Industrial Organization Commons^™

Ports And Ladders: The Nature And Relevance Of Internal Labor Markets In A Changing World, Paul Osterman, M. Diane Burton

M. Diane Burton

[Excerpt] Many believe that the nature of careers has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. One scholar writes that internal labor markets have been 'demolished', while a human resources manager at Intel comments that, in contrast to the past, today, 'You own your own employability. You are responsible' (Knoke 2001: 31). The idea of the 'boundaryless career' seems increasingly popular (Arthur and Rousseau 1996). If it is in fact true that the old rules for organizing work have disappeared, this would represent a fundamental change for employees. It would also have major implications for how scholars think about the …

The Relevance Of Economic, Institutional And Cultural Determinants For Venture Capital Investments. A Us-Europe Comparison., Nadja Benes

Master's Theses

This study analyzes the determinants of early-stage VC investments by identifying characteristics in the economic, institutional, as well as cultural framework that could explain the diverging levels of early-stage VC investments across countries. Data was assembled for 16 countries during the period from 1995 until 2013. The results indicate that countries that are more open to trade are associated with higher levels in early-stage venture capital. A higher unemployment rate negatively affects a country’s level of early-stage VC funds. Higher R&D expenditures as a proxy for the technological and innovation capacity in a country as well as a higher value …

Game Theory In Transport & Logistic World, Sajjad Khaksari

SAJJAD KHAKSARI

"OV & DP and BRT" some assumptions and a Case Study for studying John Nash "Game Theory" method in logistics and transportation world and that is only a briefly attempt to get familiar with the idea. A thought which asks "Is it possible to model and analyze one of the authenticity of the transport or logistics service request with respect to the Game Theory optimization idea?

Business Trusts, Peter B. Oh

Book Chapters

The business trust arguably is the most prominent and yet enigmatic organizational form used today. The problem is that no one knows exactly how prevalent business trusts are, much less why they are the preferred vehicle for a broad and diverse range of transactions. This chapter sheds some light on the business trust by examining its early history at common law, its subsequent mutation into modern statutory and contractarian forms, as well as some of its most common functions. The more closely we scrutinize the business trust, the more apparent it becomes that the pertinent question about business trusts is …

[Slides] Resale Price Maintenance In The Age Of Showrooming, Jeanine Miklos-Thal, Greg Shaffer

Jeanine Miklos-Thal

We examine the leading pro-competitive justification for RPM, free-riding on dealer services, in today’s context of brick-and-mortar versus online retailing. Market research studies show that many consumers visit a brick-and-mortar store to examine a product and select its features, but then purchase it at a discounted price from an online retailer. An often-voiced concern is that such “showrooming” will discourage traditional retailers from providing demand-enhancing sales services. According to the classic free-riding theory (Telser, 1960), manufacturers can solve this problem by imposing price floors that prevent online retailers from undercutting brick-and-mortar retailers. Counter to this widely used argument, we find …

Impact Of Board Characteristics And Audit Committee On Financial Performance: A Study Of Manufacturing Sector Of Pakistan, Arfan Ali, Saad Bin Nasir

Business Review

The research will examine the role of corporate governance (CG) practices on firm’s financial performance. Population of this research will be manufacture sector of Pakistan. For the purposes of measurement of impact of corporate governance practices such as board size, board independence, CEO/chairman duality and audit committee will take as independent variables and for the measurement of firm’s performance return on assets and return on equity will take as dependent variables. Panel data regression model will used to estimate the impact of CG on firm performance.

Profiling Organizational Culture Of Different Sectors In Pakistan, Zaki Rashidi, Nadeem A. Syed, Sajida Zaki

Business Review

Organizational Culture is gaining importance in the modern organization theory and research. Mangers are more emphasizing to understand the culture and climate of their organization to enhance the effectiveness and productivity of the organization. Organizational development practitioners and change management flag bearers harmoniously favoring to comprehend the culture of any organization for any kind of change or transformation. Organizational Culture Profile (OCP) provides the basic tool to analyze and figure out the type and nature of cultural stream of any organization. The OCP helps to create the cultural-profile of the organization through a survey of the employees. This study encompasses …

Determinants Of Capital Structure Of Service And Manufacturing Sectors Of Pakistani Companies Listed In Karachi Stock Exchange, Zahid Ali Channar, Manisha Bai Maheshwari, Piribhat Abbasi

Business Review

Capital structure alludes to how an organization finances its operations whether through shareholders equity, debt or a blending of both. This study was aimed to find out the determinants of capital structure in Manufacturing and Service Sectors of Pakistan and examine which capital structure theory (Trade off theory or Pecking order theory) is relevant in Pakistani context. For study secondary data was collected from financial statements of 30 Companies and then data was analyzed through Correlation and Multi Regression analysis. Results showed that leverage has negative significant relationship with tangibility in both sectors which conformed Pecking order theory is followed …

