Pensions and Deferred Befefits as Strategic Compensation

This paper examines labor-oriented aspects of pensions and deferred benefits. Recent work has embedded pensions in the framework of optimal compensation schemes that induce workers to behave in certain ways. Most pension formaulas present workers with securities that look like optioons the tendency for turnover rates to fall as vesting approaches, even though there has been no change in the naive valuation of pension accrual. The paper also discusses the use of pensions as severance pay and notes that the various pension formaulas have different incentive effects.     

Contracts as Options: Some Evidence from Condominium Developments

This paper values the real estate option to purchase contract in a contingent claims framework. The model is an application of the Black and Scholes option pricing model. Observed market data on the sale of condominiums are used to test if the option is competitively priced under various assumptions regarding the expected instantaneous variance of the condominium price. Simulation results suggest that standard industry practices of charging a fixed amount for the option to purchase roughly conform to pricing behavior dictated by the option pricing model.     

E-commerce as a stockpiling technology: Implications for consumer savings

Shopping on the Internet spares customers the discomfort of carrying around heavy and bulky baskets of goods, since the service usually includes home delivery. This makes e-commerce a technology well suited to helping consumers to buy in bulk or to stockpile items on discount. I use grocery scanner data provided by a supermarket chain selling both online and through traditional stores to show that the introduction of e-commerce leads to an increase in bulk purchase and stockpiling behavior by customers. Since bulk and discounted items are sold at a lower price per unit, my findings highlight a new dimension in which online shopping can be beneficial to consumers. According to my calculations, the reduction in the cost of stockpiling triggered by the introduction of electronic commerce generates significant savings.     

Auctions for Split-Award Contracts

The buyer of a homogeneous input divides his input requirements into two contracts that are awarded to different suppliers. He uses a sequential second-price auction to award a primary and a secondary contract. With a fixed number of suppliers the buyer pays a higher expected price than with a sole-source auction. The premium paid to the winner of the secondary contract must also be paid to the winner of the primary contract as an opportunity cost. When entry is endogenous, we identify the conditions under which a secondary contract can increase the number of suppliers and lower the expected price.     

Quality of Work Life and Human Resource Outcomes

This study develops and tests hypotheses regarding the influence of Quality of Work Life (QWL) initiatives on absenteeism, accidents, grievances, and quits, using monthly longitudinal human resource archival data collected at a unionized Midwestern heavy manufacturing firm for the period from 1976 to 1986. The sample size is 129 months (48 months of pre-QWL measures and 81 months of post-QWL measures). Autoregression procedures are utilized to examine the direct impact of QWL on human resource outcomes. QWL is found to significantly reduce absenteeism, minor accidents, grievances, and quits.     

Cross-functional integration as a knowledge transformation mechanism: Implications for new product development

The importance of cross-functional integration (CFI) teams involving workers with multiple forms of functional expertise to work on new product development cannot be overemphasized. CFI is an organic structure and it allows the team members' tacit knowledge embedded in individuals to be realized in the new product development team's collective knowledge - a holistic appreciation and understanding about how to achieve new product development goals. Specifically, despite the pivotal role of CFI and knowledge appreciation in new product development teams, scholars appear to have overlooked the integration of individual level factors, team level factors, individual tacit knowledge, and group collective knowledge within the context of achieving the new product development objectives. Adopting knowledge, CFI, and socialization theories, we propose a conceptual framework that stipulates that the factors at the team level (goal congruence, task cohesion, interpersonal cohesion, and transformational leadership) and the qualification of team members (common knowledge, functional expertise, and their positions in the network) influence the effectiveness of tacit-to-collective knowledge transformation.     

Leasing as a Lottery: Implications for Rational Building Surges and Increasing Vacancies

An expanded inventory demand framework is developed that focuses on the impacts of changes in the local leasing environment. We model the lease-up process as a lottery in which changes in turnover or absorption affect the probability of winning the leasing lottery. In this context, builders rationally respond to transitory, not just permanent, changes in the local market. Hence, factors such as temporary shocks to tenant turnover affect the decision to build. The magnitude of turnover-induced cycles can vary across markets depending upon the vintage of the existing building stock, the local absorption rate and the rent elasticity of demand for space. This framework, which refocuses attention on the local determinants of the developer's decision to build, hopefully will prove fruitful in future empirical efforts to explain development and vacancy behavior during the past decade.     

Innovation in Labor Contracts: On the Adoption of Profit Sharing inCanadian Labor Contracts

I present a model in which I show that labor contracts with wages indexed to prices have longer optimal contract lengths and therefore are more likely to adopt performance-related pay. There is empirical support for these predictions in Canadian collective-bargaining agreements. Contract durations are longer in indexed contracts. Performance-related pay is more than twice as likely to be adopted and present in indexed contracts and more likely to be adopted in contracts with longer durations.     

Infrastructure Contracts: Trust and Institutional Updating

This paper discusses trust and trust perceptions in infrastructure contracts and supporting institutions. We focus on perceptions of the trustworthiness of the government purchasers of infrastructure services by the supplying companies and by the governments themselves. In particular, we allow for trust updating and trust misalignments, which may give rise to ‘undertrusting’ and ‘overtrusting’. The core of the paper sets out a game theoretic model of contracts with dynamic adjustment of trust perceptions, which we use to explore the impact of trust misalignment both on economic efficiency (measured by expected welfare) and on investment levels. We explore flexible contracts with and without pre-payments, rigid contracts (which do not allow for post-investment renegotiation), and hybrid contracts. We then compare the efficiency of the flexible contracts to that of hybrid contracts using as a criterion the expected welfare implications of each contract. The model is used to shed light on current issues on the sustainability of private investment infrastructure contracts in developed and in developing countries, including the role of regulatory institutions.     

