Publication records

Anna Frisch has tried to initiate change at Aesch AG, a large global provider of medical devices for the healthcare industry. As marketing director, she has identified major shifts in German healthcare that demand that Aesch changes its ways of approaching customers. Instead of targeting the specific needs of doctors in hospitals, Aesch should rather address the new decision makers: the CEOs, CFOs, or CIOs of hospitals, who have a different buying logic. In Aesch's matrix organization (global product responsibility, supported by regional sales) Anna wants to convince the heads of marketing for the different product businesses to change. She seems to be able to quickly convince her colleagues of what she calls "C-level marketing." However, as soon as work is supposed to start, she realizes that commitments were less strong than she assumed. A few weeks later, Anna is clearly told that there will be no support for her.
The short case study is set when Anna realizes the failure of her change initiative. The case discussion allows analyzing and discussing various mistakes in the areas of:
- defining an attractive vision and strategy,
- reading and playing the organizational culture, power and politics,
- communicating a change initiative successfully,
- managing the stakeholders.
The case is supported by a 6-minute video showing Anna reflecting on the events, her analysis of failure, and her personal preferences as of December 2008.

We study the properties of a profit-maximizing monopolist's optimal price distribution when selling to a loss-averse consumer, where (following K?szegi and Rabin (2006)) we assume that the consumer's reference point is her recent rational expectations about the purchase. If it is close to costless for the consumer to observe the realized price of the product, then - in a pattern consistent with several recently documented facts regarding supermarket pricing - the monopolist chooses low and variable "sale" prices with some probability and a high and sticky "regular" price with the complementary probability. Realizing that she will buy at the sale prices and hence that she will purchase with positive probability, the consumer chooses to avoid the painful uncertainty in whether she will get the product by buying also at the regular price. If it is more costly for the consumer to observe the realized price, then - in a pattern consistent with the pricing behavior of some other retailers (e.g. movie theaters) - the monopolist chooses a sticky price and holds no sales. In this case, a sale is less tempting and hence less effective in generating an expectation to purchase with positive probability. We also show that ex-ante competition for loyal consumers leads to sticky pricing while ex-post competition leads to marginal-cost pricing, and discuss several other extensions of the model.

We study a two-player dynamic investment model with information externalities and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a unique switching equilibrium. Within this setup, we ask whether policymakers should interfere when better informed agents make individual investment decisions. We find that when the public information is sufficiently high and a social planer therefore expects an investment boom, investments should be taxed. Conversely, any positive investment tax is suboptimally high if the public information is sufficiently unfavorable. We also show that an investment tax may increase overall investment activity.

 

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).

The hedonic value of an outcome can be influenced by the alternatives to which it is compared, which is why people expect to be happier with outcomes that maximize comparative value (e.g., the best of several mediocre alternatives) than with outcomes that maximize absolute value (e.g., the worst of several excellent alternatives). The results of five experiments suggest that affective forecasters overestimate the importance of comparative value because forecasters do not realize that comparison requires cognitive resources, and that experiences consume more cognitive resources than do forecasts. In other words, because forecasters overestimate the extent to which they will be able to think about what they didn't get while experiencing what they got.

With permission of Elsevier

This article introduces "career entrepreneurship," a rapidly spreading phenomenon in the global knowledge-driven economy. Career entrepreneurship involves taking an entrepreneurial approach to managing our careers. It means doing things that seem "illegitimate" to other people and contradict socially-recognized and accepted sequences of work experiences in terms of age, education, or socio-economic progression. This kind of behavior challenges established norms about typical career development. The evidence presented in this article suggests new possibilities for thinking about the way individuals invest in their careers, new insights for organizations interested in capturing the potential of career entrepreneurship, and new ideas for career and life coaches to support people embracing the phenomenon. The article offers a primer on career entrepreneurship to all three groups of readers, calling for more effective collaborative relationships and more effective leveraging of individuals' career investments.

The four-part case study (text cases A, B, C, and video case D) illustrates key concepts and lessons about leading adaptive change in the context of some extra-musical initiatives of Berlin-based and world-famous conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. The case illustrates the challenges associated with resistance to adaptive change, understanding of stakeholders, management of conflicts, and the psychological challenges of leading unpopular, although important, change efforts under the conditions of pressure from various affected parties, who consciously or unconsciously attempt to divert the change-oriented leader from pushing forward. The case serves as fruitful ground for exploration of the theory of adaptive change (as put forward by Heifetz and Linsky), discussion of the dangers of leading, and psychological challenges of leading.