Digital assemblages: evidence and theorising from the computerisation of the US residential real estate industry

We develop the concept of digital assemblages in order to advance current theorising on the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are helping to reshape work. The empirical setting is the US residential real estate industry—a ‘living laboratory’ for studying information‐intensive work and the adoption and uses of ICT. We find that real estate agents' uses of ICT are pervasive and suggest that agents now embed themselves more deeply into the transacting of real estate by actively supporting buyers and sellers, rather than acting primarily as information intermediaries. Building from this, we theorise that this ICT use can more coherently be understood as a ‘digital assemblage’ rather than a formal information system. Digital assemblages are characterised as distinct patterns of ICT collections that, in use, are functionally equivalent and structurally similar, relying on standardised and commodified ICT and are neither formally designed nor collectively governed.     

Delegation of information verification

An agent may manipulate information when transmitting it to the principal. A direct response to this problem is to verify the information. The paper explores a situation where the principal engages in information verification herself or alternatively delegates it to the agent. The paper finds that delegated verification can be optimal if the agent has to expend costly effort to acquire information before verifying it. Delegated verification promotes the agent's incentive for information acquisition. The paper also finds that delegated verification is more likely to be optimal if the agent is more biased.     

Accept or reject? An organizational perspective

This paper compares the relative performance of different organizational structures for the decision of accepting or rejecting a project of uncertain quality. When the principal is uninformed and relies on the advice of an informed and biased agent, cheap-talk communication is persuasive and it is equivalent to delegation of authority, provided that the agent's bias is small. When the principal has access to additional private information, cheap-talk communication dominates both (conditional) delegation and more democratic organizational arrangements such as voting with unanimous consensus.     

The value of transparency in multidivisional firms

We study internal incentives, transparency and firm performance in multidivisional organizations. Two independent divisions of the same firm design internal incentives, and decide whether to publicly disclose their performances. In each division a risk-neutral principal deals with a risk-averse (exclusive) agent under moral hazard. Each agent exerts an unverifiable effort that creates a spillover on the effort cost of the other agent. We first study the determinants of the optimal principal-agent contract with and without performance transparency. Then, we show how effort spillovers affect the equilibrium communication behavior of each division. Both principals commit to disclose the performance of their agents in equilibrium when efforts are complements, while no communication is the only equilibrium outcome when efforts are substitutes.     

Transparency in agency: The constant elasticity case and extensions

This paper considers a hidden action agency problem where the principal has a single source of hidden information concerning the agent's utility, the agent's effort productivity, or the agent's cost of effort. We examine whether the principal should precommit to disclosing these different single sources of information to the agent. If the optimal contract is invariant over the hidden information and, thus, the disclosure rules (constant elasticity case), such disclosure increases the agent's utility, it can raise or lower profit and total surplus depending on the source of hidden information, and non-disclosure can be optimal if disclosure affects the agent's motivation. If the contract varies with the hidden information and, thus, disclosure rule, disclosure or non-disclosure can be optimal depending on whether the party's payoff is convex or concave in the information variable, respectively.     

Team composition,worker effort and welfare

A successful organization needs the right team. We explore the optimal mix of familiar workers (who we call incumbents) and less familiar workers (newcomers) when production is group-based. If incumbents have a lower marginal return of effort, they will have less incentive to invest relative to newcomers. This is true, even when incumbents produce more for any given level of effort. This creates a tradeoff: less familiar agents will invest more whereas a more familiar team is inherently more productive. In our setup, the non-investing principal (weakly) prefers less familiar agents than the team that maximizes second-best surplus. On the other hand (symmetric) agents prefer a more familiar teammate compared with the second-best option. These insights have implications for team composition, job rotation and worker tenure.     

