What is the fair wage? A model of as-if-co-operation

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Committing to Incentives: Should the Decision to Sanction be Revealed or Hidden?

Sanctions are widely used to promote compliance in principal-agent-relationships. While there is ample evidence confirming the predicted positive incentive effect of sanctions, it has also been shown that imposing sanctions may in fact reduce compliance by crowding-out intrinsic motivation. We add to the literature on the hidden costs of control by showing that these costs are restricted to situations where principals ex ante reveal their decision to sanction low compliance. If this decision is not revealed and agents do not know whether they will be sanctioned or not in case of low compliance, we do not find evidence of crowding-out - not even in those cases where agents firmly believe that they will be sanctioned in case of low performance.Intrinsic Motivation, Monetary Incentives, Job Performance

Intrafirm Conflicts and Interfirm Price Competition

We study interfirm price competition in the presence of horizontal and vertical intrafirm conflicts in each firm. Intrafirm conflicts are captured by a principal-agent framework with firms employing more than one agent and implementing a tournament incentive scheme. The principals offer premium incentives in the sense of revenue shares to which agents react by proposing a sales price. Introducing such intrafirm conflicts results in higher prices and lower effort levels. Increasing the number of agents lowers the optimal surplus share of the agents as well as the individual effort and the sales prices. Firm profits first increase and then decrease when employing more and more agents suggesting that principals should employ an intermediate number of agents.Price competition, Agency theory

Standortfaktor Arbeitsrecht: Die Bewertung durch ausländische Investoren

Die strikten Regulierungen im deutschen Arbeitsrecht gelten als Nachteil für Deutschland im internationalen Wettbewerb um Produktionsstandorte. Welche Bedeutung haben arbeitsrechtliche Faktoren bei der Standortentscheidung von Unternehmen? Wie bewerten US Investoren das deutsche Arbeitsrecht im Vergleich? --

IST Austria Thesis

Contagious diseases must transmit from infectious to susceptible hosts in order to reproduce. Whilst vectored pathogens can rely on intermediaries to find new hosts for them, many infectious pathogens require close contact or direct interaction between hosts for transmission. Hence, this means that conspecifics are often the main source of infection for most animals and so, in theory, animals should avoid conspecifics to reduce their risk of infection. Of course, in reality animals must interact with one another, as a bare minimum, to mate. However, being social provides many additional benefits and group living has become a taxonomically diverse and widespread trait. How then do social animals overcome the issue of increased disease? Over the last few decades, the social insects (ants, termites and some bees and wasps) have become a model system for studying disease in social animals. On paper, a social insect colony should be particularly susceptible to disease, given that they often contain thousands of potential hosts that are closely related and frequently interact, as well as exhibiting stable environmental conditions that encourage microbial growth. Yet, disease outbreaks appear to be rare and attempts to eradicate pest species using pathogens have failed time and again. Evolutionary biologists investigating this observation have discovered that the reduced disease susceptibility in social insects is, in part, due to collectively performed disease defences of the workers. These defences act like a “social immune system” for the colony, resulting in a per capita decrease in disease, termed social immunity. Our understanding of social immunity, and its importance in relation to the immunological defences of each insect, continues to grow, but there remain many open questions. In this thesis I have studied disease defence in garden ants. In the first data chapter, I use the invasive garden ant, Lasius neglectus, to investigate how colonies mitigate lethal infections and prevent them from spreading systemically. I find that ants have evolved ‘destructive disinfection’ – a behaviour that uses endogenously produced acidic poison to kill diseased brood and to prevent the pathogen from replicating. In the second experimental chapter, I continue to study the use of poison in invasive garden ant colonies, finding that it is sprayed prophylactically within the nest. However, this spraying has negative effects on developing pupae when they have had their cocoons artificially removed. Hence, I suggest that acidic nest sanitation may be maintaining larval cocoon spinning in this species. In the next experimental chapter, I investigated how colony founding black garden ant queens (Lasius niger) prevent disease when a co-foundress dies. I show that ant queens prophylactically perform undertaking behaviours, similar to those performed by the workers in mature nests. When a co-foundress was infected, these undertaking behaviours improved the survival of the healthy queen. In the final data chapter, I explored how immunocompetence (measured as antifungal activity) changes as incipient black garden ant colonies grow and mature, from the solitary queen phase to colonies with several hundred workers. Queen and worker antifungal activity varied throughout this time period, but despite social immunity, did not decrease as colonies matured. In addition to the above data chapters, this thesis includes two co-authored reviews. In the first, we examine the state of the art in the field of social immunity and how it might develop in the future. In the second, we identify several challenges and open questions in the study of disease defence in animals. We highlight how social insects offer a unique model to tackle some of these problems, as disease defence can be studied from the cell to the society

Peak oil and the Apocalypse: Apocalyptic imaginaries as a threat to politics proper

