Self‐regulation through Goal Setting*

Goals are an important motivator. But little is known about why and how people set them. We address this issue in a model based on two stylized facts. First, goals serve as reference points for performance. Second, present‐biased preferences create self‐control problems. We show the power and limits of self‐regulation through goals. Goals increase an individual's motivation—but only up to a certain point. Furthermore, they are painful self‐disciplining devices. Thus, greater self‐control problems may result in tougher goals; but for a severe present bias goals either lack a motivating force, or are too painful to be accepted.     

Mixed up? that’s good for motivation

We show that career concerns can arise in the absence of ex ante uncertainty about an agent’s type, if his unobservable actions influence future productivity. Implementing effort in mixed strategies allows the principal to endogenously introduce uncertainty about the agent’s ex post productivity and generate reputational incentives. Creating such ambiguity can be optimal for the principal, even though this exposes the agent to additional risk and reduces output. This finding for an environment with imperfect commitment contrasts with standard agency models, where implementing mixed strategy actions typically is not optimal if pure strategies can also be implemented.     

Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Much more at stake than Gewürztraminer: The U.S. Supreme Court's wine decision

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the laws of 11 states that permitted in-state wineries to sell wine directly to customers in those states, but prevented out-of-state wineries from doing the same. While the wine decision will help wineries that serve customers via the Internet, its economic implications are much greater for markets such as real estate and automobiles. The Court's broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause has the potential to eliminate many of the protectionist practices that states have developed to shield local firms from out-of-state competition, particularly that fostered by the Internet. Consumers will save an estimated $23.7 billion per year if these protectionist practices are eliminated.     

Who Uses Intermediaries in International Trade? Evidence from Firm‐level Survey Data

The present paper uses data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey conducted in Turkey in 2005 to shed light on the firms that use intermediaries in international trade. It lends robust empirical support to recent theories which suggest that indirect exporters are mostly small firms that are not profitable enough to cover the high fixed costs of building an own distribution network abroad. Manufacturers who develop new products are more likely to use trade intermediaries, as are firms that produce low‐quality goods. In contrast, neither foreign ownership nor credit constraints are correlated with the choice of export mode. Moreover, firms that rely on trade intermediaries to sell their goods abroad also do so to source their foreign inputs, implying that the role of intermediaries in facilitating trade may be larger than previous studies suggest.     

‘DUAL’ GRAVITY: USING SPATIAL ECONOMETRICS TO CONTROL FOR MULTILATERAL RESISTANCE

We derive a quantity‐based structural gravity equation system in which both trade flows and error terms are cross‐sectionally correlated. This system can be estimated using techniques borrowed from the spatial econometrics literature. To illustrate our methodology, we apply it to a well‐known Canada–US trade dataset. We find that border effects between the USA and Canada are smaller than suggested by previous studies: about 7.5 for Canadian provinces and about 1.3 for US states. Hence controlling directly for cross‐sectional interdependence among both trade flows and error terms reduces measured border effects by capturing ‘multilateral resistance’. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.