What Do Employees Know About Their Pension Plan?

Original survey data based on 529 respondents in a large organization are used to analyze how much employees know about various features of their occupational pension plan. While the level of understanding was quite low among all employees, it was quite high among those for whom the knowledge matters most in terms of their behavioral decision making. Our results show that rather than being optimal labor contracts that workers enter into with full knowledge at the time of employment, pension contracts are more like contingent claims contracts evolving under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete information.     

Is Selection Bias Inherent in Housing Transactions? An Equilibrium Approach

We develop an equilibrium model for residential housing transactions in an economy with houses that differ in their quality and households that differ in their planned holding horizon. We show that, in equilibrium, a clientele effect persists, with long‐horizon buyers overwhelmingly choosing higher quality properties and short‐horizon buyers settling for lower quality properties. This clientele effect creates a sample selection bias: the properties that are on the market are predominantly of lower quality. Since these are the preferred choice of short‐horizon buyers, they demonstrate a faster turnover. Both the clientele effect and the selection bias are more pronounced with an increase in the variance of house quality and in the variance of the planned holding horizon. Our theoretical model supports empirical evidence on the existence of such bias in home price indices and explains it by the differences in ex ante holding horizons.     

Do Conspicuous Consumers Pay Higher Housing Premiums? Spatial and Temporal Variation in the United States

This study is the first to examine the relationship between conspicuous demand and housing price dynamics. We hypothesize that conspicuous consumers would want high‐end homes to signal their wealth and this housing consumption behavior would induce greater deviations from fundamental house prices. We test this by using a unique dataset that matches the consumers’ appetite for nonhousing luxury goods from Google Insights for Search to housing premiums that they pay for high‐end houses in U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) during 2004–2011. The estimation results demonstrate that controlling for a wide range of MSA demographic and economic characteristics, conspicuous demand has a significant, positive relationship with housing premiums. This relationship varies spatially and temporally. Conspicuous demand has a stronger relationship with a price increase in high‐end homes in MSAs with a steady, higher housing premium than in MSAs with a volatile, lower premium during the boom period. In MSAs with a steady, higher housing premium, the relationship remains significant even during the bust period, potentially contributing to maintaining higher housing premiums.     

Do Auctions and Forced Divestitures Increase Competition? Evidence for Retail Gasoline Markets

To foster competition, governments can intervene by auctioning licenses to operate, or by imposing divestitures. The Dutch government has done exactly that, organizing auctions to redistribute tenancy rights for highway gasoline stations and imposing divestitures of such stations on the four major companies. We evaluate this policy experiment and find that the auctioning of licenses without an obligation to divest has no discernible effect on prices. An obligation to divest lowers prices by 1.3–2.3% at divested sites. Moreover, prices decrease by 0.9–1.2% at sites nearby. This suggests that the observed price decreases are at least partly due to competitive spillovers.     

What Do Unions Do to Work Design? Computer Use,Union Presence,and Tayloristic Jobs in Britain

The task framework has focused on employee survey data to analyze how computer use changes the content of jobs. In this article, we add another factor of work design, namely trade union presence. Using data from the UK Skills and Employment Surveys for the period 1997–2012, we find that union presence is associated with more Tayloristic jobs involving less autonomy, lower relevance of problem solving, and more control. In line with theory, the union effect moves in the opposite direction to the effect of computer use. The article has two important general implications. First, the Tayloristic/holistic distinction is an instructive dichotomy to evaluate changes in work design. Second, the presence of unions may induce managers to design jobs in Tayloristic ways in order to curb union bargaining power.     

Why Do Sellers Hold Out in the Housing Market? An Option‐Based Explanation

In the residential housing market, home owners are reluctant to sell in a declining market. We build a model which focuses on the embedded call option associated with home ownership that allows owners to delay the (irreversible) sale. When prices are low, the (opportunity) cost of a sale, i.e., a higher implied gain from a future sale, likely exceeds its immediate trade benefit and an owner is better off waiting for market conditions to improve. The model also highlights the importance of supply conditions: a more constrained supply is associated with a longer delay. Using state‐level residential housing data, we find evidence consistent with the model. Transaction volume is increasing (decreasing) in the rental growth rate (volatility) in the cross section; their effects are amplified in areas with low supply elasticities, and in times with low market prices. Overall, this paper provides a rational explanation for delayed trading decisions in the housing market.     

