Coordination within organizations has been recognized as an issue of central importance in the organizational economics literature, where the degree of interdependence between individuals’ actions is taken as given. In reality, however, the degree of interdependence is affected by the choice...

Using the personnel and transaction data from a large auto dealership in Japan, this paper discusses the value, incentives, assignments, determinants of performance, and learning of managers. We find that: (1) moving one standard deviation up the distribution of manager fixed effects raises a...

Using data from a questionnaire survey focusing on firms from Japan, China, and South Korea, this paper empirically examines the complementarity between product architecture and human resource (HR) management. The results of the analysis can be summarized as follows. First, in Japan and Korea,...

Subjective performance evaluation serves as a double-edged sword. While it can mitigate multitasking agency problems, it also opens the door to evaluators’ biases, resulting in lower job satisfaction and a higher rate of worker quits. Using the personnel and transaction records of individual...

Using personnel and transaction data obtained from two auto dealerships located in a large city in Canada, we examine whether same or different ethnic matches between salespersons and customers affect the prices and quantities of transactions. First, compared with White-White matches, we find...

Using microdata derived from the same questionnaire surveys conducted in 1992 and 2007, this paper examines changes in the economic effects of labor unions and attitudes toward unionization among nonunion workers in Japan. The main findings are as follows. First, while no union wage effects were...

This paper examines the incentive effect of a discontinuous and nonlinear compensation scheme, using the transaction data provided by two North American auto dealerships. Under the nonlinear scheme, a salesperson's expected daily commission revenue critically depends on his position in the pay...

This paper examines incentives and gaming behavior in a sales workforce using personnel records from one of Japan's largest auto sales chains. The company replaced a simple, linear compensation system in 2000 with nonlinear pay scheme kinked around a draw line. Econometric analysis indicates the...