The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to over-invest in their companies. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed at explaining this stylized fact, most of them focusing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows...

Digital work settings potentially facilitate remote collaboration and thereby decrease geographic frictions in knowledge work. Here, I analyze spatial collaboration patterns of some 191 thousand software developers in the United States on the largest code repository platform GitHub. Despite...

Hidden Champions (HCs) are firms unknown to the wider public, but global leaders in the niche markets they serve. This paper looks at distinctive features of these firms, focusing on their dynamic capabilities. Employing a unique data base on German firms, we identify a representative sample of...

Actors in various settings have been increasingly relying on algorithmic tools to support their decision-making. Much of the public debate concerning algorithms - especially the associated regulation of new technologies - rests on the assumption that humans can assess the quality of algorithms....

We study how the threat of entry affects service quantity and quality of general prac- titioners (GPs). We leverage Germany’s needs-based primary care planning system, in which the likelihood of new GPs reduces by 20 percentage points when primary care coverage exceeds a cut-off. We compile...

This paper shows the strategic aspects of international outsourcing in a duopolistic market. Due to different costs of integrated production and outsourcing, the choice of a firm influences the strategy of the competitor via the output price. Therefore, the resulting market constellation depends...

This paper shows the strategic aspects of international outsourcing in an oligopolistic market, if outsourcing is attractive because of fixed cost savings. We show that outsourcing decisions are strategic substitutes. Furthermore, we demonstrate that due to decreasing individual output,...

Over the past decade, new types of business incubation have been developed. One particularly prominent example is company builders, which use their own resources to build up companies, establishing numerous companies in a series. In doing so, this investor type facilitates internal and external...

We show that team formation can serve as an implicit commitment device to overcome problems of self-control. If individuals have present-biased preferences, effort that is costly today but rewarded at some later point in time is too low from the perspective of an individual's long-run self. If...