Search results

Purpose – We investigate the outcomes of public sector charity provision, which relies on income redistribution. Increasing the level of redistribution can result in an efficiency-equality tradeoff. We investigate whether the efficiency-equality tradeoff can be explained by lowered work incentives.

Methodology – The chapter uses the methodology of laboratory experiments. We remove the administration costs of redistribution to see if a significant source of the tradeoff can be explained by lower work incentives.

Findings – We find a significant efficiency-equality tradeoff between low- and high-tax groups explained by lowered work incentives. Labor supply decisions are motivated by strategic and cooperative preferences which vary the size of the tradeoff.

Limitations – Our analysis is limited to measuring the size and distribution of labor income. We discuss avenues such as allowing for crowding out and volunteerism, to further explore the impact of public sector charity provision.

Practical and social implications – Charity can be provided by the public, private, and independent sector. The public sector must redistribute income to provide charity, which leads to an efficiency-equality tradeoff. This calls for a reconsideration of increasing dependence on public sector charity provision.

Originality – The efficiency-equality tradeoff traditionally focuses on the labor supply response to taxation. We allow subjects to respond to how their taxes are being used as well. Subjects are also given feedback on whether they are net taxpayers into redistribution or net recipients from it.

Taking global economic integration into consideration, this study investigates the effects of the imposition of the tariff. For every tariff increase, a percentage of the trade volume is reduced. This means, there is a tradeoff between globalization and restricted trade. This chapter presents empirical evidence from the European Union and the Sub-Saharan Africa region using annual times series for the period, 1980–2019. Result indicates that with coefficient of 4.31 percent, the tradeoff in European Union is higher than Sub-Saharan Africa region with coefficient of 2.66 percent. Implied is that developing countries are more likely to suffer more from the negative effect of globalization due to trade restrictions than the developed countries of the world. This is an indication that whether in developed or developing countries, a tradeoff exists between globalization and restricted trade. Hence, the imposition of tariffs and counter-tariffs is capable of shutting down globalization.

Institutional rules and economies of scale can create incentives for firms to make inframarginal decisions when offering fringe benefits. We examine how such incentives might affect a firm's offer of health insurance.

We develop and estimate an empirical model of the firm's offer of health insurance that includes incentives created by rules and economies of scale. We quantify the behavioral manifestations from rules and costs as recruiting difficulty in areas outside those in which compensation is set and the percentage of high-skilled jobs in the firm and use the California Health and Employment Surveys (CHES) to estimate the model.

We show a 10–13 percentage point increase in the probability of a firm offering workers health insurance in jobs outside of those in which compensation is being set, if the recruiting difficulty lies in mid- or high-skilled positions. This increase is about twice the size of the increase associated with recruiting difficulty in the position in which compensation is negotiated.

A failure to control for the influence of inframarginal decision making when estimating the wage-insurance tradeoff helps produce wrong-signed estimates.

By bringing institutional rules and economies of scale into the framework of a firm's offer of fringe benefits, we help move the focus of the fringe benefit-wage tradeoff away from the individual level.

The author argues and explains that the indigenous Eastern epistemological frame of yin-yang balancing can be taken as a unique system of thinking toward a meta-perspective. It is not only deeply rooted in the indigenous Eastern culture traditions, but also bears salient global implications, especially in the domain of paradox management. The purpose and contribution of this chapter are twofold: (1) to explain the unique and salient features of yin-yang balancing (the “either/and” system to reframe paradox into duality as partially conflicting and partially complementary, both spatially and temporarily) as compared with the Western logic systems (the “either/or” and “both/or” or “both/and” systems); and (2) to explore the global implications of the “either/and” system for future paradox research, including the three unique themes of overlap between opposites with the “seed” of one opposite inside the other; threshold from the contingent balance between partial separation and partial integration in line with specific contexts through three operating mechanisms, and knot for the special role of third-party to shift paradox from a dyadic level to a triadic and even a multiplex level.

The renascent focus on strategy in social movement research has made important contributions to our understanding of organizational dynamics, but has not been systematically applied to relational dynamics within movements as a whole. We begin to bridge that gap by presenting a framework for mapping the relative strategic positions of multiple collective actors along two dimensions of strategic orientation: the depth of challenge promoted and the breadth of appeal cultivated. This framework integrates a wider range of collective actors into analyses, and identifies distinct movement roles and contributions associated with different strategic positions. More importantly, the framework facilitates analysis of the overall distribution of actors across a movement and the nature and extent of linkages among them – what we refer to as strategic articulation. Drawing on a breadth of secondary research, we identify characteristics of movement distributions that facilitate stronger articulation and draw out their implications for intramovement relational dynamics – such as the balance between cooperation and competition, and the extent to which flanks are integrated or isolated.

