First Look

Publications

The Profits of Power: Commerce and Realpolitik in Eurasia

Abstract

Although the energy trade is the single most important element of nearly all European countries' relations with Russia, Europe has been divided by both worldview and practice. Why, in the face of the common challenge of dependence on imported Russian gas, have national reactions to such vulnerability varied so dramatically across the continent? And why have a handful of French, German, and Italian corporations somehow taken responsibility for formulating the energy strategy-and thus the Russia policy-for essentially all of Europe? The resolutions of these two puzzles are, I show, interlinked; they also demand theoretical innovation. With several case studies-of Gazprom's decision making during the 2006 and 2009 gas crises and of the response of western and central Europe to their gas dependence-I find that firms are driving these political outcomes; those firms are motivated by profits but employ sociological conventions along their ways; and firms generally seek the necessary inter-firm, cross-border cooperation that will deliver corporate performance. Finally, I conclude that the field will ultimately require a framework that puts firms at its center.

Benefiting from Location: Knowledge Retrieval

An abstract is unavailable at this time.

Read the paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gsj.28/abstract

Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation

Abstract

In this paper, we assess the economic viability of innovation by producers relative to two increasingly important alternative models: innovations by single-user individuals or firms and open collaborative innovation. We analyze the design costs and architectures and communication costs associated with each model. We conclude that both innovation by individual users and open collaborative innovation increasingly compete with and may displace producer innovation in many parts of the economy. We explain why this represents a paradigm shift with respect to innovation research, policy making, and practice. We discuss important implications and offer suggestions for further research.

Read the paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0618

Equitable and Efficient Coordination in Traffic Flow Management

Abstract

When air traffic demand is projected to exceed capacity, the FAA implements Traffic Flow Management programs. Independently, these programs maintain a first-scheduled, first-served invariant, which is the accepted standard of fairness within the industry. Coordinating conflicting programs requires a careful balance between equity and efficiency. In our work, we first develop a fairness metric to measure deviation from first-scheduled, first-served in the presence of program conflicts. Next, we develop an IP formulation that minimizes a convex approximation of this metric. We further develop an exponential penalty approach and show that its computational performance is far superior and its trade-off between delay and fairness compares favorably. In our results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these models using historical and hypothetical scenarios. Additionally, we demonstrate that the exponential penalty approach exhibits exceptional computational performance, implying practical viability. Our results suggest that this approach could lead to system-wide savings on the order of $25 million to $50 million per year.

Using Internet Data for Economic Research

Abstract

The data used by economists can be broadly divided into two categories. First, structured datasets arise when a government agency, trade association, or company can justify the expense of assembling records. The Internet has transformed how economists interact with these datasets by lowering the cost of storing, updating, distributing, finding, and retrieving this information. Second, some economic researchers affirmatively collect data of interest. Historically, assembling a dataset might involve delving through annual reports or archives that had not previously been organized into a format ready for research: in some cases, surveying stores, factories, consumers, or workers, or in other cases, carrying out an experiment. For researcher-collected data, the Internet opens exceptional possibilities both by increasing the amount of information available for researchers to gather and by lowering researchers' costs of collecting information. In this paper, I explore the Internet's new datasets, present methods for harnessing their wealth, and survey a sampling of the research questions these data help to answer.

Advertising Disclosures: Measuring Labeling Alternatives in Internet Search Engines

Abstract

In an online experiment, we measure users' interactions with search engines, both in standard configurations and in modified versions with clearer labels identifying search engine advertisements. In particular, for a random subset of users, we change "Sponsored links" or "Ads" labels to instead read "Paid Advertisements." Relative to users receiving the "Sponsored link" or "Ad" labels, users receiving the "Paid Advertisement" label click 25% and 27% fewer advertisements, respectively. Users seeing "Paid Advertisement" labels also correctly report that they click fewer advertisements, controlling for the number of advertisements they actually click. Results are most pronounced for commercial searches and for vulnerable users with low education and little online experience.

