The keys to effective teamwork in firms are (1) carefully designed team-formation policies that take into account what level of diversity of skills, knowledge, and demographics is desirable and (2) balanced team-based incentives. Employers need to choose policies that maximize the gains from...

Employers want motivated and productive employees. Are there ways to increase employee motivation without relying solely on monetary incentives, such as pay-for-performance schemes? One tool that has shown promise in recent decades for improving worker performance is setting goals, whether they...

This study investigates induced productivity effects of firms introducing new environmental technologies. The literature on within-firm organisational change and productivity suggests that firms can achieve higher productivity gains from adopting new technologies if they adapt their...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt, dass die Festlegung der Fertigungstiefe in der Gegenstromplanung von Strategien kein stringentes Instrument der Unternehmensführung ist. Die Top-Down und Bottom-Up Analyse über die hierarchischen Ebenen der Unternehmens-, Wettbewerbs- und Funktionalstrategie...

In the German automobile industry the vertical integration, as an indicator of value added, is on average low. Beyond the argument of relative high labour costs for manufacturing, several specific reasons for the level of vertical integration, linked to the flexibility of business administration...

We often use delegation as a commitment device if a government faces problems of timeinconsistency. McCallum (1995, AER P&P) challenged this practice, claiming that delegation merely relocates the commitment problem but does not solve it. In a model where delegation and specific policies are...

How can a manager influence workers' activity while knowing little about it? This paper examines a situation where production requires several tasks, and the manager wants to direct production to achieve a preferred allocation of effort across tasks. However, the effort that is required for each...

The object of the present analysis is organizational slack. The paper targets at a "slack type" which consists of basic information deriving from slack functions, slack conditions, antecedents of slack and dispositional requirements of slack. The purpose of the analysis is the creation of a...

This article incorporates a political decision process into an urban land use model to predict the likely location of a public good. It fills an important gap in the literature by modeling the endogenous location of open space. The article compares open space decisions made under a...