施工合同激励条款分析与设计建议

有效的激励措施能提高工程建设效率,而合同是激励措施落实的重要手段,因此必须设计准确、合理、完备的激励条款.通过对我国建设工程施工合同示范文本、FIDIC施工合同条件的激励条款进行分析,提出激励条款设计建议.     

Resources as dual sources of advantage: Implications for valuing entrepreneurial‐firm patents

Why and how do resources provide sources of competitive advantage? This study sheds new light on this central question of resource‐based theory by allowing a single resource—entrepreneurial‐firm patents—to play distinctive roles in different competitive arenas. As rights to exclude others, patents serve a well‐known role as legal safeguards in product markets. As quality signals, patents also could improve access and the terms of trade in factor input markets. Based on the financing activities of 370 venture‐backed semiconductor start‐ups, we provide new evidence that patents confer dual advantages in strategic factor markets, improved access and terms of trade, above and beyond their added product‐market protection. The study has important implications for empirical tests of resource‐based theory and the measurement of resource value. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Wi-Fi as a Commercial Service: New Technology and Policy Implications

While Wi-Fi has enjoyed explosive growth and deployment for use in residential homes, the rollout of commercial Wi-Fi service has been more limited. Part of the holdback on large-scale commercial deployment has been the strategic concern that the commons model to spectrum management lacks the incentives for service providers to invest due to the limited ability to manage interference in the unlicensed band. Today, however, this situation appears to have changed. To explain the new confidence by service providers in commercial Wi-Fi, the activities of the Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE 802.11 standards body are analyzed to show how these groups essentially replicate many, but not all, of the functions traditionally employed by an effective band manager that is optimizing efficiency on a licensed spectrum block more typically associated with the deployment of commercial services. Consequently, with the Wi-Fi ecosystem functioning as an effective spectrum manager, it is concluded that the service provider investment in Public Wi-Fi networks is rational and the risk posed by saturation or overuse has been reduced to an acceptable level. The strategic implications of this finding on the Wi-Fi platform are the examined. How the requirements from service providers are already significantly influencing the evolution of the Wi-Fi standard is discussed, and an attempt is made to address the risks and liabilities associated with the unlicensed spectrum management model. Thus, service providers increasingly need functionality in Wi-Fi technology to manage interference, and monitor and improve network performance. The current ideas under discussion are elaborated for the next version of Wi-Fi to support both commercial Wi-Fi requirements, which address the interference concerns, but only up to a point, as the unlicensed model intrinsically leaves some risk to participants of spectrum saturation through overuse.     

薪酬合约的激励有效性研究:一个理论综述

薪酬激励是组织中最常用的激励手段之一，薪酬合约的激励效果直接影响组织效率。本文尝试用激励理论系统阐述各类薪酬合约的激励有效性条件，为这方面研究梳理出一个统一的理论框架。     

Renegotiation of Concession Contracts: A Theoretical Approach

We construct a regulation model in which renegotiation occurs due to the imperfect enforcement of concession contracts. This enables us to provide theoretical predictions for the impact, on the probability of renegotiation of a concession, of regulatory policy, institutional features, economic shocks and of several characteristics of the concession contracts themselves.     

Project Balances as Division Coefficients and Implications for Rate of Return Analysis

Project balances are shown to be the coefficients resulting from division of the future worth polynomial by a simple monomial and are used in representations of the future worth polynomial and its derivative. Those representations are used to provide elementary proofs for some rate of return analysis results making use of our project balance framework. We develop a convenient method to determine the existence of a root of multiplicity from the derivative of the future worth polynomial using project balances. This article incorporates a useful, unified collection of results that previously have been dispersed throughout the literature that should be of interest to technical economic analysts.     

Human Capital Theory: Implications for HR Managers

This paper reviews some of the contributions of and challenges to human capital theory. It focuses on the alleged link between earings and education and experience and on competing explanations for observed earning differentis by race and by gender. The review concludes that while human capital theory provides some central insights about the supply side of the labor market, the challenges to this theory suggest that the demand side od the market, i.e., the actions of human resource managers, also play a key role in detemining earnings and employment. Moreover, these challenges suggest that government policies can be instrmental in effecting a more efficient and equitable use of human resources.     

Spatial data constraints: Implications for measuring broadband

The accurate determination of where broadband telecommunication services are available in the United States continues to be a significant challenge. Existing data regarding broadband provision, such as that provided by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) simply designate ZIP codes with at least one high-speed Internet subscriber. As ZIP code areas vary greatly in size and shape, the lack of geographic specificity as to exactly where broadband is available, particularly within ZIP code areas, confounds communications policymaking. Further, there are a number of additional geographic nuances concerning broadband availability that also inhibit empirical examination and policy generation, including the spatial limitations of digital subscriber line services. The purpose of this paper is to briefly review the issues concerning broadband measurement in the United States and provide an empirical analysis of several spatial data constraints that must be accounted for when interpreting and constructing public telecommunications policy.