Publication database

Mistakes are unavoidable. Yet in most organizations, they are rarely thoroughly examined. An exception is the high-risk aviation industry, where experts have established an open and democratic culture for dealing with error. Confronting Mistakes draws on this expertise to initiate a new framework for active error management relevant to wider industry. By analyzing dramatic aviation accidents, Jan Hagen presents a new approach to error management in business to reveal how diagnostic, error-permissive behaviour is the first step towards turning mistakes into learning opportunities.

This book is an executive education companion for managerial courses in which participants engage in Peer Coaching. It is designed as a package with exercises and tools that can be used as advance preparation, in-class assignments, and post-course follow up work. The exercises and examples are based on real-life scenarios that managers bring into peer coaching sessions. They can be used for reflection, discussion, and role-plays for practicing peer coaching. The book can be used flexibly to meet the needs of a particular course.

This paper asks whether firms respond to cost shocks by introducing process innovations and increasing the use of managerial incentives. Using a large panel data set of workplaces in Canada, our identification strategy relies on exogenous variation in costs arising from increased border security along the 49th parallel fol- lowing 9/11. Our longitudinal difference-in-differences estimates indicate that firms responded to the cost shock by introducing new or improved processes, but did not change their use of managerial incentives. These results suggest that the threat of bankruptcy may provide impetus for improving efficiency.

© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Payment card networks, such as Visa, require merchants' banks to pay substantial "interchange" fees to cardholders' banks, on a per transaction basis. This paper shows that a network's profit-maximizing fee induces an inefficient price structure, over-subsidizing card usage and over-taxing merchants. In contrast to the literature we show that this distortion is systematic and arises from the fact that consumers make two distinct decisions (membership and usage) whereas merchants make only one (membership). These findings are robust to competition for cardholders and/or for merchants, network competition, and strategic card acceptance to attract consumers.

Copyright © 2013 by the American Economic Association.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).