Working Papers

We present a new methodology for studying the problem of intrafirm bargaining, based on the notion that contracts cannot commit the firm and its agents to wages and employment. In particular, we analyze a general bargaining game between the firm…

The organization of the value chain in the computer industry is undergoing profound change. The nature of this change is caricatured in two contrasting market models. In the “vertical” market model, large vertically integrated vendors of…

We explore the critical linkages between attributes of manufacturing strategy and attributes of marketing strategy. Generic linkages drawn from a significant managerial sample are presented and discussed. A second, independent sample is used to…

A model of vacancy rate determination is estimated using over thirty years of data for twenty U.S. office markets. The variances of individual city office vacancy rates are decomposed into common, time-varying components and city-specific fixed…

Throughout the world, returns policies are widespread in distribution. They are usually justified as a way of insuring retailers against excess inventory. We demonstrate that returns policies can increase manufacturer profitability even in the…

Marketing costs represent a significantly large component of the cost structure in many industries. Relative to research on manufacturing costs, however, marketing costs have received very little attention in the accounting literature. In the…

This paper studies the economic forces which shape the diversity of an organization over time. We introduce a direct connection between a worker’s attributes (such as gender or cultural background) and her productivity in a given firm.…

A dependent variable which is a discrete response causes the estimated coefficients to be inconsistent in a probit or logit model when misclassification is present. By ‘misclassification’ we mean that the response is reported or recorded in the…

Using an option pricing approach, this paper develops a model of a firm’s optimal investment strategy when confronted with a sequence of technological innovations. There are several key features of the model. First, successive innovations of…

Organizational change can be usefully conceptualized in terms of both its process and its content. Process refers to how change occurs. Content describes what actually changes in the organization. Theories and analyzes of organizational change…

We consider a wide number of applications of an intrafirm bargaining game within organizations where employees and the owner of a firm’s assets engage in wage negotiations. Under our presumption that contracts cannot serve to bind employees to…

We study why functional departments within companies, such as the marketing and manufacturing departments, have different preferences regarding what their firm should do. We then analyze why these disagreements lead to overt conflict. Finally,…

The process model of strategic business exit (SBE) maps the activities of different levels of management onto the business and corporate levels of strategy making involved in Intel Corporation’s exit from the dynamic random access memory (DRAM)…

The benefits from using a computer software, and hence the willingness of a customer to pay for it, often depends on the number of other customers using the same software. These benefits have been referred to in the literature as “network…

In this paper, we study the interaction between a firm’s internal organizational design, which we treat as an irreversible technology choice, and its external environment. We focus on two internal organizational design variables: product design…

Quality of products and services is a key strategic variable for many organizations. A good understanding of quality improvement drivers enables managers to better allocate resources to those areas most likely to improve quality levels. It can…

A quota plan pays a fixed salary which is supplemented by commission income that is a prespecified fraction of the dollar sales that exceed the quota. For a salesforce comprised of multiple salespersons/territories, the commission rate and salary…

This paper models a dynamic sequence of protest activities as an informational cascade. Such a synthesis of participation and signaling games motivates why large numbers of people may have incentives to engage in costly collective action. The…

This paper considers a two-period model of investment management. Investors decide how to reallocate their wealth between two mutual funds managed by different investment advisers after observing the performance of each adviser in the first…

This paper analyzes a model of financing for start-up companies, focusing on the investment decisions that are made in later stages of financing and on the interaction between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other capital providers. We…