This thesis will examine the discourse of peak oil understood from a post-political perspective and challenge the un-reflexive assumption of peak oil as a natural challenger to current hegemony. It will do so by constructing a theoretical framework for ‘politics proper’ through which the peak oil discourse will be assessed. The conclusion is that while peak oil offer the potential of a serious rupture with the current regime; the discourse is also infused with apocalyptical imaginaries and populist maneuvers threatening to render such a rupture insignificant. The thesis warns against letting apolitical infusion obscure and hinder the illumination of proper political subjects and diverse alternatives to our current regime

Übertarifliche Entlohnung : ein Ergebnis vorweggenommener Verhandlungen (Wages above the collectively agreed level: a result of anticipated negotiations)

"The failure of the more recent attempts to discriminate between alternative explanation approaches of wages above the collectively agreed level (market, negotiation, and efficiency wage approach) (cf. last Bellman/Kohaut 1995 in this journal) is probably not the result of a data deficit, but of a theory deficit. In this article an attempt is made to reduce this theory deficit. Anew explanation approach is developed, the approach of anticipated or implied negotiations, in which it is assumed that that the employer anticipates the result of a negotiation with the employee in order to save the costs of an argument with him/her. In contrast to the approach of a collective 'second wage round' at company level, however, individual negotiations are assumed. The degree to which wages are paid above the collectively agreed level depends in the result both on a number of company-specific factors and on market and institutional factors. The conclusions are surprisingly consistent with the stylized facts of the labour market - even though the 'works council' was completely neglected as an institution." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))übertariflicher Lohn, Lohntheorie

Equity versus Efficiency? - Evidence from Three-Person Generosity Experiments -

In two-person generosity games the proposer's agreement payoff is exogenously given whereas that of the responder is endogenously determined by the proposer's choice of the pie size. Earlier results for two-person generosity games show that participants seem to care more for efficiency than for equity. In three-person generosity games equal agreement payoffs for two of the players are either exogenously excluded or imposed. We predict that the latter crowds out - or at least weakens - efficiency seeking. Our treatments rely on a 2x3 factorial design differing in whether the responder or the third (dummy) player is the residual claimant and whether the proposer's agreement payoff is larger, equal, or smaller than the other exogenously given agreement payoff.generosity game, equity, efficiency, experiment

Questioning the Fundamental Right to Marry

The Supreme Court has adopted the doctrine of a constitutional “fundamental right to marry,” and has construed this doctrine to mean a fundamental right to state-recognized legal-marriage. However, the doctrine has several problems: (a) the Court never satisfactorily explains why marriage is a fundamental right; (b) the Court never defines the boundaries of marriage as a fundamental right; and (c) the Court has occasionally treated marriage as if it were not a fundamental right. Further, the idea of a “fundamental right to marry” contains a debilitating internal contradiction: the notion of a fundamental right implies firm privileges which the state cannot deny, define, or disrespect, but marriage boundaries (the legal rules establishing who is eligible to marry whom, what formalities are required for marriage, and the legal ramifications of marriage) in the United States have always been subject to almost plenary state control which denies some marriages and refuses to give legal effect to others. What can a “right to marry” protecting individuals against the state possibly mean when the state itself determines what this thing called “marriage” is? Two observations about marriage suggest the answer to this question. First, the word “marriage” carries several different meanings which are related to each other but conceptually distinct. The “fundamental right to marry” conundrum arises in part from the conflation of these various meanings. Second, the history of western marriage regulation—particularly the contemporary rejection of the traditional beliefs about sexuality and marriage that once provided principled boundaries for a right to marry—explains why the various meanings of marriage often are conflated today, and it suggests how the law can escape the “fundamental right to marry” conundrum. The Supreme Court should reinterpret the fundamental right to marry as referring to the practice of personal-marriage behaviors (cohabitation, economic partnership, joint decision-making, etc.) rather than state-recognized legal-marriage. This would preserve the entrenched idea of a fundamental right to marry while cohering wit! h the negative liberty nature of the Court’s other recognized fundamental rights and accommodating the reality that the Constitution does not (currently) textually define or even mention marriage in any way

The International Regulation Of Maternity Leave: Leave Duration, Predictability, And Employer-Co-financed Maternity Pay

Provisions for maternity leave are common among industrialized countries, but their institutional design varies distinctly from country to country. In this paper we analyze the costs of maternity leave legislation in the US, Germany, Denmark and the UK by comparing the legal provisions on leave durations and on employer-co-financed maternity pay. We argue that the costs of re-organi­zation in response to maternity leave will not simply increase with its duration, but will instead be hump-shaped displaying a maximum at medium-leave durations. More than its expected duration, however, the predictability of leave duration will influence the costs of re-organization. Employer co-financed maternity pay further adds to these costs. Following our theoretical analysis, we re­view the existing empirical literature on maternity leave: While existing surveys among employers and working mothers are in line with our theoretical considerations, the mixed evidence presented in the existing econometric studies concerning the effect of leave duration on female wages and la­bor force participation may result from having excluded the issue of predictability of leave dura­tion as well as the question of co-financed maternity pay. We close with (tentative) conclusions for the design of maternity leave provisions, which are currently being discussed and revised in many countries around the world