How Teamwork Matters More as Team Member Dispersion Increases*

Product development teams become increasingly dispersed because innovative project tasks require the input of specialized knowledge at multiple locations. Prior analyses indicate that as team member dispersion increases teams find it more difficult to perform high‐quality teamwork. Moreover, the literature has largely assumed that the performance effect of teamwork in innovative projects would be driven by the nature of the project task and that this would be true regardless of the degree to which team members were co‐located. The present study argues, however, that teamwork affects team performance more strongly as team member dispersion increases. Two main reasons for this are discussed: (1) High‐quality teamwork can leverage the increased knowledge potential of dispersed teams; and (2) team leaders in more dispersed teams have little possibility to compensate low‐quality teamwork through hands‐on leadership. Responses from 575 managers, team leaders, and team members of 145 new product development (NPD) projects in the software industry were used to analyze the moderating effect of team member proximity on the relationship between teamwork quality and team performance. Using regression analysis, support is found for the initial hypothesis that team member dispersion moderates the relationship between teamwork quality and team performance, that is, that increasing team member dispersion increases the positive impact of teamwork quality on team performance. As such, the present analysis advances understanding of dispersed teams, showing that teamwork quality not only is more difficult to achieve but also is more critical to team performance as team dispersion increases. Furthermore, low‐proximity teams can reach higher levels of effectiveness and efficiency than co‐located ones if they manage to achieve high levels of teamwork over distance. Thus, team dispersion may well be an opportunity and should not just be regarded as a liability to be overcome or avoided. This research recognizes that the vast majority of teams are neither perfectly co‐located nor perfectly virtual. There are many shades of gray between these two extremes, and various individual, team, task, and contextual characteristics may have an effect on how decreases—however small—in geographical proximity affect the process and performance of teams. Future research is encouraged to address such factors at different levels of analysis aimed at providing managers with recommendations for dispersed teamwork.     

Risk aversion in the small and Jensen inequalities

This paper investigates further the connection between the concept of risk-aversion and the property of concavity of the utility function of the agent. Improved specifications of the Jensen inequality are used for stating a number of local properties of certainty equivalents under milder regularity assumptions on the utility function than those made in literature. The paper concludes by illustrating a few applications of this theory.

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Riassunto Si approfondisce lo studio del legame tra il concetto di avversione al rischio e quello di concavità della funzione di utilità dell'agente. Nel lavoro vengono utilizzate estesamente versioni migliorate della disuguaglianza di Jensen che consentono di fornire alcuni risultati locali sotto ipotesi deboli di regolarità sulla funzione di utilità. Il lavoro termina fornendo alcune applicazioni di questa analisi nell'ambito della teoria delle scelte in ambito rischioso.

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This research was partially supported by M.U.R.S.T. Dinamiche Non-Lineari e Applicazioni alle Scienze Economiche e Sociali.

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Although the paper is co-authoured, we specify that Sections 3 and 4 are to be attributed to Luigi Montrucchio, while Sections 1, 2 and 5 to Luisa Tibiletti.     

Survival of the Fittest or the Fattest? Exit and Financing in the Trucking Industry

This paper studies the impact that capital market imperfections have on the natural selection of the most efficient firms by estimating the effect of the prederegulation level of leverage on the survival of trucking firms after the Carter deregulation. Highly leveraged carriers are less likely to survive the deregulation shock, even after controlling for various measures of efficiency. This effect is stronger in the imperfectly competitive segment of the motor carrier industry. High debt seems to affect survival by curtailing investments and reducing the price per ton-mile that a carrier can afford to charge after deregulation.     

Negotiated Enforcement and Credible Deterrence

This paper develops a model of law enforcement in which indicted offenders and the prosecutor can negotiate the penalty prior to the completion of the investigation. The analysis focuses on the credibility of the conviction threat: the prosecutor cannot commit to any predetermined level of investigative effort should the negotiation fail. The settlement stage introduces several new features of the optimal enforcement policy, including the possibility that maximal sanctions may not be optimal. We show that the screening process associated with the negotiation stage reduces the incentives for the prosecutor to undertake thorough investigations and increases the rate of noncompliance.     

Investigating the Robustness of Macroeconomic Inference to Measurement Errors: The Case of the Consumer Decision Interval

That economists know next to nothing about measurement errors is not a good reason to assume them away. A more meaningful approach might be to investigate under which classes of measurement errors a given null hypothesis is rejected or not rejected. This paper illustrates this approach for the question of whether consumers make decisions at high or low frequency. It is shown that, with monthly data and assuming no measurement errors, a model of consumer behaviour that takes into account the durability of non-durable goods corroborates the low-frequency hypothesis. The paper then investigates the classes of measurement errors for which this conclusion does and does not hold.
JEL Classification Numbers: C4, E2.     

Interregional Income Redistribution and Convergence in a Model with Perfect Capital Mobility and Unionized Labor Markets

The model presents a general equilibrium dynamic model of an economy consisting of many regions. Capital is perfectly mobile and labor is immobile across regions. Wages are determined by local unions. There is training on the job and strategic complementarity between investment in physical capital by firms and investment in becoming “trainable’’ by workers. Structurally similar regional economies preserve forever their differences in per capita output and employment rate, if the workers’ non-labor income is equalized across regions by interregional income redistribution operated via central budget. Regional decentralization of income redistribution allows convergence in per capita output and employment rate.     

Price and quantity adjustment in a dynamic closed model: The dual stability theorem

The paper analyzes dual instability in a dynamic input-output framework. It is divided into three parts: the first gives an informal introduction, the second discusses the similarity with the knife edge, and the last suggests a new interpretation, which guarantees nonnegative solutions and relative stability. It has been assumed that the producers adjust their prices following an adaptive expectation mechanism, and the current level of investment to the expected value defined by a golden rule approach.