2019/12/17 (火) 15:30～17:00
第2研究館 2階 小会議室 (217室)

Henry Schneider （Queen's University）

"Promoting Best Practices in a Multitask Workplace"

Employers often identify best practices and encourage workers to use them. We consider how best to incentivize best practices by analyzing data from field experiments at an auto repair firm. The best practice we consider is the use of checklists by mechanics during car inspections. We find that low-powered incentives to use checklists generate much better outcomes than high-powered incentives. High-powered incentives for checklist use had the effect of crowding out time for actual repairs. We explain this result using a modified multitask principal-agent model that predicts an inverted-U relationship between incentive strength on one task and overall output. These results illustrate how moderate incentives for best practices may have large benefits even in a multitask setting, while strong incentives can be counterproductive.

2019/12/10 (火) 15:30～17:00
第2研究館 2階 小会議室 (217室)

Mark Armstrong （University of Oxford）

"Competition with Captive Customers"

We explore patterns of competitive interaction by studying mixed-strategy equilibrium pricing in oligopoly settings where consumers vary in the set of suppliers they consider for their purchase. In the case of nested reach we find equilibria, unlike those in existing models, in which price competition is segmented: small firms offer only low prices and large firms only offer high prices. We characterize equilibria in the three-firm case using correlation measures of competition between pairs of firms. We then contrast them with equilibria in the parallel model with capacity constraints. A theme of the analysis is how patterns of consumer consideration matter for competitive outcomes.

2019/6/25(火) 15:30～17:00
第2研究館 2階 小会議室 (217室)

Takeshi Murooka （Osaka University）

"Market Competition and Informal Incentives"

2019/5/14 (火) 15:30～17:00
第2研究館 2階 小会議室 (217室)

Takao Kato (Colgate University)

"Advising, Gender, and Performance: Evidence from a University with Exogenous Adviser-Student Gender Match"

2019/4/9 (火) 15:30～17:00
第2研究館 2階 小会議室 (217室)

Koji Kotani (Kochi University of Technology)

" Concerns for future generations in societies: A deliberative analysis of the intergenerational sustainability dilemma "

The intergenerational sustainability dilemma (ISD) is a serious problem in that the current generation tends to choose actions to their benefit without considering future generations. However, little is known about how people deliberate and what types of "concepts" people consider with regard to the ISD in societies. We institute field experiments of an ISD game (ISDG) and conduct qualitative deliberative analysis in rural and urban societies of Nepal. A sequence of six generations, each composed of three people, is organized, and each generation is asked to choose whether to maintain intergenerational sustainability (sustainable option) or maximize their payoff by irreversibly imposing costs on future generations (unsustainable option) in the ISDG. Each generation conducts a discussion up to 10 minutes before making the decision, enabling deliberative analysis of the ISD. The qualitative deliberative analysis shows that the attitudes and concepts, such as ideas, motivations and reasoning, that people discuss during the deliberation vary between urban and rural people. A considerable portion of urban people are identified to be "stable" as "influencers" that consistently argue for supporting the unsustainable option and another considerable portion of urban people are "dependent" as "conditional followers" to follow the influencers, while rural people do not show such tendencies. Moreover, urban subjects discuss more arguments not to consider future generations during their deliberation than do rural people, leading urban generations to more frequently choose unsustainable options. Overall, our deliberative analysis finds that urban subjects may be becoming less concerned about future generations.