Building upon the framework of the tradeoff model of capital structure and motivated by the equity market timing theory, we examine whether equity misvaluation is a source of adjustment “costs” that will affect a firm’s leverage adjustment speed toward target. We also investigate whether the quality of a firm’s long-term growth options will influence the decisions of managers to exploit the mispriced equity to converge to the optimum. Using a sample of listed Taiwanese firms during 1992–2014 and employing the market-to-book decomposition as developed by Rhodes-Kropf, Robinson, and Viswanathan (2005), we find that overleveraged and overvalued firms demonstrate faster adjustment speed than overleveraged but undervalued firms. Furthermore, controlling for the misvaluation status, high-growth firms converge to target faster than their low-growth counterparts. The effect of growth options on the relation between equity mispricing and adjustment speed does not mirror the effect of financing deficits. With the detailed financial information of the local companies across a rather long time series, this study provides incremental inputs to the literature of capital structure from the determinants of target leverage, the estimation of leverage adjustment speeds, to the identification of the sources of adjustment costs in an emerging market where institutional environment is strikingly different from the US.

Resource reconfiguration enables firms to adapt in dynamic environments by supplementing, removing, recombining, or redeploying resources. Whereas prior research has underscored the merits of resource reconfiguration and the modes for implementing it, little is known about the antecedents of this practice. According to prior research, under given industry conditions, resource reconfiguration is prompted by a firm’s corporate strategy and by characteristics of its knowledge assets. We complement this research by identifying learning from performance feedback as a fundamental driver of resource reconfiguration. We claim that performance decline relative to aspiration motivates the firm’s investment in knowledge reconfiguration, and that this investment is reinforced by the munificence of complementary resources in its industry, although uncertainty about the availability of such resources limits that investment. Testing our conjectures with a sample of 248 electronics firms during the period 1993–2001, we reveal a clear distinction between exploitative reconfiguration, which combines existing knowledge elements, and exploratory reconfiguration, which incorporates new knowledge elements. We demonstrate that performance decline relative to aspiration motivates a shift from exploitative reconfiguration to exploratory reconfiguration. Moreover, munificence of complementary resources mitigates the tradeoff between exploratory and exploitative reconfigurations, whereas uncertainty weakens the motivation to engage in both types of reconfiguration, despite the performance gap. Nevertheless, codeployment, which extends the deployment of knowledge assets to additional domains, is more susceptible to uncertainty than redeployment, which withdraws those assets from their original domain and reallocates them to new domains. Our study contributes to emerging research on resource reconfiguration, extends the literature on learning from performance feedback, and advances research on balancing exploration and exploitation.

This chapter reports estimates of consumers’ preferences for plans to improve food safety.

The plans are distinguished based on whether they address the ex ante risk of food borne illness or the ex post effects of the illness. They are also distinguished based on whether they focus on a public good – reducing risk of illness for all consumers or allowing individual households to reduce their private risks of contracting a food borne pathogen.

Based on a National Survey conducted in 2007 using the Knowledge Network internet panel, our findings indicate consumers favor ex ante risk reductions and are willing to pay approximately $250 annually to reduce the risk of food borne illness. Moreover, they prefer private to public approaches and would not support efforts to reduce the severity of cases of illness over risk reductions.

This study is the first research that allows a comparison of survey respondents’ choices between public and private mechanisms for ex ante risk reductions.

Chapter 2 describes how behavioral science research methods that management and marketing scholars apply in studying processes involving decisions and organizational outcomes relate to three principal research objectives: fulfilling generality of findings, achieving accuracy of process actions and outcomes, and capturing complexity of nuances and conditions. The chapter's unique contribution is in advocating and describing the possibilities of researchers replacing Thorngate's (1976) “postulate of commensurate complexity” — it is impossible for a theory of social behavior to be simultaneously general, accurate, and simple and as a result organizational theorists inevitably have to make tradeoffs in their theory development — with a new postulate of disproportionate achievement. This new postulate proposes the possibilities and advocates the building and testing of useful process models that achieve all three principal research objectives. Rather than assuming the stance that a researcher must make tradeoffs that permit achieving any two, but not all three, principal research objectives as, Weick (1979) clock analogy shows, this chapter advocates embracing a property space (a three-dimensional box rather than a clock) view of research objectives and research methods. Tradeoffs need not be made; having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too is possible. The chapter includes a brief review of principal criticisms that case study researchers often express of surveys of respondents using fixed-point surveys. Likewise, the chapter reviews principal criticisms of case study research studies that researchers who favor the use of fixed-point surveys express.