Common Third Parties and Coordination Disruptions in New Product Development Organizations

This conceptual article builds on existing research on network analysis to examine the possibility that the self‐organizing tendencies of communication networks may endogenously affect the likelihood of informal communication between interdependent teams in new product development organizations. Although informal communication between teams emerges out of those teams' effort to coordinate their task interdependencies, the presence of common third parties in the communication network may shape the behavior of teams in ways that makes this communication network depart from the underlying network of technical interdependencies between the teams. In some cases, the presence of a common third party may reinforce the predisposition of interdependent teams to exchange information. In others, it may drive teams to enter exchanges without an apparent technical need to do so. Finally, and more importantly, the presence of a common third party may induce interdependent teams to neglect exchanging information on their technical interdependencies. This possibility is more likely when coordination between two interdependent teams and a common third party can result in cyclic exchanges that can trigger design oscillations affecting the work of the common third party. While these oscillations may be undesirable, efforts to prevent them can result in coordination disruptions that are also undesirable, because they can affect the performance or durability of the affected components and subsystems.     

The Incentive Effects of Flat-Fee and Percentage Commissions for Real Estate Brokers

This paper analyzes the incentive affects of flat-fee and percentage commission systems from the perspective of the economic theory of agency. Under a plausible set of assumptions the systems provide equivalent incentives. However, the relative desirability of the two systems depends upon the pricing strategy employed and factors specific to the individual. In general, neither system perfectly aligns the interests of the agent with those of the property-owner. A surprising result of the analysis is that the optimal listing price when an agent is employed may be below the first-best price. The first-best price, or residual maximizing solution to the principal-agent problem from the perspective of the property-owner, is the solution that would occur if the agent's interests were perfectly aligned with those of the principal. This study suggests that the use of a percentage versus a flat-fee commission may be due to information costs rather than price discrimination on the part of brokers.     

Centralized and Decentralized Contracts in a Moral Hazard Environment

We study the optimal allocation of the contracting capacity in a moral hazard environment. Centralizing is superior when the principal is able to establish all the contracts with the agents simultaneously and she is able to monitor side contracting between the agents. Otherwise, decentralizing can be a superior strategy. We apply our results to a firm's decision on which outlets to franchise. They suggest that franchising is more likely to occur the further the store is from headquarters, the more isolated it is and in those activities where the risk is low. This conclusion is consistent with empirical studies.     

Optimal prize-rationing strategy in all-pay contests with incomplete information

A contest organizer (e.g., a government regulatory agency) is endowed with the capacity to provide unlimited homogeneous prizes (e.g., medals) that he can use to incentivize contestants to exert productive effort in an all-pay auction with incomplete information. Each agent, at most, wins one prize. We study the optimal number of prizes the organizer should grant in order to induce maximal expected total effort or expected highest effort from agents. Both are single peaked under mild regularity conditions. When players’ abilities follow a family of beta distributions, expected highest effort maximization requires a smaller set of prizes to be awarded; for both goals, the optimal number of prizes weakly increases when the pool of contestants expands or contestant quality improves.     

Foreshadowing as Impression Management: Illuminating the Path for Security Analysts

Research summary: Managers can disclose information to security analysts as a form of impression management, but doing so is problematic because competitors can use that same information at the expense of the firm. We identify an impression management technique we call foreshadowing, which refers to hinting about future potential strategic activity. Foreshadowing provides information of value to analysts that can influence their evaluations of a firm, but not so much information as to put the firm at a competitive disadvantage. We hypothesize and find that managers who foreshadow acquisition announcements receive fewer analyst downgrades following the announcements, especially when there is more analyst uncertainty about the firm. We also hypothesize and find that analysts' responses to foreshadowing positively influence the likelihood that managers eventually acquire other firms. Managerial summary: Security analysts are often suspicious when firms announce acquisitions as those announcements are cumbersome to analyze on short notice and raise questions about managerial motivations that might not represent the best interests of the firm. We find that managers can improve analyst reactions to acquisition announcements by disclosing some information of value to analysts—specifically by hinting that an acquisition could occur in the future. We refer to such hints as foreshadowing. Foreshadowing entails giving analysts information to reduce their suspicions and facilitate their analyses, but not so much information as to degrade the firm's competitive information advantage over other firms. Foreshadowing also allows managers the option to reconsider actually executing the acquisition if analysts respond negatively to its possibility. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interorganizational Imitation and Acquisitions of High‐tech Ventures

