Handicaps in Job Assignment: Insiders,Outsiders and Gender

In this study, I use personnel data from a large German company in order to analyze handicaps in job assignment. First, I compare the productivity-relevant characteristics (university degree and work experience) and wages between insiders and outsiders as well as between men and women, who have been assigned to jobs at the same hierarchical level. Second, I estimate promotion probabilities and duration models for the time until the next promotion. The overall findings indicate a significant handicap in job assignment for outsiders with respect to schooling and little evidence that women are handicapped. While gender differences in wages within job levels and promotion probabilities are small, women have, on average, significantly less work experience than men at the same job level.     

Who speaks up to whom? A relational approach to employee voice

We adopt a relational approach to examine the effects of social relations and formal structure on who speaks up to whom about problems at work. Data were collected in a two-wave employee survey in three Dutch preschools. Using exponential random graph modeling, we found significant positive effects of formal structure (recipient's hierarchical level; team co-membership) and good relations between speaker and recipient on the likelihood of voice in a dyad. Speaker's hierarchical level had positive effects, significant in Wave 1. Speaker's degree centrality significantly reduced the likelihood of voice, whereas recipient's degree centrality had no effect.     

A Note on “Sourcing Decisions with Stochastic Supplier Reliability and Stochastic Demand”

This note complements the study of Burke, Carillo, and Vakharia ( 2009 hereafter “BCV”) which analyzes a class of single‐product multisourcing problems under stochastic demand and random yields. The purpose is twofold. First, we prove that the objective function used by these authors is only a lower bound for the expected profit for which we provide the correct expression. Second, we show on some of the numerical instances provided in BCV's study that the structure and the performance of the BCV ordering policy may be substantially different from the optimal ordering policy. We conclude by giving general qualitative insights characterizing suboptimality of the BCV solution.     

Entrepreneurial Marketing in Online-Netzwerken

A growing number of professionals use online social networks (e.g., Xing or LinkedIn) for business reasons by specifically promoting themselves. Especially executives and entrepreneurs use business social networks as a marketing tool in order to manage their business contacts and, thus, positioning themselves as a brand. Using on Keller’s (1993) customer-based brand equity model, we focus on the special behavior of entrepreneurs in such social networks. Based on the a large data set from a leading social network, we empirically analyze whether entrepreneurs act differently than other users and whether this strategy pays off. Based on a SUR model, we determine what the drivers for entrepreneurs’ profile views and contacts are. The results show that entrepreneurs focus on communicating their intentions and competencies and engage actively in the community. Especially participating in user groups and attending community events are key drivers for success.     

Creeping-In als neues Instrument des Erwerbs von Unternehmenskontrollrechten ?C Taktische Meisterleistung oder unkalkulierbares Risiko?

A modern method for (partial) acquisitions is the so called creeping-in tactic. In this procedure the acquirer uses cash settled equity swaps to undermine WpHG notification requirements systematically until she holds at least 30% of the voting rights in the target company. In this case the acquirer has the obligation to submit a mandatory takeover bid for the remaining outstanding shares. In many cases acquirers are not interested in a complete acquisition of the target company but rather want to make use of low shareholder presence levels during the general assembly and therefore have the opportunity to significantly influence fundamental decisions like, e.g. allocation of the net income, corporate actions etc. The mandatory takeover bid has to be equal at least to the three months average share price. At first glance, this involves a high risk of an unintentional acceptance by the targets?? shareholders. The goal of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of the mandatory takeover bid. We show that with a temporal shift of the mandatory takeover bid to a point in time when the share price is above the three months average share price an unintentional acceptance is virtually impossible. In a logit-regression company specific context factors for the acceptance risk are indentified and rejected.     

The U.S. Forest Service and Its Responsibilities under the National Environmental Policy Act: A Work Design Problem

The U.S. Forest Service’s responsibilities under the National Environmental Policy Act entail a wide range of activities including scoping, scientific analysis, social and economic analysis, managing public input and involvement, media relations, regulatory analysis, and litigation. These myriad duties raise several important organizational and management questions. First, is the U.S. Forest Service capable of discharging these widely varying tasks with high levels of effectiveness and efficiency? To what extent should these activities be outsourced to private contractors or other providers? For those responsibilities retained in-house, what organizational structure best supports their effective and efficient execution? To address these questions, this article draws on concepts from new institutional economics and insights from the privatization and strategic organizational design literatures.     

Disentangling Constituency and Legislator Effects in Legislative Representation: Black Legislators or Black Districts?*

Objective. Does the race of a legislator or does the black population of a district best predict legislative roll‐call voting in the interests of African Americans? Due to methodological limitations, no prior study has found that both the race of the legislator and the black district population are significant predictors of congressional roll‐call voting. Drawing on post Shaw v. Reno/Miller v. Johnson congressional districts (with greater data variance), I examine the effect of these two racial representation variables on roll‐call voting in the 104th–106th Congresses. Methods. Linear regression with random effects is employed in two statistical models. Results. Even when the black district population and party are considered, the presence of an African‐American legislator leads to greater substantive representation of black constituents. Conclusion. Districting plans that maximize the election of black legislators and Democrats are the most important for the aggregate enhancement of liberal voting in Congress, while districting plans that maximize black district populations and Democrats are the most important for the aggregate enhancement of civil rights voting records in Congress.     

Intradimensional Single-Peakedness and the Multidimensional Arrow Problem

Arrow's account (1951/1963) of the problem of social choice is based upon the assumption that the preferences of each individual in the relevant group are expressible by a single ordering. This paper lifts that assumption and develops a multidimensional generalization of Arrow's framework. I show that, like Arrow's original framework, the multidimensional generalization is affected by an impossibility theorem, highlighting not only the threat of dictatorship of a single individual, but also the threat of dominance of a single dimension. In particular, even if preferences are single-peaked across individuals within each dimension – a situation called intradimensional single-peakedness – any aggregation procedure satisfying Arrow-type conditions will make one dimension dominant. I introduce lexicographic hierarchies of dimensions as a class of possible aggregation procedures under intradimensional single-peakedness. The interpretation of the results is discussed.     

Strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests with heterogeneous players

When heterogeneous players make strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests, they might conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in a subsequent contest, if the degree of heterogeneity in the current (subsequent) contest is sufficiently large (small). We confirm these predictions using data from German professional soccer, in which players are subject to a one-match ban if they accumulate five yellow cards. Players with four yellow cards facing the risk of being suspended for the next match are (i) less likely to be fielded when the heterogeneity in the current match increases and (ii) more likely to receive a fifth yellow card in the current match when heterogeneity in the next match increases or heterogeneity in the next match but one (when they return from their ban) decreases.

     

HOW DO INFORMAL AGREEMENTS AND REVISION SHAPE CONTRACTUAL REFERENCE POINTS?

The notion of contracts as reference points provides the basis for a deeper understanding of important phenomena such as the employment contract, vertical integration, firm scope, authority, and delegation. Previous experiments lend support to this notion but they ignore realistic aspects of trading relationships such as informal agreements and ex‐post renegotiation or revision. Here we show that the central behavioral mechanism underlying contractual reference points is robust to such considerations. Our data reveal that informal agreements can mitigate the trade‐off between rigidity and flexibility but they do not fully resolve the problem of misaligned reference points. Our experiments also show that contract revision is a more nuanced process than the previous literature has recognized. We find, for example, that it is sometimes better for parties to write a simple (rigid) contract and then revise it ex post if needed, rather than to anticipate and include future contingencies in a (flexible) contract from the outset.