the 'making' of an entrepreneur: testing a model of entrepreneurial intent among engineering students at MIT

In the present study a covariance structure model is tested to identify the causes of entrepreneurial intent among engineering students. Specifically, we explore whether steady personal dispositions or whether perceptions of contextual founding conditions have an impact on the intention to found one's own business. The survey of 512 students at the MIT School of Engineering broadly confirms the model. Personality traits have a strong impact on the attitude towards self–employment. The entrepreneurial attitude is strongly linked with the intention to start a new venture. The students' personality therefore shows an indirect effect on intentions. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial intent is directly affected by perceived barriers and support factors in the entrepreneurship–related context. The findings have important implications for policy makers inside and outside universities.     

Ein Jahr neue Positionierung des Journals für Betriebswirtschaft

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Why Customers Value Self‐Designed Products: The Importance of Process Effort and Enjoyment*

This study analyzes which factors prompt customers to attribute value to products they design themselves using mass‐customization (MC) toolkits. The assumption that self‐design delivers superior customer value is fundamental to the concept of MC toolkits and can be found in almost any conceptual work in this field. However, spectacular failures reinforce the practical relevance of developing a deeper understanding of why and when MC toolkits generate value for customers—and when they do not. Research to date has assumed that the closer fit between the self‐designed product's characteristics and the preferences of the customer is the dominant source of value. In this research, it is asked whether the enjoyment and perceived effort of the self‐design process have an additional impact on the perceived value of self‐designed products. This question is interesting because one could argue that a rational actor would hardly be willing to pay ex post for an economic good already consumed. The hypotheses are tested on 186 participants designing their own scarves with an MC toolkit. After completing the process, they submitted binding bids for “their” products in Vickrey auctions. Therefore, real buying behavior, not merely stated intentions, is observed. The present study finds that the subjective value of a self‐designed product (i.e., one's bid in the course of the auction) is indeed impacted not only by the preference fit the customer expects it to deliver but also by (1) the process enjoyment the customer reports, (2) the interaction of preference fit and process enjoyment, and (3) the interaction of preference fit and perceived process effort. In addition to its main effect, preference fit can be interpreted as a moderator of the value‐generating effect of process evaluation: in cases where the outcome of the process is perceived as positive (high preference fit), the customer also interprets process effort as a positive accomplishment, and this positive effect adds (further) value to the product. It appears that the perception of the self‐design process as a good or bad experience is partly constructed on the basis of the outcome of the process. In the opposite case (low preference fit), effort creates a negative effect that further reduces the subjective value of the product. Likewise, process enjoyment is amplified by preference fit, although enjoyment also has a significant main effect, which means that regardless of the outcome, customers attribute higher value to a self‐designed product if they enjoy the process. In a way, this effect resembles of the classic story of Tom Sawyer and the fence, in which Tom manages to “frame” the tedious chore of whitewashing a fence as a rare opportunity—thus persuading his friends to pay him for letting them work. Manufacturers designing an MC system therefore are advised to designing MC toolkits in a way that they elicit positive affective reactions that make their customers value their work.     

Income distributions and decomposable divergence measures

Inequality indices evaluate the divergence between the income distribution and the hypothetical situation where all individuals receive the mean income, and are unambiguously reduced by a Pigou–Dalton progressive transfer. This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate the divergence between any two income distributions, where the latter can be a reference distribution for the former. In the case where the reference distribution is perfectly egalitarian – and uniquely in this case – we assume that any progressive transfer reduces the divergence, and that the divergence can be additively separated into inequality and efficiency loss. We characterize the unique class of decomposable divergence measures consistent with these views. We derive the associated relative and absolute subclasses, and we illustrate the applicability of our results. This approach extends the generalized entropy studied in inequality measurement.     

An Old-Keynesian Note on Destabilizing Price Flexibility

Tobin's (1975) macrodynamic model on 'recession and depression' is extended by introducing two separate adjustment rules for money wages and the price level. It turns out that sluggish prices and, under an additional assumption, also sticky wages are favourable for local stability of the long-run equilibrium, while a high degree of flexibility tends to be destabilizing. In addition, a disposition to cyclical behaviour is indicated.     

Equal,proportional, and mixed sharing of cooperative production under the threat of sabotage

This paper analyzes the consequences of a parametrized class of sharing rules on the propensity of individuals to sabotage each other in a cooperative production framework. The considered sharing rules include equal and proportional sharing as special cases and are parametrized with respect to their sensitivity to relative input contributions. This parameter affects the equilibrium provision of productive individual labor (that increases the respective individual input contribution) but also the propensity to sabotage others (which decreases the input contributions of sabotaged individuals). The theoretical analysis shows that sharing rules in which more weight is put on equal sharing induce zero sabotage in equilibrium; however, they might also lead to inefficient underproduction. In contrast, sharing rules that are highly sensitive with respect to relative input contributions lead to destructive sabotage activities and moreover to inefficient overproduction.     

Harnessing the power of social incentives to curb shirking in teams

We study several solutions to shirking in teams, each of which triggers social incentives by reshaping the workplace social context. Using an experimental design, we manipulate social pressure at work by varying the type of workplace monitoring and the extent to which employees are allowed to engage in social interaction. This design allows us to assess the effectiveness as well as the appeal of each solution. Despite similar effectiveness in boosting productivity, only organizational systems involving social interaction (via chat) were comparably appealing to a baseline treatment. This suggests that solutions involving social interaction are more likely to be effective in the long‐run than solutions involving monitoring alone.     

Rezensionen

Ohne Zusammenfassung