Research summary: This article shows that there is a positive association between the changes in the number of prior acquisitions or the changes in the prominence of prior acquirers within the focal venture's subfield and the venture's likelihood to be acquired. Results are in line with the existence of frequency‐ and trait‐based imitation in acquisitions targeting tech ventures. More importantly, these positive associations are more pronounced when (a) exogenous technological uncertainty within the venture's subfield increases and (b) there are significant differences between the focal venture's and acquirer's technological resources. Our findings are in accord with the suggestion that uncertainty in the technology domain is an important boundary condition in moderating the extent of imitation in technology acquisitions. We also discuss alternative explanations and implications. Managerial summary: The findings of this article suggest that when deciding whether or not to acquire a technology venture (i.e., startup company in a high‐tech industry), managers infer information by observing other acquisitions in the venture's subfield to make assessments about the underlying value of the potential targets. We also find that receiving some informational cues from previous acquisitions would be more useful when there is high technological uncertainty in the potential target's subfield about which technologies will be dominant, and when the potential acquirer and the tech venture operate in dissimilar technological areas. This article shows that imitation can be one way to deal with decision‐making under uncertainty when making acquisition decisions in high‐tech environments. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Information disclosure in optimal auctions

This paper analyzes a situation in which the seller controls the accuracy of what potential buyers learn about their valuation of a good to be sold. This setting is related to many real situations such as home sales, antique auctions, and digital platforms such as Google and Facebook selling online advertising slots. Two important questions arise: what is the optimal selling mechanism, and what is the optimal disclosure policy of the seller. Under the assumption of private values, a simple auction with a reserve price is the optimal mechanism. What we show is that the amount of (costly) information provided increases with the number of potential bidders when using the optimal mechanism and is greater than when the object is always sold. Because information changes the distribution of a bidder’s expected valuations, the optimal reserve price also changes, so that the number of bidders (indirectly) affects the reserve price. We show that as the number of bidders increases, the optimal reserve price becomes more restrictive.     

Moral hazard in repeated procurement of services

This paper analyzes repeated procurement of services as a two period model with a potential repeated agency relationship. In the first period, there is an incumbent who provides a service. In the second period, there is a contest stage in which the principal selects the next service provider. The agents’ effort is non-contractible and the contest stage is the mechanism to mitigate potential moral hazard problems. The principal takes account of the past service effort in the contest stage by choosing the weight of past effort and the degree of substitutability between past and current efforts. The results show that, when the principal does not value contest effort, considering past effort as the relevant effort in the contest is optimal. When the principal values contest effort and effort cost increases, decreasing substitutability between efforts is optimal.     

THE VALUE OF PRIVATE INFORMATION IN MONOPOLY*

We investigate a basic question about a monopoly with incomplete information: when does the seller have an incentive to allow potential buyers to acquire more private information about their tastes for the seller's product? Under plausible conditions such as log‐concave density of willingness‐to‐pay and convex marginal cost, the seller prefers that the paying customers be well informed as a group but be left in the dark regarding their individual tastes.     

Not only speed matters – Crisis response in the hypothetical case of a transport accident involving genetically modified crops

Crisis communication has attained increased importance for communicators, especially in the modern agricultural sector, with each crisis creating a demand for communication that is responsive and problem-specific. This demand is related to the desire for social acceptance, which also constitutes an essential part of an organization’s activity. Our purpose in this study is to identify appropriate response strategies for the hypothetical case of a transport accident involving genetically modified organisms (GMOs). To answer the research question, we conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with experts in communication, crisis communication, and internet communication, or with individuals who had contact with crisis management when an incident with GMOs occurred. We had the interviews audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed. We based the analysis on a qualitative content analysis, which we structured in the manner of Kuckartz's (2016) study. Regarding the GMO scenario presented, the findings show that crisis management constitutes an essential precondition for successful crisis communication. Due to the increasing use of online media, especially social media, dissemination and exchange of information happens very fast. In line with this, the interviews indicate that one must put the primary emphasis on crisis preparedness, especially on developing a crisis manual that provides a structure for crisis response, thus enabling a quick response. We also highlight the significance of using online media because of its ability to rapidly disseminate information. Furthermore, we found that responding with emotional messages was important, as it might help stakeholders deal with their uncertainty in a way that would not negatively affect the organization’s reputation.     

