Issue 2

Volume 26 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Summer 2017

Measuring Consumer Preferences for Video Content Provision Via Cord-Cutting Behavior

Jeffrey Prince, Shane Greenstein
The television industry is undergoing a generational shift in structure; however, many demand-side determinants are still not well understood. We model how consumers choose video content provision among over-the-air (OTA), paid subscription to cable or satellite, and online streaming (also known as over-the-top, or OTT).

Privacy Is Precious: On the Attempt of Lifting Anonymity on the Internet to Increase Revenue

Tobias Regner and Gerhard Riener
We investigate the effect of a reduction of anonymity on consumers' purchase decisions (whether to buy, and if so how much to pay) at an online music store with Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW)-like pricing and in an Internet experiment mimicking the real world situation. Our results suggest that the positive effect of reduced anonymity, previously established for donation or public goods contexts, does not extend to a consumption environment.

The Quality of Institutions and Organizational Form Decisions: Evidence from Within the Firm

Francine Lafontaine, Rozenn Perrigot, Nathan E. Wilson
We use data on the operations of a multinational, multibrand hotel company to show that in environments where local institutions are weaker—as proxied mainly by the World Bank's Checks index—the company eschews direct ownership. Rather than increasing its reliance on franchising, as predicted by some models, the company relies more on another form of organization commonly used in this industry, namely management contracts.

Vertical Integration and Firm Productivity

Hongyi Li, Yi Lu, Zhigang Tao
This paper uses three cross-industry datasets from China and other developing countries to study the effect of vertical integration on firm productivity. Our findings suggest that vertical integration has a negative impact on productivity, in contrast to recent studies based on U.S. firms. We argue that in settings with poor corporate governance, vertical integration reduces firm productivity because it enables inefficient rent-seeking by insiders.

Optimal Loyalty-Based Management

Dongsoo Shin
This paper studies an agency model in which an entrepreneur selects a manager from a candidate set. The selected manager's effort improves the project's potential environment, and is a hidden action. The realized project environment is the entrepreneur's private information.

Honest versus Misleading Certification

Philippe Mahenc
This paper questions the honesty of third-party certification in the market for a good whose environmental quality is not observable by consumers. I show that certification can only be honest when the certifier is driven more by social welfare than by profit. In the reverse case, the certifier cannot help jamming the price signal, thereby granting unreliable labels.

Punishment Motives for Small and Big Lies

Gerald Eisenkopf, Ruslan Gurtoviy, and Verena Utikal
Corporate fraud typically involves deceptive financial statements that are harmful for some stakeholders. We analyze how preferences for honesty and economic fairness shape the punishment of such untruthful statements. Our results suggest that popular demand for punitive measures in case of financial scandals reflects a genuine interest in the enforcement of social norms.

Copyright Enforcement: Evidence from Two Field Experiments

Hong Luo, Julie Holland Mortimer
Effective dispute resolution is important for reducing private and social costs. We study how resolution responds to changes in price and communication using a new, extensive data set of copyright infringement incidences by firms.