Archive for November, 2013
Field Experiment in Multitasking
| Peter Klein |
It finds what you’d expect: When agents are assigned multiple tasks, and evaluated using objective performance criteria, they will tend to favor those tasks that produce measurable outputs, at the expense of equally important, but harder-to-measure tasks. This is why, for example, professors at research universities often neglect their teaching duties. Sure it’s important, but quality is hard to demonstrate, so I’ll concentrate on publications, grants, and other research activities.
Testing the Theory of Multitasking: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment in Chinese Factories
Fuhai Hong, Tanjim Hossain, John A. List, and Migiwa Tanaka
NBER Working Paper No. 19660, November 2013A well-recognized problem in the multitasking literature is that workers might substantially reduce their effort on tasks that produce unobservable outputs as they seek the salient rewards to observable outputs. Since the theory related to multitasking is decades ahead of the empirical evidence, the economic costs of standard incentive schemes under multitasking contexts remain largely unknown. This study provides empirical insights quantifying such effects using a field experiment in Chinese factories. Using more than 2200 data points across 126 workers, we find sharp evidence that workers do trade off the incented output (quantity) at the expense of the non-incented one (quality) as a result of a piece rate bonus scheme. Consistent with our theoretical model, treatment effects are much stronger for workers whose base salary structure is a flat wage compared to those under a piece rate base salary. While the incentives result in a large increase in quantity and a sharp decrease in quality for workers under a flat base salary, they result only in a small increase in quantity without affecting quality for workers under a piece rate base salary.
Academia QoTD
| Peter Klein |
Gladwell has more in common with his academic critics than either he or they realize, or care to admit. Academic writing is rarely a pursuit of unpopular truths; much of the time it is an attempt to bolster prevailing orthodoxies and shore up widely felt but ill-founded hopes.
The subject here is Malcolm Gladwell, a favorite punching-bag here at O&M, but the general point is worth pondering. Despite the myth of the brave academic, wielding his tenured position as a shield against the powerful interests trying to bring him down, academics typically crave influence, acceptance, and security and are attracted to power — in particular, political power — like moths to flame. There are exceptions, of course.
Le Doux Commerce — Cont’d
| Nicolai Foss |
More evidence on the softening nature of commercial society. Here is the abstract:
Levitt and List (2007) conjecture that selection pressures among business people will reduce or eliminate pro-social choices. While recent work comparing students with various adult populations often fails to find that adults are less pro-social, this evidence is not necessarily at odds with the selection hypothesis, which may be most relevant for behavior in cutthroat competitive industries. To examine the selection hypothesis, we compare students with two adult populations deliberately selected from two cutthroat internet industries — domain trading and adult entertainment (pornography). Across a range of indicators, business people in these industries are more pro-social than students: they are more altruistic, trusting, trustworthy, and lying averse. They also respond differently to shame-based incentives. We offer a theory of reverse selection that can rationalize these findings
SMS Special Conference on Microfoundations
| Nicolai Foss |
So, with Torben Pedersen, Bocconi University, I am arranging a Strategic Management Society “Special Conference” (so-called) on “Microfoundations in Strategic Management Research: Embracing Individuals” next year in Copenhagen. Specifically, the conference takes place from the 13. to the 15. of June at the Copenhagen Business School. (The DRUID conference starts on June 16). Pretty good lineup, I dare say, with keynotes by Ron Burt, Richard Rumelt and Ernst Fehr and several luminaries in the panels.
Here is a little presentation video on the conference. Here is the conference site.
The deadline for paper proposals (5 pp + 2 pp refs) is December 5. Submit a proposal!
Top Ranked Thinkers 2013
| Nicolai Foss |
In management, that is. Here. Hardly surprising that Clay Christensen is #1. But … where is Klein?
Solution to the Economic Crisis? More Keynes and Marx
| Peter Klein |
We’ve previously discussed attempts to blame the accounting scandals of the early 2000s on the teaching of transaction cost economics and agency theory. By describing the hazards of opportunistic behavior and shirking, professors were allegedly encouraging students to be opportunistic and to shirk. Then we were told that business schools teach “a particular brand of free-market ideology” — the view that “the market always ‘gets prices right’ and “[a]n individual’s worth can be reduced to one’s worth in the market” — and that this ideology was partly responsible for the financial crisis. (My initial reaction: Where to I sign up for these courses?!)
The Guardian reports now on a movement in the UK to address “the crisis in economics teaching, which critics say has remained largely unchanged since the 2008 financial crash despite the failure of many in the profession to spot the looming credit crunch and worst recession for 100 years.” If you think this refers to a movement to discredit orthodox Keynesianism, which dominates monetary theory and practice in all countries, and its view that discretionary fiscal and (especially) monetary policy are needed to steer the economy on a smooth course, with particular attention to asset markets where prices must be rising at all times, you’d be wrong. No, the reformers are calling for “economics courses to embrace the teachings of Marx and Keynes to undermine the dominance of neoclassical free-market theories.” To their credit, the reformers appear also to want more attention to economic history and the history of economic thought, which is all to the good. But the reformers’ basic premise seems to be that mainstream economics is too friendly toward the free market, and that this has left students unprepared to understand the “post-2008” world.
To a non-Keyensian and non-Marixian like me, these arguments seem to come from a bizarro world where the sky is green, water runs uphill, and Janet Yellen is seven feet tall. It’s true that most economists reject economy-wide central planning, but the vast majority endorse some version of Keynesian economic policy complete with activist fiscal and monetary interventions, substantial regulation of markets (especially financial markets), fiat money under the control of a central bank, social policy to encourage home ownership, and all the rest. We’ve pointed many times on this blog to research on the social and political views of economists, who lean “left” by a ratio of about 2.5 to 1 — yes, nothing like the sociologists’ zillion to 1, but hardly evidence for a rigid, free-market orthodoxy. I note that the reformers described in the Guardian piece never, ever offer any kind of empirical evidence on the views of economists, the content of economics courses, or the influence of economics courses on economic policy. They simply assert that they don’t like this or that economic theory or pedagogy, which somehow contributed to this or that economic problem. They seem blissfully unaware of the possibility that their own policy preferences might actually be favored in the textbooks and classrooms, and might have just a teeny bit to do with bad economic policies.
I’m reminded of Sheldon Richman’s pithy summary: “No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains.”
Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales on Corporate Culture
| Peter Klein |
Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales tackle the elusive concept of corporate culture in a new NBER paper. Using survey data from the Great Place to Work Initiative they show that firm performance is higher, other things equal, when employees perceive top management as trustworthy and ethical. They control for corporate governance variables and try to separate the effects of an ethical culture from the halo effect that distorts perceptions of high-performing firms. The data are cross-sectional, so it’s impossible to say that a strong corporate culture causes strong performance, rather than the other way around, but the findings are extremely interesting nonetheless.
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