Instability in the labor market for researchers

R&D is both an activity which involves team effort, and with many of the features of a zero-sum game. This paper shows that these characteristics make the labor market for researchers unstable in the sense that firms have incentives to continuously change the composition of their research teams. Related results concerning the core of several cooperative games in characteristic form are also proved.     

Set-valued solution concepts using interval-type payoffs for interval games

Uncertainty is a daily presence in the real world. It affects our decision making and may have influence on cooperation. Often uncertainty is so severe that we can only predict some upper and lower bounds for the outcome of our actions, i.e., payoffs lie in some intervals. A suitable game theoretic model to support decision making in collaborative situations with interval data is that of cooperative interval games. Solution concepts that associate with each cooperative interval game sets of interval allocations with appealing properties provide a natural way to capture the uncertainty of coalition values into the players’ payoffs. In this paper, some set-valued solution concepts using interval payoffs, namely the interval core, the interval dominance core and the interval stable sets for cooperative interval games, are introduced and studied. The main results contained in the paper are a necessary and sufficient condition for the non-emptiness of the interval core of a cooperative interval game and the relations between the interval core, the interval dominance core and the interval stable sets of such a game.     

中国队防守技术和对手的比较研究

中国男篮在第十六届世界男子篮球锦标赛的六场比赛中取得了一胜五负的战绩,与前两届相比成绩有所下降,但从整个比赛过程来看,中国队每场球打的都很顽强,尤其在防守端与以往相比还有一定进步。以下通过文献资料法、录像分析法和比较分析法等研究方法,第十六届世界男子篮球锦标赛中国队与对手之间的6场比赛的防守数据进行了多角度的比较研究,发掘中国队自身问题,找出与世界强队的差距,以期在今后的比赛中取得更好成绩。     

The impact of the disposition effect on asset prices: insight from the NBA

In this paper we examine the price movements of contracts that represent bets on NBA games and find that the disposition effect causes significant deviations between contract prices and values. The contracts under examination are listed on Tradesports, a prediction market which provides an ideal venue for testing this and other behavioral theories because of its asset properties, market structure, and the absence of the joint hypothesis problem. In our analysis, we forecast the projected final combined scores of both teams in a contest based on observed within-game scores and game time remaining. At all points in time throughout each game, mean future returns (measured as Ticks to Expiry) should be no different than zero. However, we find that contracts which have fallen off pace to exceed the stated contract total become overpriced and experience negative future returns. Likewise, we provide evidence that contracts on games in which teams are on pace to exceed the stated total become underpriced and experience significantly positive future returns. These findings are consistent with the disposition effect in which traders tend to hold losing positions to avoid realizing losses yet prematurely unwind winning positions to realize gains.     

博弈论在逆向供应链系统定价中的应用

基于单一制造商和单一零售商构成的逆向供应链系统,应用博弈理论对废旧产品回收的定价策略进行研究。分别得出了非合作博弈的均衡解(Stackelberg均衡)和合作博弈的均衡解(联合定价),并进一步对各种定价策略的效率进行了分析。另外,给出了便于实际操作的协调方法。     

重复占优策略博弈在团队培训中的应用及启发——基于一个体验式训练项目的思考

博弈论是研究决策主体行为发生直接相互作用时的决策以及这种决策的均衡问题的一门科学。占优策略博弈是指存在始终优于对方反应的博弈,占优策略博弈可能存在合作解和非合作解。在对一个基于重复非合作占优策略博弈而设计的培训项目进行分析的基础上,探讨有限重复占优策略博弈的非合作解和合作解的差别,并借鉴这种差别对于团队管理的启发,在管理实践中充分考虑主体的充分理性和最大化偏好,以团队利益为前提,尊重个体合理利益,设计科学的激励约束制度,促成一个良性的竞争合作团队氛围。     

MACROECONOMIC POLICY EVALUATION AND OPTIMAL CONTROL THEORY: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Abstract. This survey addresses the recent literature on the application of optimal control theory and game theory to macroeconomic policy evaluation and design. This literature focuses on strategic interactions between governments and private agents engaged in dynamic non-cooperative games and emphasizes such issues as precommitment, credibility and reputation as important and endemic aspects of optimal policy design. A dominant theme is the problem of dynamic inconsistency and the inferiority of an equilibrium in single-stage full-information games without commitment. This may be alleviated in repeated games involving reputation effects and threat strategies designed to coerce rivals into pursuing particular strategies and to sustain a sequential equilibrium. The type and characteristics of a sequential equilibrium also depend importantly upon the information structure conditioning players'beliefs under uncertainty. Included here are separating and pooling equilibria, involving notions of learning, signalling and information revelation. Additional dimensions exist in stochastic systems which introduce other forms of uncertainty. Optimal control and game theory have also been applied to international macroeconomic policy design, with emphasis on the potential costs and benefits of non-cooperative and cooperative behaviour between countries and problems of international policy coordination.     

