We test the effectiveness of team incentives by running a natural field experiment in a retail chain of 193 shops and 1,300 employees. As a response to intensified product market competition, the firm offered a bonus to shop teams for surpassing sales targets. A bonus to teams rather than...

Globalization has set new paradigms, especially in the business world. Breakthroughs in technology (telecommunications, logistics, the internet) and ideology (most notably economic and political trends in China and India) are creating exciting opportunities as well as crucial challenges. This...

Competitors can be valuable sources and partners for innovation activities. Against the background of international expansion of firms and increased international competition, the R&D collaborations with international competitors (international co-opetition) is becoming an increasingly...

We explore the determinants and effects of trust relationships between upstream suppliers and downstream producers. Using unique survey data on individual supplier-buyer relationships in the German automotive industry, we show, by means of different measures of supplier-buyer trust, that higher...

Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German...

Cartel detection is usually viewed as a key task of either competition authorities or compliance officials in firms with an elevated risk of cartelization. We argue that customers of hard core cartels can have both incentives and possibilities to detect such agreements on their own initiative...

Buyer power is widely considered to decrease innovation incentives of suppliers. However, there is little empirical evidence for this statement. Our paper analyses how buyer power influences innovation incentives of upstream firms while taking into account the type of competition in the...