Club Networks with Multiple Memberships and Noncooperative Stability

Modeling club structures as bipartite directed networks, we formulate the problem of club formation as a noncooperative game of network formation and identify conditions on network formation rules and players’ network payoffs sufficient to guarantee that the game has a potential function. Our sufficient conditions on network formation rules require that each player be choose freely and unilaterally those clubs he joins and also his activities within these clubs (subject to his set of feasible actions). We refer to our conditions on rules as noncooperative free mobility. We also require that players’ payoffs be additively separable in player-specific payoffs and externalities (additive separability) and that payoff externalities — a function of club membership, club activities, and crowding — be identical across players (externality homogeneity). We then show that under these conditions, the noncooperative game of club network formation is a potential game over directed club networks and we discuss the implications of this result.

Nonconsensual International Lawmaking

This article documents the rise of nonconsensual international lawmaking and analyzes its consequences for the treaty design, treaty participation, and treaty adherence decisions of nation states. Grounding treaties upon the formal consent of states has numerous advantages for a decentralized and largely anarchic international legal system that suffers from a pervasive “compliance deficit.” But consent also has real costs, including the inability to ensure that all nations affected by transborder problems join treaties that seek to resolve those problems. This “participation deficit” helps explain why some international rules bind countries without their acceptance or approval. Such rules have wide applicability. But they can also increase sovereignty costs, exacerbating the compliance deficit. Nonconsensual international lawmaking thus appears to create an insoluble tradeoff between increasing participation and decreasing compliance. This article explains that such a tradeoff is not inevitable. Drawing on recent examples from multilateral efforts to prevent transnational terrorism, preserve the global environment, and protect human rights, the article demonstrates that the game-theoretic structure of certain cooperation problems, together with their institutional and political context, create self-enforcing equilibria in which compliance is a dominant strategy. In these situations, nonconsensual lawmaking reduces both the participation and the compliance deficits. In other issue areas, by contrast, problem structure and context do not affect the tradeoff between the two deficits, and the incentive to defect remains unaltered. Analyzing the differences among these issue areas helps to identify the conditions under which nonconsensual lawmaking increases the welfare of all states

Is It We or They? The Effect of Identity on Collaboration and Performance in Buyer-Supplier Relationships

In today’s scale-driven and technology-intensive global economy, collaboration becomes the supply chain’s core capability (Liker and Choi, 2004). A well-developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives companies a significant competitive advantage (Kanter, 1994). Retailers are increasingly relying on their suppliers to reduce costs, improve quality, and develop new processes and products faster than their rivals’ vendors can. On the other hand, suppliers benefit from retailers that they are able to monitor store-level demand in real time in order to ensure the top-selling items are in-stock or the accuracy and timeliness of retailer’s demand forecast. Previous literature has shown various ways to promote collaboration in buyer-supplier relationships, but it may also have negative impacts such as deception (Gneezy, 2005), dishonesty (Mazar et al., 2008), or opportunism (John, 1984). This dissertation aims to investigate the impact of two types of identity (induced group identity and natural identity) on discretionary collaborative behaviors without any monetary incentives and supply chain performance in buyer-supplier relationships. Using social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979), Essay 1 explores the influence of buyer-supplier identification which is defined as perceived oneness of a supplier/buyer with its partner’s organization and experience of its partner’s successes and failures as its own (Ashforth and Mael, 1989) on collaboration and supply chain performance, and the foundation and formation of buyer-supplier identification. To explore the effect of natural identity, particularly, gender identity, Essay 2 addresses the impact of gender composition in buyer-supplier relationships on collaboration, and supply chain performance. It investigates whether females and males exhibit differences in trust and trustworthiness. Controlled laboratory experiments are executed for Essays 1 and 2. Together the two essays bring the concept of identity to supply chain management literature and advance our understanding of the enablers and drivers that can increase buyer-supplier collaboration and supply chain performance