College Football Attendance: A Panel Study of the Football Championship Subdivision

Panel data across 8 years for the Football Championship Subdivision are used to estimate regular season game‐day percent of capacity regression equations. Higher ticket prices reduce attendance (elasticity of ?1.9). Better team performance, in the short and intermediate terms, and traditional rivalries increase percent of capacity used. Poor weather and higher travel costs decrease it. Fan interest wanes as a season progresses, but this is offset as a team wins more games. Games played on Saturdays, played against conference opponents, or played by teams from the Football Bowl Subdivision increase stadium utilization. Results provide some evidence for the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RECENT ADVANCES IN OLIGOPOLY THEORY FROM A GAME THEORY PERSPECTIVE

Abstract. This paper surveys the contribution that recent developments in game theory have made to the understanding of oligopoly theory. It is argued that conventional models suffer from the problem that there are a number of solution concepts offered with little guidance as to which should be selected, and this is related to the static nature of the models employed. One important development in game theory has been the analysis of repeated games, and when applied to oligopoly theory this suggests that outcomes may be more cooperative than conventional theory suggests. Related to this is the requirement that firms employ credible threats to punish cheating from cooperative outcomes, and the paper examines the extent to which imperfect information may restrict the scope of firms to employ such punishments. One way in which firms may seek to make threats credible is through strategic investments, for example in production capacity, and the paper explores how competition over price or output is integrated with competition over instruments for strategic investment.     

非线性需求下两层供应链的定价策略及协调机制研究

对基于单一制造商和单一零售商构成的供应链,在非线性需求函数的前提下,应用博弈理论对供应链系统的定价策略进行了分析,分别得出非合作博弈和合作博弈的均衡解,进一步对各种定价策略的效率进行了分析。另外,给出了便于实际操作的协调方法。     

On discrimination in the optimal management of teams

We study the optimal management of teams in which agents’ effort decisions are mapped (via a production technology) into the probability of the team’s success. Optimal wage schemes in such context are largely discriminatory, but we show that the extent of the discrimination crucially depends on the existence of moral hazard. More precisely, for teams with a flat structure, the domain of production technologies giving rise to discrimination is broader when agents’ actions are observable and contractible. For teams with a sequential structure, the result reverses and the domain of production technologies giving rise to discrimination is broader when there exists moral hazard. Finally, in more cooperative environments in which agents are allowed to collude, optimality does not entail discrimination, with or without moral hazard.     

Bankruptcy behavior in the NFL: does the overtime structure change the strategy of the game?

Companies in financial distress have an incentive to take on high-risk/high-reward projects, known as ??bankruptcy behavior.?? This paper investigates the activity of bankruptcy behavior outside of the corporate setting by analyzing the effects of the overtime structure in the NFL relative to College Football. In overtime, the first team to score in the NFL wins. In college football, however, both teams in overtime get a chance to score and the winner is decided when one team outscores the other. This structure causes different strategies for the NFL teams approaching overtime relative to college football teams. Using the variance in scoring throughout the game, I find evidence that NFL teams take on more risk late in the game to avoid overtime, or act as if they have bankruptcy behavior.     

基于合作博弈下制造商主导的供应链定价决策研究

利用博弈理论,针对制造商主导的供应链,通过建立博弈模型,探讨制造商与分销商的二级供应链的定价决策,即首先通过非合作博弈模型与合作博弈模型比较分析,找出合作博弈模型的缺陷,然后在合作博弈模型的基础上进行两方面的改进:通过设计一个利润分配因子确定定价范围,然后根据讨价还价能力确定最优定价,以及通过引入时间因素,与线性函数结合起来确定最优价格以及市场需求量。最后通过实例来进一步验证定价模型的可行性。     

Virtual teams in organizations

Organizations continue to widely adopt virtual teams as a primary way to structure work and the recent growth in utilization has outstripped theory and research on virtual teams. The explosive growth in virtual team use by organizations and the inherent challenges of virtual teams highlight the need for theory and research to inform organizations in designing, structuring and managing virtual teams. Therefore, the purpose of this special issue is to (a) advance theory and research on virtual teams, (b) offer new directions for research on the topic, and (c) contribute to efforts to enhance the effectiveness of virtual teams in organizations. Toward this end, in this introduction we provide a brief overview of virtual teams and present an input-process-output framework to contextualize and organize the eight papers appearing in this special issue.     

