Farmers’ Adoption of Irrigation Technologies: Experimental Evidence from a Coordination Game with Positive Network Externalities in India

Electric irrigation contributes to food security in rural India, but deteriorating electrical infrastructures threaten the functioning of farmers’ pump sets. This problem could be solved through investments in energy‐efficient technologies. However, network externalities create a coordination problem for farmers. We develop a framed field experiment to study the effects of group size, leading by example, and payoff structures on the ability to coordinate technology adoption investments. The experiment is based on a game that combines features of a step‐level public goods game and a critical mass game. Our findings show that smaller groups more frequently coordinate on payoff‐superior equilibria and that higher payoffs lead to more investments. Contrary to previous studies, leading by example reduces investments but has no effect on efficiency. Building on this analysis, we discuss possible bottom‐up solutions to the energy crisis in rural India.     

A complex systems methodology to transition management

There is a general sense of urgency that major technological transitions are required for sustainable development. Such transitions are best perceived as involving multiple transition steps along a transition path. Due to the path dependent and irreversible nature of innovation in complex technologies, an initial transition step along some preferred path may cut off paths that later may turn out to be more desirable. For these reasons, initial transition steps should allow for future flexibility, where we define flexibility as robustness regarding changing evidence and changing preferences. We propose a technology assessment methodology based on rugged fitness landscapes, which identifies the flexibility of initial transition steps in complex technologies. We illustrate our methodology by an empirical application to 2,646 possible future car systems.

Top management's social capital and learning in new product development and its interaction with external uncertainties

This paper examines the effect of the elements of top management's social capital on exploratory and exploitative learning and on the outcomes of new product development (NPD), as well as the interaction effects of these elements with external uncertainties. In so doing, the study follows prior research that calls for a fine-grained analysis of how top management's social capital can positively affect NPD outcomes. Large-scale survey data (675 firms) from the United States, Germany, and Australia are used to develop and empirically validate a theoretical framework. As hypothesized, elements of top management's social capital have positive, but not identical, effects on exploitative and exploratory learning. In addition, the effects of structural social capital on learning, as well as the effects of learning on NPD outcomes, are significantly moderated by the interplay of technology uncertainty and demand uncertainty. The research concludes with implications for theory and practice.     

Antecedents and Performance Implications of a Sales Department's Learning and Entrepreneurial Orientation in SMEs

Existing research on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has concentrated on the organizational level but neglected the analysis of more fine‐grained effects of EO in organizations. This study applies the concept of EO to the departmental level and investigates the sales department's entrepreneurial orientation (SDEO) and salespeople's learning orientation (SLO) and these orientations' impact on sales performance. Using a survey of 268 small and medium‐sized enterprises, the authors find that SDEO is a key performance lever, whereas SLO only indirectly fosters sales performance through driving SDEO. Furthermore, informal controls and technological turbulence are found to be important drivers of SDEO and SLO.     

Inside the Black Box of IASB Standard Setting: Evidence from Board Meeting Audio Playbacks on the Amendment of IAS 19 (2011)

We provide evidence on the little researched internal sphere of private IASB standard setting, more specifically, on the dynamic of board discussions and the respective impact of exogenous input such as comment letters, the array of arguments evoked in IASB debates, individual board member contribution and board-staff relations. We conduct a content analysis of audio recordings of 14 IASB meetings on the amendment of IAS 19 Employee Benefits (2011) between November 2008 and February 2010. Our main findings comprise the argument-based handling of comment letters not being conditioned by the political or economic importance of the senders, the gatekeeper role of staff members in channelling exogenous input and their equal role in board discussions and the dominant reference to conceptual arguments there. We also point to the heterogeneous involvement of board members, their different attribution to key issues and to further observations regarding the meeting governance, board’s discussion culture and etiquette. Our paper adds to the literature on private IASB standard setting, pension accounting and group decision making.

Data: All data are available from the public sources identified in this paper     

The European Redemption Pact: Implementation and macroeconomic effects

One possible solution to the sovereign debt crisis is the European Redemption Pact (ERP) proposed by the German Council of Economic Experts. The ERP provides sustainable financing conditions for participating sovereigns to facilitate bringing public debt ratios below the reference value of 60% within the next 20 to 25 years. In this paper, we describe one possible way of implementing the ERP and analyse the fiscal effects of participating in the ERP. The macroeconomic impact of the proposal is illustrated with the multi-country model NiGEM.     

Comprehension in risk elicitation experiments

Economic experiments are increasingly conducted with field populations for whom comprehension of instructions may be more difficult to achieve. We investigate how framing experimental instructions in a familiar context and incentivizing the experimental task may affect comprehension. Based on an experiment with 146 German farmers, we compare four different versions of a Holt-and-Laury multiple price list. We find that incentives have a small positive effect on comprehension, as measured by the probability of making inconsistent choices and subjects’ self-assessment. In the absence of incentives, framing negatively affects comprehension. Comprehension is enhanced for farmers who score high on a numeracy test. We conclude that contextual framing might confuse subjects, whereas incentives can help to facilitate comprehension of experimental instructions.     

The innovation impact of the EU Emission Trading System — Findings of company case studies in the German power sector

This paper provides a detailed analysis of how the European Emission Trading System (EU ETS) as the core climate policy instrument of the European Union has impacted innovation. Towards this end, we investigate the impact of the EU ETS on research, development and demonstration (RD&D), adoption, and organizational change. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the relative influences of context factors (policy mix, market factors and public acceptance) and firm characteristics (value chain position, technology portfolio, size and vision). Empirically, our qualitative analysis is based on multiple case studies with 19 power generators, technology providers and project developers in the German power sector which were conducted in 2008/09. We find that the innovation impact of the EU ETS has remained limited so far because of the scheme's initial lack of stringency and predictability and the relatively greater importance of context factors. Additionally, the impact varies significantly across technologies, firms, and innovation dimensions and is most pronounced for RD&D on carbon capture technologies and organizational changes. Our analysis suggests that the EU ETS on its own may not provide sufficient incentives for fundamental changes in corporate innovation activities at a level which ensures political long-term targets can be achieved.     

Incorporating long-term effects in determining the effectiveness of different types of online advertising

Although online advertising has become a full member of the marketing mix and is still growing in importance, studies of long-term, or lagged, advertising effects have generally either neglected online advertising channels or have treated online advertising as one homogeneous block. We analyze the short- and long-term effectiveness of different types of online advertising channels by incorporating separate time lags for each advertising channel. We look at the sales effect of email, banner, and price comparison advertising (PCA) using a sample of 2.8 million purchases and more than 1.1 million individual costumers aggregated to 365 days. Our analysis shows that email advertising has the longest effect, followed by banner advertising and PCA. We find that the length of the effect does not always go hand in hand with its intensity since, for example, banner advertising lasts longer than PCA but performs worse in terms of actual sales. This research yields important insights for theory and practice since it shows how to model long-term advertising effects and provides meaningful insights for improving the allocation of advertising budgets.