Cooperation among strangers with limited information about reputation

The amount of institutional intervention necessary to secure efficiency-enhancing cooperation in markets and organizations, in circumstances where interactions take place among essentially strangers, depends critically on the amount of information informal reputation mechanisms need transmit. Models based on subgame perfection find that the information necessary to support cooperation is recursive in nature and thus information generating and processing requirements are quite demanding. Models that do not rely on subgame perfection, on the other hand, suggest that the information demands may be quite modest. The experiment we present indicates that even without any reputation information there is a non-negligible amount of cooperation that is, however, quite sensitive to the cooperation costs. For high costs, providing information about a partner's immediate past action increases cooperation. Recursive information about the partners' previous partners' reputation further promotes cooperation, regardless of the cooperation costs.     

The private value single item bisection auction

In this paper we present a new iterative auction, the bisection auction, that can be used for the sale of a single indivisible object. The bisection auction has fewer rounds than the classical English auction and causes less information to be revealed than the Vickrey auction. Still, it preserves all characteristics the English auction shares with the Vickrey auction: there exists an equilibrium in weakly dominant strategies in which everyone behaves truthfully, the object is allocated in accordance with efficiency requirements to the buyer who has the highest valuation, and the price paid by the winner of the object equals the second-highest valuationElena Grigorieva acknowledges support by the Dutch Science Foundation NWO through grant 401-01-101. Jean-Jacques Herings acknowledges support by the Dutch Science Foundation NWO through a VICI-grant. Rudolf Müller acknowledges support by European Commission through funds for the International Institute of Infonomics     

The dark side of buyer-supplier relationships: A social capital perspective

The literature on supply chain management (SCM) has consistently promoted the “bright side” of collaborative buyer-supplier relationships (BSRs). Based on the social capital argument, SCM scholars have investigated how a buyer can gain access to and leverage resources through its collaborative BSRs. Our study extends this research stream by considering the “dark side” of social capital in BSRs. It evaluates how social capital in its cognitive, relational, and structural forms contributes to or impedes value creation within BSRs. Both primary survey measures and secondary objective measures have been used in data analysis. The results show the presence of both the bright side, confirming the existing literature, and the dark side, extending the literature. There is an inverted curvilinear relationship between social capital and performance: Either too little or too much social capital can hurt performance. This study confirms that building social capital in a collaborative BSR positively affects buyer performance, but that if taken to an extreme it can reduce the buyer's ability to be objective and make effective decisions as well as increase the supplier's opportunistic behavior. Our study also examines how a buyer can delay the emergence of the dark side. It opens up new research avenues in the collaborative BSR context and suggests directions for future research and practice.     

Workers’ tenure and firm productivity: New evidence from matched employer-employee panel data

Using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data on Belgian firms, we explore the impact of workers’ tenure on firm productivity. To do so, we estimate production functions augmented with firm-level measures of tenure. We deal with the endogeneity of standard inputs and tenure, which arises from unobserved firm heterogeneity and reverse causality, by applying a modified version of Ackerberg et al.’s (2015) control function method, which explicitly removes firm fixed effects. Consistently with recent theoretical predictions, our analyses point to positive, but decreasing, returns to tenure. We also find that the impact differs widely across several firm dimensions. Tenure is particularly beneficial for productivity in contexts characterized by a certain degree of routineness and low job complexity. Along the same lines, our findings indicate that tenure exerts stronger positive impacts in industrial and capital-intensive firms, as well as in firms less reliant on ICT-intensive and knowledge-intensive processes.