We are excited to announce the return of the CIVOE Seminar series in the fall. This time we have scheduled 3 seminars to take place on the first Monday on 5 October, 2 November and 7 December 2020.
The CEPR International Virtual Organization Economics Seminars (CIVOE-Seminars) is aimed at drawing together organizational economics and personnel economics speakers during this time when our university and NBER conferences are occurring less frequently. We are also taking the opportunity to make this a truly international collection of colleagues and speakers. We will meet via a webinar monthly on Mondays at 6pm CEST. Further details about CIVOE can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/cepr-ivoes.
Our sixth CIVOE seminar will be on Monday 5 October 2020 at 6pm CEST / 5pm London / 12pm East Coast / 11am Chicago / 9am West Coast. Our speaker will be Bob Gibbons (MIT and CEPR) presenting on “Building an Equilibrium: Rules versus Principles in Relational Contracts” with Manuel Grieder, Holger Herz and Christian Zehnder.
Title: Building an Equilibrium: Rules versus Principles in Relational Contracts
Authors: Bob Gibbons, Manuel Grieder, Holger Herz and Christian Zehnder
Abstract: Effective organizations are able to adapt members' strategies to unforeseen change in an efficient manner. We study when relational contracts enable organizations to achieve this. Specifically, in a novel experiment we explored the hypothesis that basing a relational contract on general principles rather than on specific rules is more successful in achieving efficient adaptation. In our Baseline condition, we indeed observe that, compared to pairs who relied on specific rules, those who articulated general principles achieved significantly higher performance after change occurred. Underlying this correlation, we also find that pairs with principle-based agreements were more likely both to expect and to take actions that were consistent with what their relational contract prescribed. To investigate whether there is a causal link between principle-based agreements and performance, we implemented a \Nudge" intervention intended to foster principle-based relational contracts. The Nudge succeeded in causing more pairs to articulate principles, but the intervention failed to increase performance after the shock because many of the pairs induced to articulate principles then did not take actions that were consistent with their relational contracts. In short, our results suggest that (1) principle-based relational contracts may improve organizational performance, but also that (2) high-performing relational contracts may be difficult to build.
Please register your interest by using this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqdumgrj4jHdbaZj1S6iuKhcNTOAJDJlXo, After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. You will only need to register once and can use the same Zoom joining details to join all 3 seminars.
Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think may be interested.
To get in touch with us, suggest a speaker, or any other questions, please email us at [email protected]. Or to join the CIVOE mailing list please click here.
