Publication records

When organizations crowdsource ideas, they ultimately select only a small share of the submitted ideas for implementation. Organizations generally provide no feedback on ideas they do not select. Contributors whose ideas are not selected for implementation tend to forego submitting ideas in the future. We suggest that organizations can increase contributors’ willingness to submit ideas in the future by giving a thus far understudied form of feedback: rejections. Drawing on social network theory, we develop the overarching argument that rejections lead contributors to bond with the organization, increasing their willingness to continue to interact with the organization. While it may be counterintuitive to associate rejections with bonding, we hypothesize that rejections indicate to contributors that the organization is interested both in receiving their ideas and in developing a relationship with them. This effect, we argue, is particularly pronounced when rejections provide newcomers with explanations that suggest to them that they and the organization are a good match. To test our theory, we examine the crowdsourcing efforts of 70, 159 organizations that receive ideas from 1,336,154 contributors. Using large-scale content analysis, we examine differences in how rejections are written in order to disentangle the mechanisms through which rejections affect contributors’ willingness to continue to interact with an organization. We find that getting a rejection has a positive effect on a newcomer’s willingness to submit idea in the future. The effect is stronger if the rejection includes an explanation, and is particularly pronounced if the explanation accompanying the rejection matches the original idea in terms of linguistic style.

With permission of the Academy of Management

The paper discusses economic perspectives on recommunalization in the energy sector. When privatization and deregulation of public infrastructure services became the dominant paradigm of public policy in the 1980s and 1990s, it was considered an adequate measure to increase efficiency, enable consumer choice, and foster a cultural change towards more competitive practices among the management of utilities. In retrospect, the move towards market principles and privatization in infrastructure policies has not yielded regulatory convergence towards a liberalized system architecture. On the contrary, it can be observed that in some infrastructure sectors liberalization has succeeded as the dominant design, whereas other infrastructure services have by and large remained in public ownership and under strict government control (Observation #1). An analysis of the electricity sector shows that a broad spectrum of diverse regulatory models co-exists – across world regions, countries, and even individual states, such as in the USA (Observation #2). The recent wave of recommunalizations may be interpreted as a backlash to free-market principles in infrastructure services. In bottom-up initiatives, citizens intend to reclaim (at least partial) control of public infrastructure services. These initiatives operate in a larger context of private individuals and associations entering the electricity sector in a new form of dispersed private ownership (Observation #3). In the future all the diverse models might co-exist while digitalization will provide transparency for the actors involved.

Maintenance service plans (MSPs) are contracts for the provision of maintenance by a service provider to an equipment operator. These plans can have different payment structures and risk allocations, which induce various types of incentives for agents in the service chain. How do such structures affect service performance and service chain value? We provide an empirical answer to this question by using a unique panel data covering the sales and service records of more than 700 diagnostic body scanners. We exploit the presence of a standard warranty period and employ a matching approach to isolate the incentive effects of MSPs from the confounding effects of endogenous contract selection. We find that moving the equipment operator from a basic, pay-per-service plan to a fixed-fee, full-protection plan not only reduces reliability but also increases equipment service costs. Furthermore, that increase is driven by both the operator and the service provider. Our results indicate that incentive effects arising from MSPs leads to losses in service chain value, and we provide the first evidence that a basic pay-per-service plan—under which risk of equipment failure is borne by the operator—can improve performance and reduce costs.

Copyright © 2019, INFORMS

It is 25 years since the European Union (EU) agreed to complete the European Single Market (SM) in goods, services, people, and capital. While many barriers to the free movement of capital across borders have been removed, some important practical hurdles are still in place. The euro crisis has shown that the European financial sector in particular remains vulnerable and fragmented and this poses serious risks to the stability of both national economies and the euro area as a whole. In 2015, the European Commission therefore set out a list of measures to establish an integrated capital market in the EU by 2019.
The first part of this policy paper analyzes the channels through which financial integration affects growth, stability, and convergence in the EU, including capital allocation, production specialization, diversification of risk, and access to investment opportunities. The second part takes stock of persisting administrative and legal hurdles that impede full market integration. In particular, this paper distinguishes between a firm-level perspective, investors, and banks in its analysis. The final part provides some specific recommendations to improve the internal market for capital in the EU.

This chapter summarizes the need to transfer leadership development in Russian organizations from the hands of HR to senior executives and boards.