Perceptions of Material Resources in Innovation Projects: What Shapes Them and How Do They Matter?

Studies on the role of material resources for team performance in innovation projects have provided inconclusive results. This paper focuses on team members' perceptions of the provided material resources' adequacy to address this gap. Understanding what drives perceptions of material resource adequacy may not only reconcile conflicting results in the literature, but may also provide much‐needed guidance for project funding, so as to maximize innovation project performance. Further, the analyses in this paper differentiate between two outcome dimensions of innovation project performance, namely, the degree of new product quality and new product novelty, and thus offer a more fine‐grained analysis of the relationship between perceptions of material resource adequacy and innovation project teams' performance. The posited hypotheses are tested using a sample consisting of survey data from 121 innovation projects in the electronics industry. To avoid common source bias, data from different respondent groups, that is, team leaders, team members, and team external managers of the examined innovation projects, were used. The results of the regression analyses identify team potency and workload as socio‐cognitive drivers of innovation project teams' perceptions of material resource adequacy. Moreover, it is found that perceived material resource adequacy relates positively to new product quality, while it relates negatively to new product novelty. This paper thus provides an important step toward disentangling the ambiguity surrounding the relationship between material resource adequacy and innovation project teams' performance, showing that a key finding of cognitive psychology seems to hold also on the team level of inquiry: the significant influence of socio‐cognitive factors on perceptions. This finding paves the way for putting more attention in research on innovation and project management on cognitive aspects, in particular considering mechanisms behind the formation of team perceptions. Further, the results provide evidence for differential effects of perceived material resource adequacy on innovation project performance, depending on the indicators used for measuring the outcomes of an innovation project. This contributes necessary detail to studying the relationship between material resource adequacy and innovation project performance, which so far has produced inconclusive results, suggesting that these contradictions might result to a large degree from different operationalizations of innovation project performance. On a practical level, the findings of this paper suggest that material resource adequacy seems not to be a catch‐all variable, influencing innovation project outcomes in a uniform way. It appears to be a useful lever for influencing team outcomes depending on the desired result, which may be manipulated by shaping team variables that exert a systematic influence on perceptions of material resource adequacy.     

What Is a Tree Worth? Green‐City Strategies,Signaling and Housing Prices

We investigate the correlation between curbside tree plantings and housing price movements in Philadelphia from 1998 to 2003, comparing two programs, one by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society (PHS) that requires block-group effort that focuses on low-income neighborhoods and the other by the Fairmount Park Commission that is individual-based without specific target areas. A 7 to 11% price differential is identified within 4,000 feet of the Fairmount tree plantings. We argue that this is largely driven by either social capital creation or a signaling mechanism, on top of an intrinsic tree value (around 2%). Findings using the PHS tree program suggest that development of social capital or environmentally conscious behavior might be a less important channel. Any positive changes brought by the PHS tree plantings were not detected with sufficient statistical power.     

What Would They Do? Childcare under Parental Leave and Reduced Hours Options

Time diary data are used to simulate the effects of parental leave and reduced hours arrangements on childcare time among parents of infants. Estimates suggest that coupled fathers would apply approximately 70 percent of working time reductions under leave or reduced hours to childcare. Both coupled and single mothers translate working time reductions into childcare at higher rates. The analysis highlights inequalities across lines of gender, marital status, and socioeconomic status associated with existing policies and suggests policy innovations to both raise parental investments in childcare time and reduce levels of inequality.     

Cross-National Diffusion Research: What Do We Know and How Certain Are We?

