Journal of Economics & Management Strategy最新文献

Worker flexibility in effort allocation is a crucial factor for productivity and optimal job design. This paper runs a real-effort experiment that manipulates both the degree and type of autonomy individuals have in scheduling their effort, and it examines the causal effects of these manipulations on final performance. The main findings come from comparing subjects with different levels of cognitive ability. Using individual data on scheduling decisions, I find significant baseline differences in performance and effort-allocation strategies between high- and low-cognitive ability subjects. Moreover, the experiment shows that high-ability individuals reach higher performance when they have full scheduling flexibility while limiting any task-ordering possibility increases the performance of low-ability individuals. Overall, this paper provides new and robust evidence on the importance of cognitive ability in explaining effort-allocation decisions, and it identifies job design interventions to increase the performance of high- and low-ability workers.

Feedback withdrawal mechanisms in online markets aim to facilitate the resolution of conflicts during transactions. Yet, frequently used online feedback withdrawal rules are flawed and may backfire by inviting strategic transaction and feedback behavior. Our laboratory experiment shows how a small change in the design of feedback withdrawal rules, allowing unilateral rather than mutual withdrawal, can both reduce incentives for strategic gaming and improve coordination of expectations. This leads to less trading risk, more cooperation, and higher market efficiency.

We study how the growth of teams affects leadership effectiveness and intragroup cooperation. We put experimental participants in two teams. In each team, the members voluntarily contribute to a club good. In one of the two teams, the members observe the contribution of a randomly chosen leader before they decide themselves. Two treatments allow for migration between the teams. In one of them, participants control access to their team with a voting process. By design, participants can achieve the efficient outcome only if they all move into one team. We compare the results with a leaderless setting as well as with four treatments which vary team size exogenously. The results show that high contributions of leaders encourage higher per-capita contributions of their followers which foster migration into their teams. In turn, larger teams experience even more courageous leadership and higher contributions, but the coordination effect diminishes. Nevertheless, the dismissal of potential newcomers in the treatment with voting suggests that team members see a trade-off between team size and contributions. They sacrifice economic benefits from potential entrants to maintain intrateam cooperation.

This paper proposes a framework to analyze holdout in patent licensing negotiations. We show that when the validity of a patent is probabilistic, a potential downstream user has incentives to shun to pay the price offered by a patent holder to license the technology and risk being brought to court. These incentives are exacerbated when jurisdictions are local, and the downstream producer can approach courts sequentially. The informational spillovers across trials imply that this firm often finds optimal to go to court aiming to invalidate the patent in a jurisdiction due to the knock-on effect on future jurisdictions. This process results in excessive litigation compared to when the jurisdiction is global. The distortions from sequential litigation are likely to be aggravated when final competition is accounted for or when patent injunctions are not allowed.

This paper shows that, in a repeated competitive procurement, a buyer can use the reserve price in a low-price auction as a “public”—hence nondiscriminatory—incentive device to elicit unverifiable quality. We study a model with many firms and one buyer, who is imperfectly informed on the firms' costs. When firms are ex ante identical, the provision of quality is sustained by a sufficiently high reserve price to reward firms for the quality provision and by the threat of setting a low reserve price forever, if quality is not delivered. The buyer can elicit the desired level of unverifiable quality provided her baseline valuation of the project is not too high and the net benefit from unverifiable quality is not too low. These results are robust to firms' heterogeneity in their time preferences when the punishment for a deviation is finite but sufficiently long.

We study the effects of noncompete agreements in an environment where firms invest in training junior workers. After obtaining employer-provided training, trained workers can choose whether to remain loyal to their initial employer or switch to the competing employer. We evaluate the effects of noncompete agreements on wages, employment, investment in training, production, profits, and total welfare. Firms earn higher profits and pay lower average wage when they require workers to sign noncompete agreements.

This paper explores how social interactions among consumers shape markets. In a two-country model, consumers meet and exchange information about the quality of the goods. As information spreads, demand evolves, affecting the prices and quantities manufactured by profit-maximizing firms. We show that market prices with informational frictions reach the duopoly price with full information at the limit. However, this convergence can take different paths depending on the size asymmetry between countries. In particular, when the country producing the low-quality good is relatively large, the single market does not immediately turn into a duopoly and can be temporarily trapped in a situation of price instability where no Nash equilibrium in pure (but only in mixed) strategies exists and prices can fluctuate between their monopoly and duopoly levels. It follows that the classical price-reducing effects of international trade may take longer to appear. In view of an intense globalization process, understanding how social meetings affect market outcomes is critical for understanding the performance of international economic integration.

The French market for specialist physician care has a dual legal structure: physicians must exclusively work in sector 1 and charge regulated fees or in sector 2, where they can freely set their fees. Patient out-of-pocket payments in sector 2 are partially covered by private insurance. The primary differentiating factor between both sectors is the number of patients per specialist, which in turn directly affects the overall quality of the service provided. We built an equilibrium model to analyze both specialists' decisions about which sector to work in, and patients' choice of physician and therefore sector. More specifically, the model allowed us to study the effect of changes in prices and economy-wide patient-to-specialist ratios on profits and patients' utility associated with the services provided in each sector.