Suchergebnisse

We present a two‐period model in which an employee searches for business projects in a changing environment. An employee who discovers a profitable project in period 1 is reluctant to search again in period 2 because the old project may continue to be profitable. Management's response to this inertial tendency is either to increase the financial incentives to encourage searching or to accept no searching. The former response increases search efforts and total profits; the latter response has the opposite results. Inertia can be removed by restructuring the firm in period 2, but this may create a time‐inconsistency problem.

We study a situation in which an R&D department promotes the introduction of an innovation that results in costly re-adjustments for production workers. In response, the production department tries to resist change by improving the existing technology. Resistance to change triggers competition between departments, which, in turn, spurs effort. We show that firms balancing the strengths of the two departments perform better. As a negative effect, resistance to change might distort the R&D department's effort away from radical innovations. The firm can solve this problem by implementing the so-called skunk works model of innovation where the R&D department is isolated from the rest of the organization. Several implications for managing resistance to change and for the optimal design of R&D activities are derived.

This paper analyzes cooperation between sovereign national authorities in the supervision and regulation of a multinational bank. We take a political economy approach to regulation and assume that supervisors maximize the welfare of their own country. The communication between the supervisors is modeled as a 'cheap talk' game. We show that: (1) unless the interests of the countries are perfectly aligned, Þrst best closure regulation cannot be implemented; (2) the more aligned the interests are, the higher is welfare; (3) the bank can allocate its investments strategically across countries to escape closure.

On April 1, 2005, Denmark changed the way references prices, a main determinant of reimbursements for pharmaceutical purchases, are calculated. The previous reference prices, which were based on average EU prices, were substituted to minimum domestic prices. Novel to the literature, we estimate the joint effects of this reform on prices and quantities. Prices decreased more than 26 percent due to the reform, which reduced patient and government expenditures by 3.0 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, and producer revenues by 5.0 percent. The prices of expensive products decreased more than their cheaper counterparts, resulting in large differences in patient benefits from the reform.