Journal of Economics & Management Strategy最新文献

In a two-period model with repeat purchase, we compare the profit and social welfare effects of behavior-based pricing (BBP) and uniform pricing in a monopoly under quality uncertainty. We offer the novel insight that BBP increases the price elasticity of imitation demand and lowers the signaling cost relative to uniform pricing, and becomes a potentially profitable strategy even when the monopolist cannot commit to future prices. Moreover, the profitability of BBP does not arise at the expense of consumer surplus. Either upward or downward price distortion with the use of BBP signals high quality, depending on the seller's commitment power. With more accurate tracking technology, the monopolist may forsake signaling for better consumer information.

We study the early adoption and diffusion of five artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies (automated-guided vehicles, machine learning, machine vision, natural language processing, and voice recognition) as documented in the 2018 Annual Business Survey of 850,000 firms across the United States. We find that fewer than 6% of firms used any of the AI-related technologies we measure, though most very large firms reported at least some AI use. Weighted by employment, average adoption was just over 18%. AI use in production, while varying considerably by industry, was found in every sector of the economy and clustered with emerging technologies, such as cloud computing and robotics. Among dynamic young firms, AI use was highest alongside more-educated, more-experienced, and younger owners, including owners motivated by bringing new ideas to market or helping the community. AI adoption was also more common in startups displaying indicators of high-growth entrepreneurship, including venture capital funding, recent product and process innovation, and growth-oriented business strategies. Early AI adoption was far from evenly distributed: a handful of “superstar” cities and emerging hubs led startups' adoption of AI. These patterns of early AI use foreshadow economic and social impacts far beyond this limited initial diffusion, with the possibility of a growing “AI divide” if early patterns persist.

With forward ownership, an upstream supplier internalizes the effect of its supply contracts on the downstream firms, which is so far understood to decrease prices. We show that, instead, downstream prices generally increase if firms use two-part tariffs. The price-increasing effect of forward ownership occurs with both observable and secret two-part tariffs, albeit for different economic reasons. The results arise under both quantity and price competition as well as for different belief refinements. Partial forward ownership can be more profitable and more harmful for consumers than a full vertical merger between an upstream and a downstream firm.

A debate among practicing managers is whether to use cooperative or competitive incentives for team production. While competitive incentives may drive individual effort higher, they may also lead to less help and more sabotage, with unclear consequences overall, especially when team members' abilities differ. Using a lab experiment, we examine how increasing competitive incentives affects performance as team composition changes. We find that competitive incentives generally under-perform noncompetitive incentives and a larger bonus does not generate enough effort to compensate for a loss in help. Our results help understand better how to balance out individual versus team rewards and how firms could structure teams when employees have heterogeneous abilities.

In vertical relations where a retailer enters into agency contracts with multiple heterogenous suppliers of unrelated products, I show the retailer can turn the products into complements or substitutes by charging or subsidizing consumers for access. The optimal access price depends critically on the revenue share that the retailer takes from each supplier, and the retailer's cross-price elasticity with respect to each supplier's price. When firms price simultaneously, the retailer optimally subsidizes consumer access if and only if the aggregate of these two factors across all suppliers exceeds 1. When the retailer prices before suppliers, it benefits from an additional demand amplification effect: The retailer can use the access price to manipulate suppliers' best responses such that they always lead to demand surges across the whole network of suppliers, which then benefits the retailer through revenue sharing. Under different circumstances, the retailer may achieve this through either further raising a positive access price, or further reducing a negative access price.

Recent advances in healthcare information technologies allow healthcare providers to more accurately track patient characteristics and predict the future treatment costs of previously treated patients, which increases the scope for providers to quality discriminate across different patient types. We theoretically analyze the potential implications of such quality discrimination in a duopoly setting with profit-maximizing hospitals, fixed prices, and heterogeneous patients. Our analysis shows that the ability to quality discriminate tends to intensify competition and lead to higher quality provision, which benefits patients but makes the hospitals less profitable. Nevertheless, the effect on social welfare is a priori ambiguous, since quality discrimination also leads to an inefficient allocation of patients across hospitals.

Online platforms have emerged as a dominant business model in numerous industries in the new millennium. In light of the substantial and burgeoning body of empirical platform research, this article synthesizes extant studies and identifies the evolution of underlying research methodologies and topics. Building upon a database of 860 empirical online platform papers in premier journals during the first two decades of the new millennium, this article presents a categorization framework based on the online platform type (including search platforms, e-commerce platforms, online communities, and mobile platforms) and research perspective (including platform participants, platform orchestrators, and platform ecosystems). We provide a critical review of noteworthy trends and highlight directions for future research in each category of the proposed framework. A comprehensive bibliometric analysis is then conducted to visualize and track scholarship in empirical online platform research. Lastly, we adopt an interdisciplinary lens to synthesize our critical review of empirical online platform research into lessons and research opportunities that emerge from multiple disciplines.

Teams are increasingly popular decision-making and work units in firms. This paper uses a novel real-effort experiment to show that (a) some teams in the workplace reduce their members' private benefits to achieve a group optimum in a social dilemma and (b) such endogenous choices by themselves enhance their work productivity (per-work-time production)—a phenomenon called the “dividend of democracy.” In the experiment, worker subjects are randomly assigned to a team of three, and they then jointly solve a collaborative real-effort task under a revenue-sharing rule in their group with two other teams, while each individual worker can privately and independently shirk by playing a Tetris game. Strikingly, teams exhibit significantly higher productivity (per-work-time production) when they can decide whether to reduce the return from shirking by voting than when the policy implementation is randomly decided from above, irrespective of the policy implementation outcome. This means that democratic culture directly affects behavior. On the other hand, the workers under democracy also increase their shirking, presumably due to enhanced fatigue owing to the stronger productivity. Despite this, democracy does not decrease overall production thanks to the enhanced work productivity.

An incumbent employee competes against a new hire for bonuses or promotions. The incumbent's perception of the new hire's ability distribution is biased. This bias can result in overconfidence or underconfidence. We show that debiasing may be counterproductive in incentivizing efforts. We then explore whether a firm that values employees’ efforts should disclose an informative signal about the new hire's type and we characterize the conditions under which transparency or opacity is optimal for the firm. We further consider four extensions to the model. Our results contribute to the extensive discussion of confidence management and organizational transparency in firms.

Expectations are a key element of strategic environments. As it has already been shown that men's performance in current competitions is affected by the expected future opponents' strength, we investigate whether women are overshadowed by future competitors as well. We use data from professional tennis, replicate the results for men and compare it with women's behavior. Extending previous research, we focus on the role of uncertainty in this context, particularly, whether behavior differs when individuals have to form expectations instead of having accurate information. Our results suggest that individuals perform worse in competitions if the expected future opponent is stronger. We find gender-specific behavior when analyzing uncertainty as a potential source: Women's current performance does not depend on the future competitor's strength when they know her for sure, whereas they are overshadowed when having to form expectations. In contrast, men are negatively affected by the future competitor's strength when they know him and when they need to form expectations. Moreover, women (men) rather  seem to be sensitive to direct (more distant) incentives. These findings might be transferred to information revelation in promotion contests to help highly qualified individuals, especially women, climb the career ladder.