To compete effectively in the global marketplace, marketing managers require insight into how a product gets adopted in different countries. For example, can international marketers identify specific cultural traits that may help them to forecast how quickly a new product will be adopted in a particular country or in a group of somehow related countries? Similarly, can they identify factors that suggest why the adoption process differs among countries?Although these diffusion-related questions address critical issues for international marketing managers, only a few studies have explored cross-national diffusion. To help fill this gap, V. Kumar, Jaishankar Ganesh, and Raj Echambadi present the results of a study that replicates and extends the findings of three previously published studies of cross-national diffusion. Their research aims to replicate four findings from the previous studies: the role of country-specific effects in explaining differences in diffusion parameters, the presence of a lead-lag effect, the use of cultural variables to explain systematically the diffusion patterns across countries, and the merit of country segmentation schemes based on diffusion parameters. They extend the previous research by integrating cross-sectional and time lag variables into a single framework, and they demonstrate how managers can apply this integrated framework for forecasting the diffusion of new products.They replicate the findings from the previous studies by using annual sales data for five product categories (VCRs, microwave ovens, cellular phones, home computers, and CD players) in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The product categories and time periods covered differ from the ones in the previous studies; some overlap exists among the countries in this study and the ones in the previous studies.The findings in this study suggest that country-specific characteristics (for example, cosmopolitanism, mobility, percentage of women in the labor force) are useful for identifying the differences in diffusion patterns across countries and innovations. This study also suggests that the lead-lag effect helps to explain differences in diffusion across countries. Factors that this study identifies as possibly influencing the clustering of countries with similar diffusion patterns include timing of entry, geographical proximity, and cultural or economic similarity.     

Partnering against Insecurity? A Comparison of Markets,Institutions and Worker Risk in Canadian and Swedish Retail

This article provides insights on how union power influences the outcomes of labour-management partnerships, with a focus on insecurity. It examines matched pairs of food retailers in Canada and Sweden. Trends in wages, scheduling and union coverage from 1980 to 2016 are compared. Actors in both contexts adopted partnering strategies in response to intensified price competition. However, the Swedish partnerships produced stable work arrangements, while working conditions eroded considerably in Canada. Bargaining structures, union security and identity are examined to explain the variations. As market competition intensified, the Swedish union gained leverage by using partnerships to fight unfair competition and promote sectoral well-being in the process. Meanwhile, the Canadian union lost leverage, instead using partnerships to align employment practices with those of low-cost market entrants and enhancing store-level performance at all costs. The argument is that markets can be a resource for unions, even in low-skilled service sectors, but only under inclusive institutions.     

How Do Organizational Environments and Mandatory Arbitration Shape Employment Attorney Case Selection? Evidence from an Experimental Vignette

Using a novel experimental vignette design, this study shows how firm adoption of equal employment opportunity (EEO) policies, internal dispute resolution procedures, occupational segregation, and use of mandatory arbitration agreements affect employment attorney perceptions of employment discrimination claims. Findings reveal the organizational environment of a claim can signal compliance with antidiscrimination law and the use of mandatory arbitration reduces the expected value of a claim and willingness to accept it for representation. These findings contribute to the understanding of antidiscrimination law as a social system by showing organizational environments and mandatory arbitration clauses predict attorney case assessment.     

How to Build an AI Climate-Driven Service Analytics Capability for Innovation and Performance in Industrial Markets?

AI climate-driven service analytics capability has been anecdotally argued as a viable strategy to enhance service innovation and market performance in B2B markets. While AI climate refers to the shared perceptions of policies, procedures, and practices to support AI initiatives, cognitive service analytics capability refers to the analytical insights driven by AI climate and augmented by both machines and humans to make marketing decisions. However, there is limited knowledge on the antecedents of such analytics capabilities and their overall effects on service innovation and market performance. Drawing on service analytics literature and the microfoundations of dynamic capability theory, this study fills this research gap using in-depth interviews (n = 30) and a survey (n = 276) of service analytics managers within the AI climate in Australia. The findings confirm the five microfoundations of cognitive service analytics capabilities (cognitive technology, cognitive information, cognitive problem solving, cognitive knowledge & skills, cognitive training & development). The findings also highlight the significant mediating effect of service innovation in the relationship between analytics climate and market performance and cognitive service analytics capability and market performance.     