Looking Innovative: Exploring the Role of Impression Management in High‐Tech Product Adoption and Use

Although consumer adoption of high‐tech innovations is certainly influenced by the product's functional benefits, can the use of a new product confer social benefits as well? Specifically, can the mere use of an innovative product convey the impression that the user is an innovative person? Impression management (IM) is a well‐established phenomenon in social psychology that refers to the human tendency to monitor, consciously or unconsciously, the efficacy of his or her communication of self to others. This research explores the role that IM motivations, or “looking innovative,” play in consumers' use of new high‐tech products, especially in the workplace—an environment in which innovativeness is clearly valued by employers and, thus, individuals have strong motivations to convey innovativeness as a personal characteristic. Data from both ethnographic and experimental methods demonstrate that (1) the use of new high‐tech products can be a surprisingly effective social signal of one's “tech savvy” and personal innovativeness; (2) this impression even significantly increases positive evaluations of secondary traits such as leadership and professional success; and (3) this effect differs by gender. Intriguingly, stronger benefits accrue for women than for men—a finding that runs counter to the backlash effect typically found in IM research in business settings (i.e., female job evaluations typically suffer after engaging in the same self‐promoting IM strategies that benefit their male counterparts). Further, the data show that, even for professional recruiters, a momentary observation of a job candidate using a new high‐tech product versus a low‐tech equivalent significantly increases the candidate's evaluation and likelihood of being hired.     

On the existence of franchise contracts and some of their implications

We characterize the franchising problem as a contractual agreement between a principal and multiple agents. The contract contains a revenue-sharing rule, the level of national expenditures by the franchisor and the number of units to be enfranchised. The franchisor offers the contract to a group of potential agents whose attitudes toward risk and effort differ. The revenue of a franchise unit is determined by decisions of both parties as well as a random perturbation. Under certain conditions, we establish the existence and uniqueness of an expected utility maximizing franchise contract with the property that the royalty payment to the franchisor never exceeds one-half the revenue. We provide an explanation for the use of a common contract and argue that, in reality, it is non-linear. We show that this common, non-linear contract attracts agents deemed desirable by the franchisor.     

Are incentives without expertise sufficient? Evidence from fortune 500 firms

Agency theory predicts that incentives will align agents' interests with those of principals. However, the resource‐based view suggests that to be effective, the incentive to deliver must be paired with the ability to deliver. Using Fortune 500 boards as an empirical context, this study shows that the presence of directors who lack top‐level experience but own large shareholdings is negatively associated with firm value, an effect that increases in the number of such directors. Firm value rises after such directors depart from boards, with the greatest increases occurring when many of these directors leave. While agency theory highlights the importance of the right incentives being in place, this research suggests that this can be ineffective if the right resources are not also in place. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

混合邻域结构的粒子群算法

为了克服标准粒子群算法的早熟、停滞进化或易于陷入局部最优的现象,提出了一种混合模型(简称NSPO)。NSPO将一个粒子映射到无标度网络的多个网络节点上,借助网络结构获得该粒子的邻域拓扑。对粒子的更新,NSPO既考虑种群的最优,又考虑邻域的最优。在3个具有不同难度特点的测试函数上,将NSPO与标准粒子群算法进行了比较。实验结果表明:对于全局最优和梯度信息明显的函数,NSPO具有非常优越的表现;对于具有诸多局部最优的函数,NSPO逃逸局部最优的能力要强于标准粒子群算法;对于具有误导性梯度信息的函数,NSPO偶尔表现优异。