In the Journals

10 August 2007 at 3:19 pm Nicolai Foss 1 comment

| Nicolai Foss |

What can possibly be better than to return after a long holiday (Euro-style — 2 weeks!!) and a long conference (the AoM; at 6 days definitely too long) to a stack of lovely journals that arrived in your pigeonhole while you were away? After clearing the administrative, department-head-specific tasks that had accumulated in my absence, I spent this afternoon browsing the journals. Here are some of those papers, special issues, etc. I found particularly interesting, and which may interest the O&M readership:

“Behavioral Theory of the Firm Special Issue,” Organization Science (May/June) — takes stock on the impact of Cyert and March’s classic. Lots of papers (some look weak!) by scholars such as Sid Winter, Phil Bromiley, Michael Cohen and Dan Levinthal. Includes a concluding essay by March. I particularly look forward to studying in greater detail Moore et al.’s “What Competition?” which argues that firms are very myopic in their entry decisions, concentrating on analysing their own resources rather than possible adversarial incumbent reactions.

Papers and Proceedings, American Economics Review. While I seldom can find time to study the normal issues of AER, I always try to allocate substantial time to PaP-AER because of its huge selection of high-quality, extended abstract-like papers on important issues. I particularly look forward to studying the collections of papers on “Contracts and Fairness” (Fehr & Schmidt, Hart & Moore, MacLeod), “Is Foreign Aid Helping?” (Bourguignon & Sundberg, Rajan & Subramanian, Easterly), “Behavioral Welfare Economics” (Bernheim & Rangel, Gul & Pesendorfer, Koszegi & Rabin), and “Biological Evolution and Economics” (including a paper on “Why Do We Die?” (!) by Robson & Kaplan).

“Rules of Engagement, Credibility, and the Political Economy of Organizational Dissent,” by Nicholas Argyres and Vai-Lam Mui, Strategic Organization (May — pp. 107-154!!). I was the discussant on this paper at the 2000 ISNIE meeting in Tübingen. Now 7 years after, the paper has emerged, very heavily beefed up in the math dimension. The basic idea is simple (the mathematization ain’t!): Organizations should strive to implement dissent regimes that encourage the expression of dissent (because of its informational value) while minimizing the opportunism costs that may be associated with dissent. An excellent paper!

“When Do Employees Become Entrepreneurs?,” by Thomas Hellman, Management Science (June) — a perennially important issue modelled using a multi-tasking agency model.