Find Out How Much It Means to Me! The Importance of Interpersonal Respect in Work Values Compared to Perceived Organizational Practices

Two large online surveys were conducted among employees in Germany to explore the importance employees and organizations place on aspects of interpersonal respect in relation to other work values. The first study (n = 589) extracted a general ranking of work values, showing that employees rate issues of respect involving supervisors particularly high. The second study (n = 318) replicated the previous value ranking. Additionally, it is shown that the value priorities indicated by employees do not always match their perceptions of actual organizational practices. Particularly, interpersonal respect issues that involve employees’ supervisors diverge strongly negative. Consequences and potentials for change in organizations are discussed.     

Price–quality competition in a mixed duopoly

We examine competition between a private and a public provider in markets for merit goods, such as education, healthcare, housing, recreation, or culture. The private firm provides a high‐price/high‐quality variety of the good and serves richer individuals, whereas the public firm provides a low‐price/low‐quality variety and serves poorer individuals. We first characterize the private competitor’s best response to changes in the public firm’s price and quality. This enables us to examine the distributional effects of policies that affect the price or quality of the public firm’s product. We then numerically characterize the public firm’s optimal provision policy, taking the private response into consideration. Our results have implications for the financing of publicly provided goods, and for whether additional resources, if available, should be spent on reducing the price or enhancing the quality of these goods.     

Does war influence individual expectations?

We analyse the effect of mass violent conflict on individual expectations in Northern Uganda. We find that the expectations of the future economic situation are negatively affected by recent conflict while the effect on broadly defined welfare is less robust.     

Strategic Investment under Open Access: Theory and Evidence

We examine the incentives of access‐regulated firms to invest in infrastructure facilities they must share with competitors. We show that investment incentives can be decomposed into a non‐strategic and a strategic part. The non‐strategic part implies that investment depends positively on market size. The strategic incentives imply that investment also depends on market composition, namely, the market shares of the facility owner and its competitors. Using a dataset of regulated electric utilities in the United States, we find evidence that transmission investments are indeed made strategically. Ceteris paribus, utilities are less likely to invest, and investment levels are lower, when competitors occupy a larger share of the market.     

Naive Reinforcement Learning With Endogenous Aspirations

This article considers a simple model of reinforcement learning. All behavior change derives from the reinforcing or deterring effect of instantaneous payoff experiences. Payoff experiences are reinforcing or deterring depending on whether the payoff exceeds an aspiration level or falls short of it. Over time, the aspiration level is adjusted toward the actually experienced payoffs. This article shows that aspiration level adjustments may improve the decision maker's long-run performance by preventing him or her from feeling dissatisfied with even the best available strategies. However, such movements also lead to persistent deviations from expected payoff maximization by creating 'probability matching' effects.