Mentoring and Diversity

This paper studies the forces which determine how diversity at a firm evolves over time. We consider a dynamic model o a single firm with two levels of employees, the entry level and the upper level. In each period, the firm selects a subset of the entry-level workers for promotion to the upper level. The members of the entry-level worker pool vary in their initial ability as well as in their type,' where type could refer to gender or cultural background. Employees augment their initial ability by acquiring specific human capital in mentoring interactions with upper level employees. We assume that an entry-level worker receives more mentoring when a greater proportion of upper-level workers match the entry-level worker's type. In this model, it is optimal for the firm to consider type in addition to ability in making promotion decisions, so as to maximize the effectiveness of future mentoring. We derived conditions under which firms attain full diversity, as well as conditions under which there are multiple steady states, so that the level of diversity depends on the firm's initial conditions. With multiple steady states, temporary affirmative action policies can have a long-run impact on diversity levels.

Climate Change and American Know-How

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88524/1/2009_Climate_Change_Declaration_Op-Ed.pd

The impact of a chief planning officer on the administrative environment for planning

Institution-wide planning, to be effective, must have the support of key administrators. Presidents, vice-presidents, deans, and directors must feel that sufficient consensus can be reached on explicit goals to make comprehensive planning possible and worthwhile. While much has been written about the importance of CEO leadership in gaining broad support for planning, little has been said about the role of the chief planning officer in this regard. This paper, based on a national survey of administrators' views of planning, studies the relationship between having a chief planning officer and administrators' perceptions of campus planning. Its intended audience includes all those interested in institutional planning.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43608/1/11162_2004_Article_BF00991968.pd

Disruptive Technologies and the Emergence of Competition

We formalize the phenomenon of disruptive technologies (Christensen, 1997) that initially serve isolated market niches and, as they mature, expand to displace established technologies from mainstream segments. Using a model of horizontal and vertical differentiation with discrete customer segmentation, we show how the threat of disruption varies with the rate of technological advance, the number of firms using each technology, segments sizes, marginal costs, and the ability of firms to price discriminate. We characterize the effect of disruption on prices, market shares, social welfare and innovation incentives. We show that a shift from isolation to disruption lowers prices and increases social welfare, but may either increase or decrease the profits of firms using the new technology. By identifying the drivers and implications of technology competition, we contribute to debates about market definition that are often central in anti-trust deliberations. Moreover, we call into question standard results on the effects of mergers in Cournot models. Prior work finds that, absent efficiency gains, mergers among Cournot competitors lower welfare and are only profitable for the merging firms at high levels of concentration. We show that neither of these results need hold when mergers can alter the boundaries of technology competition.market definition; mergers; threat of substitutes