Enabling Shared Leadership in Virtual Project Teams: A Practitioners' Guide

Many virtual project teams perform better when leadership is shared (rather than centralized with the formal team leader); however, team leaders are often neither prepared to identify shared leadership potential nor to actually share leadership responsibility. Based on a study of 96 globally dispersed software development teams we show that team leaders tend to underestimate the team members’ capacity to lead themselves. As a consequence, these leaders monopolize decision‐making authority and provide insufficient levels of autonomy for team members to tackle their tasks. Preventing the team members from unfolding their true potential, these leaders unconsciously jeopardize virtual team performance. Paradoxically, it is thus team leaders themselves hindering leadership effectiveness in virtual teams.     

Bounds for best response functions in binary games

This paper studies the identification of best response functions in binary games without making strong parametric assumptions about the payoffs. The best response function gives the utility maximizing response to a decision of the other players. This is analogous to the response function in the treatment-response literature, taking the decision of the other players as the treatment, except that the best response function has additional structure implied by the associated utility maximization problem. Further, the relationship between the data and the best response function is not the same as the relationship between the data and the response function in the treatment-response literature. We focus especially on the case of a complete information entry game with two firms. We also discuss the case of an entry game with many firms, non-entry games, and incomplete information. Our analysis of the entry game is based on the observation of realized entry decisions, which we then link to the best response functions under various assumptions including those concerning the level of rationality of the firms, including the assumption of Nash equilibrium play, the symmetry of the payoffs between firms, and whether mixed strategies are admitted.     

Understanding politics in PSM teams: A cross-disciplinary review and future research agenda

Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) decisions, such as make-or-buy or vendor selections, are highly dependent on the cooperation of several functions in decision-making teams in order to make more holistic and effective decisions. However, members of cross-functional PSM teams often also pursue diverse goals rooted in functional incentive structures that may lead to misalignment and competition. One of the resulting problems are so-called “organizational politics”, being self-serving influence attempts among functional representatives. Examples can be nondisclosure of information, coalitions, or lobbying to protect unidimensional functional interests that potentially obstruct effective PSM decision making. So far, PSM scholars have made exploratory and inductive inquiries in team politics while the larger body of research on politics exists outside the PSM scope. Thus, as PSM scholarship transcends toward deductive theory testing designs on team politics, the fields is at risk taking isolated perspectives and failing to deduce from the extant disaggregated “general management” literature on politics. In response to this emerging trend, we review 91 contributions to the organizational literature on politics at the individual, team or group, and dyadic (individual-individual) level to build a future research framework on politics in real-world cross-functional PSM decision-making teams. To do so, we distinguish thematic areas of interest and derive future avenues for research in light of ongoing PSM debates on human resource management in PSM, leadership in PSM teams, and top management support of PSM. Furthermore, we derive epistemological, instrumental, and theoretical guidance on how to approach politics in cross-functional PSM teams.     

Conflict Management for Effective Top Management Teams and Innovation in China*

abstract Top management teams may be critical for developing organizations that can keep abreast of marketplace changes and innovate. Several streams of strategy research have argued that conflict and diversity promote top management team effectiveness. This study proposes that how top management teams manage conflict can greatly contribute to their effective leadership of organizational innovation. A total of 378 executives from 105 organizations in China completed measures of conflict management (cooperative, competitive, and avoiding) and productive conflict (an outcome of conflict). Separately, 105 CEOs from these firms indicated their team's effectiveness and their organization's innovativeness. Results support the theory that conflict management can contribute to making top management teams effective. Structural equation analysis suggests that cooperative conflict management promotes productive conflict and top management team effectiveness that in turn result in organizational innovation. These results, coupled with previous research, were interpreted as suggesting that cooperative conflict management is an important contributor to effective top management teams even in the collectivist culture of China.     

Regional information and market efficiency: the case of spread betting in United States college football

Using game results over a seven year span (1999–2006), we find that United States college football teams in arid regions “win” against the spread in 56.64% of games in which they host a team from a humid region. This result provides statistically significant evidence for both weak and strong form inefficiency in the spread betting markets of such games. By examining other cases of intraregional and interregional competition within the sport, we conclude that this inefficiency does not arise from the effects of travel or home field advantage. Rather, the result indicates that climate aridity is an observed characteristic for which college football betting markets do not accurately control. It is quite rare to find strong form market inefficiency arise from a single variable rather than from an elaborate, multivariable betting strategy. Therefore, the effect of climate aridity upon college football spread betting market efficiency can be characterized as dramatic. It is conjectured that remote market participants may need to “experience” certain types of relevant regional information, such as climate, to act in a market efficient manner.