Do Homeowners Mark to Market? A Comparison of Self‐Reported and Estimated Market Home Values During the Housing Boom and Bust

This article examines homeowners’ self‐reported values in the American Housing Survey and the Health and Retirement Study from the start of the recent housing price run‐ups through recent price declines. We compare ZIP‐Code‐level market‐based estimates of housing prices to those derived from homeowners’ self‐reported values. We show that there are systematic differences which vary with market conditions and the amount of equity owners hold in their homes. When prices have fallen, homeowners systematically state that their homes are worth more than market estimates suggest, and homeowners with little or no equity in their homes state values above the market estimates to a greater degree. Over time, homeowners appear to adjust their assessments to be more in line with past market trends, but only slowly. Our results suggest that underwater borrowers are likely to understate their losses and either may not be aware that their mortgages are underwater or underestimate the degree to which they are.     

How Do Switching Costs Affect Market Concentration and Prices in Network Industries?

I investigate the effects of switching costs on the market outcome in network industries using a dynamic duopoly model of price competition in the presence of an outside option. I find that the role of switching costs depends on network effects and the outside option. Without a viable outside option, high switching costs can neutralize the tendency towards high market concentration associated with network effects, but with a viable outside option, switching costs increase market concentration. Furthermore, switching costs lower prices if network effects are modest and there exists a viable outside option, but generally raise prices otherwise.     

Learning: What and How? An Empirical Study of Adjustments in Workplace Organization Structure

We seek to understand how firms learn about what adjustments they need to make in their organization structure at the workplace level. We define four organizational systems: traditional (the simplest system), high‐performance (the most complex system), decision‐making oriented, and financial‐incentives oriented (intermediate complexity). We analyze (1) learning‐by‐doing on adoption of more or less complex systems, (2) the performance–experience learning curves associated with different systems, (3) the match between perceived organizational capabilities and the choice of systems, the influence of (4) other firms’ systems and performance on a firm’s adjustment decisions, and of (5) a firm’s location on its decisions.     

Do you really need help? A study of employee supplication and job performance in China

This study examines a relatively unexplored impression management tactic—supplication. Compared to other more popular impression management tactics such as ingratiation and self-promotion, we know relatively little regarding how employee supplication affects job performance. Using social role theory, we argued that when the images of Chinese employees were consistent with their social roles of receiving help, supplication would be viewed as acceptable. We tested our hypotheses among 158 supervisor–subordinate dyads in China and found that female and junior employees did not receive negative job performance ratings due to supplication. Age, on the other hand, did not moderate the supplication–performance relationship. We believe our findings are consistent with the social norms in the five cardinal relations of Confucianism regarding the modest role of certain social classes in enhancing social harmony. We discuss how our research contributes to the literature of impression management and impacts management practices in China.     

Do professional service firms benefit from customer and supplier collaborations in competitive,turbulent environments?

Although recent research on business-to-business professional service firms (PSFs) emphasizes the role and consequences of collaboration with business partners, we know little regarding the conditions under which bright-side benefits of PSF interfirm collaboration turn into dark-side drawbacks. Our study shows that customer and supplier collaborations have both bright and dark sides, and their benefits with respect to helping a PSF to drive service performance are contingent on the levels of the environmental competition and turbulence. In particular, we show that increasing levels of competitive intensity and environmental turbulence encountered by a PSF can diminish the capacity of customer and supplier collaborations to drive service performance. When the level of competitive intensity increases, the benefits of customer collaboration become more positive; however, the dark-side of supplier collaboration becomes more pronounced, which negatively influences service performance. When the level of environmental turbulence increases, the dark-side of customer and supplier collaborations becomes more critical and the benefits derived from interfirm collaboration to promote service performance can be lost.     

Can Tightness in the Housing Market Help Predict Subsequent Home Price Appreciation? Evidence from the United States and the Netherlands

This article assesses the predictive power of variables that measure market tightness, such as seller's bargaining power and sale probabilities, on future home prices. Theoretical insights from a stylized search‐and‐matching model illustrate that such indicators can be associated with subsequent home price appreciation. The empirical analysis employs listings data on residential units offered for sale through a real estate broker in the Netherlands and for certain U.S. regions. Individual records are used to construct quarterly home price indices, an index that measures seller's bargaining power and (quality‐adjusted) home sale probabilities. Using conventional time‐series models we show that current sale probabilities and bargaining power can significantly reduce home price appreciation forecast errors and help to predict turning points in local area housing markets. The measures and approaches in this article help to demonstrate ways in which researchers and practitioners can leverage listings data to gain knowledge about the current and future state of the housing market.