Issue 1

Volume 30 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Spring 2021

30th Anniversary Issue!

Entry threat, entry delay, and Internet speed: The timing of the U.S. broadband rollout

Kyle Wilson, Mo Xiao, and Peter F. Orazem
In a rapidly growing industry, potential entrants strategically choose which local markets to enter. Facing the threat of additional entrants, a potential entrant may lower its expectation of future profits and delay entry into a local market, or it may accelerate entry due to preemptive motives. Using the evolution of local market structures of broadband Internet service providers from 1999 to 2007, we find that the former effect dominates the latter after allowing for spatial correlation across markets and accounting for endogenous market structure.

The effects of ambiguity on entrepreneurship

Claudio A. Bonilla and Pablo A. Gutiérrez Cubillos
We incorporate ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) into a classic model of entrepreneurship to analyze, among other things, its effects on the optimal level of business startups, the relation between total assets and the size of the entrepreneurial investment, the effects of increasing ambiguity on developing new ventures, and the decision to self‐select into entrepreneurship for an indifferent decision maker.

Harnessing the power of social incentives to curb shirking in teams

Brice Corgnet, Brian Gunia, and Roberto Hernán González
We study several solutions to shirking in teams, each of which triggers social incentives by reshaping the workplace social context. Using an experimental design, we manipulate social pressure at work by varying the type of workplace monitoring and the extent to which employees are allowed to engage in social interaction.

Worker visibility and firms’ retention policies

Simon Dato, Andreas Grunewald, and Matthias Kräkel
In the last two decades, the widespread use of web‐based social networks has led to a higher visibility of workers to the labor market. We theoretically and experimentally analyze the consequences of such increased labor market transparency for the efficiency of job assignments, the wages of workers, and firm profits.

Persistent and snap decision‐making

Tomoya Tajika
To avoid unfavorable inferences about her ability, an expert might cling to her original opinion and ignore valuable new information in formulating subsequent opinions. Conceivably, the expert might decline an initial opportunity to offer an opinion, delaying the opinion formation until more accurate information has arrived. However, we show that reputational concerns often lead an expert to express an opinion at the first opportunity, thereby making a snap decision.

The production economics of economics production

Yushan Hu and Ben G. Li
How is new economic knowledge produced over time? That depends on how the expertise of authors is managed within economic journals. Using data from 41 major economics journals spanning 21 years (1994–2014), we find that both the intensive margin (article length) and extensive margin (article number) of the discipline have been growing. In particular, the extensive margin has outgrown the intensive margin, such that each article produces absolutely more but relatively less knowledge.