It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO’s individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it underutilizes other employees’ knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees’ ideas...

Employee resistance against innovations is a virulent phenomenon and there is a broad theoretical literature on its determinants. The empirical evidence is scarce, however, and mainly provides descriptive evidence on the incidence of the phenomenon and concentrates on the effectiveness of change...

Multivariate Tobit models are estimated using German cross-sectional data to test whether strategic complementarities exist between expenditures in four different types of ICT-components. If two ICT-components are complements, they are correlated (provided that agents act rationally)....

We study the effects of improvements in eBay’s rating mechanism on seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior. Following a large sample of sellers over time, we exploit the fact that the rating mechanism was changed to reduce strategic bias in buyer rating. That improvement did not lead to...

Hotelling’s famous ‘Principle of Minimum Differentiation’ suggests that two firms engaging in spatial competition will decide to locate at the same place. Interpreting spatial competition as modeling product differentiation, firms will thus offer products that are not differentiated and...

This paper derives a three stage Cournot-oligopoly game for product innovation, expenditure on introducing the product and competition on the product market. Product innovation is assumed to increase consumer utility but is effective only if the innovating firm invests in marketing, so that...

In practice, two types of tournaments can be distinguished - U-type and J-type tournaments. In U-type tournaments, workers receive prizes that have been fixed in advance. In J-type tournaments, the employer fixes an aggregate wage bill in advance, which is then shared among the workers according...

This paper extends the standard principal-agent model with moral hazard to allow for agents having reference-dependent preferences according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The main finding is that loss aversion leads to fairly simple contracts. In particular, when shifting the focus from...

We study an industry in which an upstream monopolist supplies an essential input at a regulated price to several downstream firms. Legal unbundling means that a downstream firm owns the upstream firm but this upstream firm is legally independent and maximizes its own upstream profits. We allow...

Contractual and regulatory provisions for access affect incentives to invest in an upgraded network and, in particular, a next-generation access network. Investment decisions are made under uncertainty and have to be made over time. This papers provides a framework for taking uncertainty, risk...