Are you really doing good things in your boss's eyes? Interactive effects of employee innovative work behavior and leader–member exchange on supervisory performance ratings

Organizations increasingly depend on employee efforts to innovate. However, the quality of relationships between leaders and employees may affect the recognition that employees receive for their innovative work behaviors. Drawing from a social cognition perspective, we tested a model in which leader–member exchange (LMX) moderates the impact of employee innovative work behavior on supervisory ratings of employee performance. Results from two multisource studies combining self, colleague, and supervisor ratings consistently showed that employees receive more favorable performance ratings by engaging in innovative work behavior when they have high‐quality LMX relationships. Moreover, we found that this interactive relationship was mediated by leader perceptions of innovative employee efforts, providing support for a moderated mediation model. Implications for the literatures on performance appraisal, LMX, and innovation are discussed.     

First mover or higher quality? Optimal product strategy in markets with positive feedbacks

Conventional wisdom holds that in markets with positive feedbacks being first to market can matter more than product quality. In this paper, we test that intuition within a generalized Pólya urn model. We find that if we assume constant feedbacks, in the long run, higher quality products dominate the market regardless of initial market shares, contradicting the common wisdom. However, when we allow for variable feedbacks, initial advantages persist almost indefinitely. Thus, the choice of whether to rush to market or focus on quality depends on market characteristics such as whether the positive feedbacks result from more consistent returns to scale or from more variable social influences.     

DOES GNP EXAGGERATE GROWTH IN “ACTUAL” OUTPUT? THE CASE OF THE UNITED STATES

Measures of national product can be misleading because there is nonmarket production. There are also distortions due to transactional activities, which are expenditures to support transactions, not actual output consumed. For 1950–89, this study recalculates output for the United States, adjusting for transactional activities and nonmarket production. Due to relatively rapid growth in transactional activities, GNP overstates output growth in the 1950s; because there was slow expansion of transactional activities in the early 1970s, GNP understates actual output. Since 1974, increases in transactional activities and shifts to market production lead GNP to exaggerate improvement of "actual" output per capita.     

Informational efficiency with ambiguous information

This paper proves the existence of fully revealing rational expectations equilibria for almost all sets of beliefs when investors are ambiguity averse and have preferences that are characterized by Choquet expected utility with a convex capacity. The result implies that strong-form efficient equilibrium prices exist even when many investors in the market make use of information in a way that is substantially different from traditional models of financial markets.     

Business cycle asymmetry via occasionally binding international borrowing constraints

This paper illustrates how occasionally binding credit constraints can be quantitatively important to delivering business-cycle asymmetries. An empirical exercise suggests that countries display some business-cycles asymmetries, and an open-economy real business-cycle model is assessed where an international borrowing constraint binds occasionally. In the model, downward movements with a slack constraint are sharper and quicker than upward movements with a binding constraint, and this can deliver asymmetry over the business cycle. The model is calibrated to Canadian data and suggests that a necessary ingredient for asymmetry is a high initial level of foreign debt.