Journal of Economics & Management Strategy最新文献

Revenue drift, whereby insufficient attention is given to economic, relative to social, goals, threatens social enterprise performance and survival. We argue that financial incentives can address this problem by redirecting employee attention to commercial tasks and attracting workers less inclined to fixate on social tasks. In an online experiment with varying incentive levels, monetary rewards succeed in directing worker effort to commercial tasks; high-powered incentives attract less prosocial employees, but low-powered incentives do not alter workforce composition. Social enterprises combining monetary rewards with a social mission not only attract more workers but are also able to guard against revenue drift.

In markets where differences in the environmental performance of competing firms arise due to differences in technology that cannot be altered in the short run and firms have private information about their own current technology, I show that market competition creates a strategic disincentive for adopting ecolabels (even if the cost of adoption is negligible) to directly and credibly communicate this private information to environmentally conscious consumers. Firms adopt ecolabels only if the green premium that buyers are willing to pay is large relative to the production cost advantage of dirty firms; ecolabels reduce market power, increase the market share of clean firms, and reduce expected environmental damage. I analyze firms' strategic (long-run) incentive to invest in the development of clean technology where the outcome of such investment is uncertain. The availability of an ecolabel to directly communicate private information about the final outcome of such an investment enhances the expected net surplus whereas it reduces the ex ante strategic incentive to invest which in turn lowers industry investment in cleaner technology, relative to the case with no ecolabels.

We investigate firm decisions to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) technology and how adoption is sourced: by purchasing commercial readymade software, by developing or customizing solutions in-house, or both. Using a cross-sectional data set of 3143 firms from across Europe, we examine the extent to which sourcing strategies exhibit complementarity or substitution. We find that adoption of AI using readymade software as a sourcing strategy is now increasingly commonplace, but differs across industrial sectors. Further, complementarities between sourcing strategies are common across sectors, though with some differences in strength and some exceptions. Our results show that sourcing strategies play an important role in shaping AI adoption decisions among firms.

I study how heterogeneity in competition can affect the demand for skilled labor in a way that generates a dispersion in productivity across otherwise similar firms. This is explored in the setting of professional basketball where heterogeneity in competition is easily measured. I develop and estimate a matching model with externalities, where the value of a match between a firm and worker depends on the entire allocation of matches. I find that competition has a significant effect on hiring decisions in the National Basketball Association, resulting in a clustering of talent among rivals. A counterfactual shows that competition in the league's playoff format explains 17.59% of the widely observed gap in talent between the league's two conferences.

This paper contributes to the literature that postulates a relationship between income inequality and the relative importance of “market” and “organization” in the direction of resources. The paper emphasizes that both are endogenous; therefore, the empirical associations observed in the empirical data between inequality measures and production organization variables cannot be interpreted as indicative of causal relationships. The paper solves for the composition and size of occupational groups, the distribution of firm size, and the distribution of income as market equilibrium outcomes of an occupational choice economy, and performs a comparative static analysis. We find that the interaction between cross-economy differences in the distribution of general skills in the labor force and the loss of control in the supervision of workers by managers can explain the empirical regularities observed in the relationship between the organization of production (distribution of firm size) and income inequality (distribution of labor income). This explanation of the empirical regularities differs from others proposed in the literature, such as those based on institutional constraints or the market power of firms.

We study an agency model with vertical hierarchy—the principal, the prime-agent and the subagent. The principal faces a project that needs both agents' services. Due to costly communication, the principal receives a report only from the prime-agent, who receives a report from the subagent. The principal can directly incentivize each agent by setting individual transfers (insourcing), or sets only one overall transfer to an independent organization in which the prime-agent hires the subagent (outsourcing). We show that insourcing is always optimal when the principal can perfectly process the prime-agent's report. When the principal's information process is limited, however, outsourcing can be the prevailing mode of operation. In addition, insourcing under limited information process is prone to collusion between the agents, whereas no possibility of collusion arises with outsourcing.

This study characterizes role assignments in maximizing a group's winning probability under the influence of the complementarity of group members' efforts in a group contest, in contrast to prize and multiple resource allocations. We use a constant elasticity of substitution effort aggregator function to parameterize the complementarity. While the prize and resource allocation rules depend on the complementarity, the assignment rule does not when multiple roles are assignable to a single group member: All roles are assigned only to the most productive group member. However, when only a single role per group member is assignable, the assignment rule depends on the complementarity: Roles from greater to less importance are assigned to group members in descending order of their productivity under strong complementarity; only the most important role is assigned to the most productive group member and the others have no effect under weak complementarity.

In this essay, we identify several themes of the digital business transformation, with a particular focus on the economy-wide impacts of artificial intelligence and digital platforms. In doing so, we highlight specific industries, beyond just the high-profile “Big Tech” firms, where the digital business revolution is having, or promises to have, significant impact. The papers in this special issue (flagged with bold font below) provide a deeper analysis of the themes and applications we touch on here.

This paper analyses the relationship between innovation and export performance. More specifically, we highlight the effect of the introduction of new products on the quality and prices charged by firms in international markets. We develop a model to explain the mechanism underlying the relationship between innovation and product quality. Using a unique database of new product launches combined with data on production and trade in the French dairy industry, we tested this mechanism in several ways. Our results show that the export prices charged by the firms increase after the introduction of a new product in a given market. We also show that the projected quality of the new product increases after its introduction in a given market. This confirms the quality-upgrading effect of innovation at the product level.

This article deals with the integration of industry-level markup targets into oligopoly theory. It proposes a behavioral competition model in which firms use the average cost-plus price to determine their supplies. Specifically, firms are assumed to increase (resp., decrease) their supplies as the market price rises over (resp., falls below) this reference price. The equilibrium market outcome lies between those corresponding to Bertrand and Cournot competition. It depends on the industry's margin target, which determines the slope of firms' supply functions. The more significant the markup target is, the lower are the firms' equilibrium supplies at any price level and the higher is the equilibrium market price. An industry-wide commitment to targeting a markup thus reduces competition in equilibrium. The reduction in competition is more pronounced than when firms commit to linear supply functions.