Read the paper: http://www.benedelman.org/adlabeling/adlabeling.pdf

Evaluating Air Traffic Flow Management in a Collaborative Decision-Making Environment

Abstract

The Collaborative Decision-Making (CDM) framework introduced into ground delay programs in the late 1990s is an integral component of the FAA's Traffic Flow Management (TFM) procedures. CDM allows the FAA to act as a mediator when managing TFM programs, transferring as much decision making as possible to the individual airlines. Although this approach has been highly successful in practice, it creates a new question for the research community: How should proposed enhancements to TFM be evaluated in a CDM environment? A sequential evaluation procedure, developed in this paper, addresses this question. The procedure includes airline disruption responses and a quasi-compression operation, attempting to mimic the three-stage CDM process. To model airline disruption responses, an integer optimization model was developed to balance operational and passenger considerations in determining which flights to cancel, swap, or delay. The value of this procedure is demonstrated by analyzing an optimization-based TFM approach in the CDM environment.

Read the paper: http://trb.metapress.com/content/g6kt053v4651386t/

Performance Pressure as a Double-Edged Sword: Enhancing Team Motivation While Undermining the Use of Team Knowledge

Abstract

In this paper, I develop and empirically test the proposition that performance pressure acts as a double-edged sword for teams, providing positive effects by enhancing team motivation to achieve good results while simultaneously triggering process losses. I conducted a multi-method field study of 78 audit and consulting teams from two global professional firms, revealing an irony of team life: even though motivated to perform well on a high-stakes project, pressured teams are more likely to engage in performance-detracting behaviors. Survey results show that, as performance pressure increases, team members begin to over-rely on general expertise while discounting domain-specific expertise, leading to suboptimal performance. I use longitudinal qualitative case studies to explore the underlying behavioral mechanisms that generate this outcome. Results also show that only domain-specific expertise-the kind that teams under-use when facing higher pressure-increases client-rated team performance. I thus find, paradoxically, that when teams need domain-specific expertise the most, they tend to use it the least, despite evidence suggesting they are highly motivated to do well on their task.

Authentic Leadership Development

An abstract is unavailable at this time.

Publisher's link: http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book235126

Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the 'Mirroring' Hypothesis

Abstract

: A variety of academic studies argue that a relationship exists between the structure of an organization and the design of the products that this organization produces. Specifically, products tend to "mirror" the architectures of the organizations in which they are developed. This dynamic occurs because the organization's governance structures, problem solving routines, and communication patterns constrain the space in which it searches for new solutions. Such a relationship is important, given that product architecture has been shown to be an important predictor of product performance, product variety, process flexibility and even the path of industry evolution. We explore this relationship in the software industry. Our research takes advantage of a natural experiment, in that we observe products that fulfill the same function being developed by very different organizational forms. At one extreme are commercial software firms, in which the organizational participants are tightly coupled, with respect to their goals, structure, and behavior. At the other, are open source software communities, in which the participants are much more loosely coupled by comparison. The mirroring hypothesis predicts that these different organizational forms will produce products with distinctly different architectures. Specifically, loosely coupled organizations will develop more modular designs than tightly coupled organizations. We test this hypothesis, using a sample of matched-pair products.

Read the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-039.pdf

Walking the Talk in Multiparty Bargaining: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract

We study the framing effects of communication on payoffs in multiparty bargaining. Communication has been shown to be more truthful and revealing than predicted in equilibrium. Because talk is preference revealing, it may effectively frame bargaining around a logic of fairness or competition, moving parties on a path toward or away from equal-division agreements. These endogenous framing effects may outweigh any overall social utility effects due to the mere presence of communication. In two studies, we find that non-binding talk about fairness within a three-party, complete-information game leads toward off equilibrium, equal division payoffs, while non-binding talk focusing on competitive reasoning moves parties away from equal divisions. Our two studies allow us to demonstrate that manipulated pre-game talk and spontaneous within-game dialogue lead to the same results.

An Age Penalty in Racial Preferences

Abstract

We document an age penalty in racial discrimination: charitable behavior toward African American children decreases-and negative stereotypical inferences increase-with the age of those children. Using data from an online charity that solicits donations for school projects, we found that proposals accompanied by images of older African American students (Grades 6-12) led to fewer donations than proposals with images of younger African Americans (pre-K-Grade 5), with the opposite pattern for proposals with images of multiples races or of all White students. A laboratory experiment demonstrated that negative stereotypical beliefs about African Americans (e.g., that they are lazy) increased with age more for African American children than for White children, a pattern that predicted decreases in giving.

Read the paper: http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/small pope norton.pdf