A Coordination Game Model of Charitable Giving and Seed Money Effect

If potential donors for a charity project possess the warm‐glow properties in their preferences, we can represent their behavior with a coordination game. Accordingly, we construct a simultaneous incomplete information game model of charitable giving based on a simple global coordination game. We demonstrate that merely by the effect of seed money to shift the threshold requirement of the donations for project success downwards, the proportion of donors and the total amount of donations strictly and continuously increase with the amount of seed money. This result is partially compatible with the field experimental evidence in List and Lucking‐Reiley (2002).     

MULTIPROJECT STRATEGY AND SALES GROWTH: THE BENEFITS OF RAPID DESIGN TRANSFER IN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

This paper explores the impact on sales growth of different product development strategies, especially an approach that focuses on the coordination of multiple projects that overlap in time and share critical components. The data for our analysis comes from the automobile industry, although the principles we discuss should apply to any industry where firms compete with multiple product lines and where the sharing of components among more than one distinct product is both possible and desirable. Some firms compete by trying to develop ‘hit’ products in isolation, with little or no reuse of components or coordination with other products. Another way to compete is to leverage a firm’s investment in new technologies across as many new products as possible as quickly as possible, while the technologies are still relatively new. This paper proposes a typology that captures this effect by categorizing product development strategies into four types: new design, rapid (or concurrent) design transfer, sequential design transfer, and design modification. An analysis of 210 projects from the automobile industry between 1980 and 1991 indicates that firms utilizing the rapid design transfer strategy—quickly leveraging new platform components across multiple projects–increased sales more than when they or their competitors did not use this strategy. The study’s results suggest that not only the sharing of technology among multiple projects but also the speed of technology leveraging are important to sales growth. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.