were determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]