Journal of Economics & Management Strategy最新文献

For managers who are responsible for designing the division of labor, there are prototypes such as the divisional and functional designs, but insufficient knowledge of what to consider when selecting them. To address this shortfall, we developed a multiple economic game model with a two-step structure to examine the strategic interdependence between the two prototypes. We analyzed the model from three different perspectives: a traditional analysis, an equilibrium analysis, and a behavioral analysis followed by a laboratory experiment. While the first analysis revealed that the functional design would outperform divisional design when individual decisions are exogenous, the game theoretic equilibrium analysis demonstrated that the two prototype designs have similar equilibria when individuals are rational. However, assuming that individuals made autonomous decisions with accessible information under given organizational structures, behavioral analysis derived predictions that the divisional design was more likely to produce favorable consequences than the functional design. This prediction was confirmed by the economic experiment in the laboratory. These results imply that the strategic uncertainty within organizations differs according to the designs and affects organizational consequences.

We study optimal promotion decisions of hierarchical firms, with one junior and one senior managerial position, which interact in a search and matching labour market. Workers acquire experience over time while being employed in a junior position and the firm has to determine the experience level at which the worker receives a promotion which allows her to fill a senior position. Promoted workers move to the senior position in their current firm, if it is vacant, otherwise they search for senior positions on the market. The promotion cut-offs of the competing firms exhibit strategic complementarity, but we show that generically a unique stable symmetric general equilibrium exists. We find that stronger competition among firms leads to later (earlier) promotions if the initial number of firms is small (large) giving rise to an inverse U-shape relationship. In the presence of two skill groups, stronger competition among firms reduces the importance of skill differences, so the gap in wages and promotion times decreases with the number of firms. The model is compatible with empirical evidence that high-skill workers are promoted faster than the low-skilled and that internal promotions are more frequent than cross-firm moves to a higher hierarchical position.

This paper examines hedging against a large market-wide shock in a model with heterogeneous firms and sunk costs of entry. If hedging is voluntary only the most efficient firms hedge against this shock, a finding in line with empirical evidence but at odds with standard motivations for risk management. Hedging affects the critical level of the marginal cost needed to operate in the market. A setting with mandatory hedging is associated with stronger competition than when hedging is voluntary which, in turn, is associated with stronger competition than when hedging is unavailable.

Standard-essential patents (SEPs) have become a key element of technical coordination via standard-setting organizations. Yet, in many cases, it remains unclear whether a declared SEP is truly standard-essential. To date, there is no automated procedure that allows for a scalable and objective assessment of SEP status. This paper introduces a semantics-based method for approximating the standard essentiality of patents. We provide details on the procedure that generates the measure of standard essentiality and present the results of several validation and robustness exercises. We illustrate the measure's usefulness in estimating the share of true SEPs in firm patent portfolios for several telecommunication standards.

Research on the location choice of foreign direct investment (FDI) focuses on the choice between countries. The within-country location choice is either not analyzed at all or restricted to greenfield investments only. The majority of FDI, however, takes the form of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We develop and test a pair of hypotheses regarding location-target selection for both cross-border and national M&As across the United States, expecting differences in line with the liability of foreignness argument. Using a detailed firm-level data set for M&As in the period 1985–2012, we compare location choices of cross-border versus national M&As. We find that cross-border M&As are more spatially concentrated, and tend to sort into larger agglomerations than national M&As. This finding holds both for urban agglomerations in isolation, as well as for agglomerations that take the economic geography of the United States into account.

We explore the supply chain problem of a downstream durable goods monopolist, who chooses one of the following trading modes: an exclusive supply chain with an incumbent supplier or an open supply chain, allowing the monopolist to trade with a new efficient entrant in the future. The expected retail price reduction in the future dampens the profitability of the original firms. An efficient entrant's entry magnifies such a price reduction, causing a further reduction of original firms' joint profits. In equilibrium, the downstream monopolist chooses the exclusive supply chain to escape further price reductions, although it expects efficient entry.

This study explores how bonding contracts improve employee attraction and retention. These bonds are payment schemes tied to employment duration, such as the vesting of pensions and stock options. This study presents an employee turnover model in which only the worker knows their taste for their current job. This taste gives the current employer monopsonistic power, resulting in deadweight loss from excessive turnover. Bonding contracts serve as a commitment device for future wages and eliminate such deadweight loss, but only when the roles of bondholders and wage setters are separate. Firms that do this are more competitive to new hires. This model offers several empirical findings regarding a variety of common bonding practices.

Hybrid marketplaces, such as Amazon's and Zalando's stores or Apple's and Google's app stores, which distribute their own products and services in competition with those of third-party sellers, play a significant and growing role in the Internet economy. This paper shows that, other things equal, such platforms would maximize their profits if they lowered the fees charged to sellers and the prices charged to consumers in response to cooperation agreements between third-party sellers: horizontal mergers or collusive agreements. It also shows that such cooperation can be pro-competitive when the platform is a vertically integrated gatekeeper, adopts the agency business model, is a close competitor to the third-party sellers it hosts, and observes (or correctly anticipates) the third-party sellers' agreement. The discussion here is of significant policy relevance, since third-party sellers in online marketplaces may find it easier to collude and may respond to the bargaining power of certain gatekeeper platforms by merging their activities.

This article offers a model integrating heterogeneously moral preferences to overcome the seemingly irrational tendency of individuals to freely share data and knowledge. We build on recent literature showing that moral preferences are favored by evolution theoretically, and have a strong explanatory power empirically, to model individual sharing behavior. Our analysis highlights the limit of financial incentives and the importance of promoting a sharing culture by enhancing awareness. Shedding light on how people respond not only to financial but also moral motives, we contribute to the ongoing policy debate on the design of effective open science policies.

This paper studies the effects of asymmetric punishment of bribery on both bribery and compliance with regulations. The bribe amount is decided via Nash bargaining and regulatory compliance and whistle-blowing are strategic decisions. Moreover, investigations of bribery and noncompliance occur in a manner that may be interdependent. We show that, under symmetric punishment, inducing whistle-blowing has no effect on the frequency of bribery. When the bribery and noncompliance investigations are independent, a switch from symmetric to asymmetric punishment either makes no difference or induces more nonharassment bribery. Only when bribery detection increases the chance of noncompliance detection and asymmetric punishment leads to whistle-blowing for both types of entrepreneurs, can the shift succeed in reducing noncompliance. The result is robust to the case where legalization of bribe-giving is not feasible for nonharassment bribes.