Antitrust And The Patent System: A Reexamination, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the federal antitrust laws were first passed they have cycled through extreme positions on the relationship between competition law and the patent system. Previous studies of antitrust and patents have generally assumed that patents are valid, discrete, and generally of high quality in the sense that they further innovation. As a result, increasing the returns to patenting increases the incentive to do socially valuable innovation. Further, if the returns to the patentee exceed the social losses caused by increased exclusion, the tradeoff is positive and antitrust should not interfere. If a patent does nothing to further innovation, however, then …

Reputation Building Through Failure, Huan Wang, Yi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In China, many entrepreneurs receive strong supports each time their business fails. This contradicts existing literature and differs from rare revival elsewhere. The major explanation lies in China’s unfriendly and unstable policy environments, due to which business failure per se cannot discern competence. Therefore, entrepreneurs failing because of policy shocks have the incentive for extra efforts to build reputation of competence and trustworthiness. This mechanism prepares a pool of seasoned entrepreneurs who can help alleviate damages of not only policy shocks, but also such system shocks as business cycle and sector upgrading, and therefore makes the economy more adaptable.

Rediscovering Corporate Governance In Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay on Lynn LoPucki and Bill Whitford’s corporate reorganization project, written for a symposium honoring Bill Whitford, I begin by very briefly describing its historical antecedents. The project draws on the insights and perspectives of two closely intertwined traditions: the legal realism of 1930s, whose exemplars included William Douglas and other participants in the SEC study; and the law in action movement at the University of Wisconsin. In Section II, I briefly survey the key contributions of the corporate governance project, which punctured the then-conventional wisdom about the treatment of shareholders in bankruptcy, managers’ principal allegiance, and many …

The Rule Of Reason And The Scope Of The Patent, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

For a century and a half the Supreme Court has described perceived patent abuses as conduct that reaches "beyond the scope of the patent." That phrase, which evokes an image of boundary lines in real property, has been applied to both government and private activity and has many different meanings. It has been used offensively to conclude that certain patent uses are unlawful because they extend beyond the scope of the patent. It is also used defensively to characterize activities as lawful if they do not extend beyond the patent's scope. In the first half of the twentieth century the …

All-Units Discounts As A Partial Foreclosure Device, Yong Chao, Guofu Tan

Yong Chao

All-units discounts (AUD) are pricing schemes that lower a buyer’s marginal price on every unit purchased when the buyer’s purchase exceeds or is equal to a pre-specified threshold. The AUD and related conditional rebates are commonly used in both final-goods and intermediate-goods markets. Although the existing literature has thus far focused on interpreting the AUD as a price discrimination tool, investment incentive program, or rent-shifting instrument, the antitrust concerns on the AUD and related conditional rebates are often their plausible exclusionary effects.

In this article, we investigate strategic effects of volume-threshold based AUD used by a dominant firm in the …

When Less Is More: The Benefit Of Limits On Executive Pay, Peter Cebon, Benjamin Hermalin

Peter Cebon

We derive conditions under which limits on executive compensation can enhance efficiency and benefit shareholders (but not executives). Having their hands tied in the future allows a board of directors to credibly enter into relational contracts with executives that are more efficient than performance-contingent contracts. This has implications for the ideal composition of the board. The analysis also offers insights into the political economy of executive-compensation reform.

Pay-What-You-Want Pricing: Can It Be Profitable?, Yong Chao, Jose Fernandez, Babu Nahata

Yong Chao

Using a game theoretic framework, we show that not only can pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing generate positive profits, but it can also be more profitable than charging a fixed price to all consumers. Further, whenever it is more profitable, it is also Pareto-improving. We derive conditions in terms of two parameters, namely the marginal cost of production and the psychological cost of the consumer for paying too little compared to her reference price.

The paper makes the following contributions to the existing literature. First, we endogenize the choice of pricing strategies—PWYW vs. fixed price. Thus rather than solely focusing on the …

Vertical Probabilistic Selling: The Role Of Consumer Anticipated Regret, Yong Chao, Lin Liu, Dongyuan Zhan

Yong Chao

This paper studies vertical probabilistic selling (mixing products with different qualities) when firms compete, and consumers have different abilities to anticipate the potential post-purchase regret raised by the possibility of obtaining the inferior products. We show that, when consumers have either no or full ability to anticipate the regret, probabilistic selling emerges only when the product differentiation between firms is intermediate. However, when consumers have partial ability to anticipate the regret, probabilistic selling will arise more often and yield higher profit compared with the previous two cases. This is due to the “reverse quality discrimination”: the perceived quality of the …