Issue 2

Volume 28 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Summer 2019

Strategic attractiveness and release decisions for cultural goods

Paul Belleflamme and Dimitri Paolini
We study how producers of cultural goods can strategically invest in raising the attractiveness of their goods in order to secure the most profitable release dates. Results are consistent with the theoretical predictions, indicating that higher budget movies are released closer to seasonal demand peaks.

Can social media lead to labor market discrimination? Evidence from a field experiment

Matthieu Manant, Serge Pajak, and Nicolas Soulié
In this paper, we investigate the role of social media as a source of information for recruiters to discriminate applicants. We set up a field experiment over a 12‐month period, involving more than 800 applications from two fictitious applicants which differed in their perceived origins, which is an information available only from their Facebook profiles.

Media market concentration and pluralism

Torben Stühmeier
We study the relationship between market concentration and market variety, and thereby focus on two dimensions of variety, namely on internal variety and on external variety. In our setup, firms can expand their internal variety continuously around their focus point on a Salop‐circle. External variety then refers to the market supply of variety offered by all firms on the circle. We believe that this setting is particularly applicable to media.

Value capture in hierarchically organized value chains

Joachim Henkel and Alexander Hoffmann
We study how the structure of negotiations in a value chain affects the distribution of value among its members. To this end, we generalize the Shapley value and the core to hierarchical bargaining situations.

Competitive strategy for open and user innovation

Gastón Llanes
I study the incentives to open technologies in imperfectly competitive markets with user innovation. I find that large firms are less open and invest more in product development than small firms, and that firms react to greater openness from rivals by becoming more open.

Political contestability and public contract rigidity: An analysis of procurement contracts

Jean Beuve, Marian W. Moszoro, and Stéphane Saussier
Using a comprehensive set of contracts for a standard product, we compare procurement contracts in which the procurer is either a public administration or a private corporation. We find that public‐to‐private contracts feature more rigidity clauses than private‐to‐private contracts and that the use of rigidity clauses in public contracts rises when political risks are more salient. We argue that a significant part of the increased rigidity of public contracts is a contractual adaptation to limit political hazards from political opponents and interested third parties.

Do discriminatory leniency policies fight hard‐core cartels?

Georg Clemens and Holger A. Rau
This paper experimentally analyzes the effects of nondiscriminatory and discriminatory leniency policies on hard‐core cartels. We design a mechanism to form a hard‐core cartel, which allows that multiple ringleaders emerge.  We find that firms create trust among other firms when acting as ringleaders. This signaling effect ultimately facilitates coordination in the explicit cartel.

Calendar synchronization of gasoline price increases

Michael D. Noel
In many retail gasoline markets with Edgeworth price cycles, large and regular price increases occur on the same day of the week every week, that is, they are calendar synchronized. In this article, I test whether calendar synchronization leads to higher or lower consumer expenditures on gasoline compared to a world with cycles but without calendar synchronization.