Externalities in Recruiting

External recruiting at least weakly improves the quality of the pool of applicants, but the incentive implications are less clear. Using a contest model, this paper investigates the pure incentive effects of external recruiting. Our results show that if workers are heterogeneous, the opening of a firm’s career system may lead to a homogenization of the pool of contestants and, thus, encourage the firm’s high ability workers to exert more effort. If this positive effect outweighs the discouragement of low ability workers, the firm will benefit from external recruiting. If, however, the discouragement effect dominates the homogenization effect, the firm should disregard external recruiting. In addition, product market competition makes opening of the career system less attractive for a firm since it increases the incentives of its competitors’ workers and hence strengthens the competitors

Renewing an ‘Armenian’ neighbourhood: Recursive dispossession and the history of extractive sovereignty in Turkey

Based on ethnographic research on an urban regeneration project targeting the historically Armenian quarter of a provincial capital in the Kurdish parts of Turkey, the article engages with two related, but separate strands of anthropological scholarship on the ‘fragmented’ nature of sovereignty to think through the relation of sovereignty and extraction. It does so, firstly, in relation to contemporary transformations of statecraft under conditions of financialised neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and secondly, in relation to the historically contingent constellation of property relations, racialisation and violence in the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation-state. The first leads me to argue that ‘fragmentation’ emerges here as a project internal to the practices of statecraft, that is, not primarily driven by market mechanisms, nor as something that extends beyond the nation-state. The historical account is offered as a case that further extends our scholarly archive of modern sovereignty as a global form intimately entangled with extraction and dispossession.H2020 European Research Councilhttps://doi.org/10.13039/100010663Peer Reviewe

Sovereign extractions, extractive sovereignty

Within the broader context of a financialised supply-chain capitalism and the international governance of statehood in the wake of decolonisation and European integration, this special issue asks how sovereignty figures in relation to extraction at this conjuncture. In this introduction, we outline the issue's conceptual framework. We argue that sovereignty manifests as a space-making power, across different scales, which delineates and crafts various sites and zones of contemporary processes of extraction as various kinds of ‘outside’. We understand this ‘outside’ not only from the structural point of view of capital accumulation or simply in terms of its function for the stabilisation of capitalism. Rather, we understand it as shaped and saturated by symbolic investments and determinations, through discursive formations, fantasies and patterns of racialisation and dehumanisation, which assist the operations of extractive capital but which may also feature histories and genealogies not reducible to the logics of capital. But we also take distance from an Agambenian take on the ‘outside’, which would figure its sovereign dimension in terms of negativity, as a withdrawal of the law and a form of abandonment. Our interest lies in tracing the mutual articulation and implication of (genocidal, colonial, imperial) violence and capitalist extractions of value and wealth as they intersect, often conjointly, at times in tension, in the crafting and delineation of space.Peer Reviewe

The Firm as the Locus of Social Comparisons

We suggest a parsimonious dynamic agency model in which workers have status concerns. A firm is a promotion hierarchy in which a worker's status depends on past performance. We investigate the optimality of two types of promotion hierarchies: (i) standard promotion practices, where agents have a job guarantee, and (ii) “up-or-out”, in which agents are fired when unsuccessful. We show that up-or-out is optimal if success is difficult to achieve. When success is less hard to achieve, standard promotion practices are optimal provided the payoffs associated with success are moderate. Otherwise, up-or-out is, again, optimal

Empathy: A clue for prosocialty and driver of indirect reciprocity.

Indirect reciprocity has been proposed to explain prosocial behavior among strangers, whereby the prosocial act is returned by a third party. However, what happens if the prosocial act cannot be observed by the third party? Here, we examine whether empathy serves as a clue for prosociality and whether people are more generous toward more empathetic people. In a laboratory study, we measured prosocial behavior as the amount sent in the dictator game and empathy based on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). By using an incentivized task, we find that people believe that more empathetic participants send more money in the dictator game. Thus, people see empathy as a clue for prosocial behavior. Furthermore, in a second dictator game, participants indirectly reciprocate by sending more money to more empathetic recipients. Therefore, we suggest that empathy can replace a reputation derived from observable prosocial behavior in triggering indirect reciprocity