Inertia and Incentives: Bridging Organizational Economics and Organizational Theory

Organizational theorists have long acknowledged the importance of the formal and informal incentives facing a firm%u2019s employees, stressing that the political economy of a firm plays a major role in shaping organizational life and firm behavior. Yet the detailed study of incentive systems has traditionally been left in the hands of (organizational) economists, with most organizational theorists focusing their attention on critical problems in culture, network structure, framing and so on -- in essence, the social context in which economics and incentive systems are embedded. We argue that this separation of domains is problematic. The economics literature, for example, is unable to explain why organizations should find it difficult to change incentive structures in the face of environmental change, while the organizational literature focuses heavily on the role of inertia as sources of organizational rigidity. Drawing on recent research on incentives in organizational economics and on cognition in organizational theory, we build a framework for the analysis of incentives that highlights the ways in which incentives and cognition -- while being analytically distinct concepts -- are phenomenologically deeply intertwined. We suggest that incentives and cognition coevolve so that organizational competencies or routines are as much about building knowledge of %u201Cwhat should be rewarded%u201D as they are about %u201Cwhat should be done.%u201D

A Cross County Examination of Fiscal Federalism in the 2016 Election

The 2016 election has often been referred to as one of the most unorthodox elections in United States history. Both major candidates had their own unusual qualities about them. Hillary Clinton was the first woman to receive a major party’s nomination. Donald Trump ran with no political experience, using a rhetoric that was foreign to the established political world. And yet, Donald Trump did the unthinkable and was elected to the highest office in the nation. He triggered a voice that many felt was silenced in recent years. By laughing in the face of political correctness, and speaking about what many felt too ashamed to say out loud, he created a whole new political climate. His wars on immigration, socialism, and the media became fighting points for all of his supporters. Cries of “Build that Wall” and “Make America Great Again” flooded the internet, Trump’s rallies, and the streets of the US. Trump became a force which has never been seen before. Within the established political sphere, each party was known to align itself with certain traditional ideas. One major policy point the GOP fights for is smaller government, and less government intervention. Fiscal federalism is the term used to describe the levels of centralized power, and what power should be allocated to which level of the government. This thesis seeks to investigate whether the voting population is actually voting for these policies, or if something else is a driving factor. Using county-level data, specifically per capita net federal assistance as the measure for fiscal federalism, together with several control variable, regressions were run to understand how voting in the 2016 election measured up with these beliefs. Hypothetically, counties that voted Republican, should value small government. Under that assumption, they should be taking the least federal assistance, and paying the most in taxes. However, our results show that the higher Republican vote share a county had, the larger their net federal assistance to the Federal government. This positive and robust relationship is completely at odds with the established ideas of what the GOP stands for

Big Food and Soda Versus Public Health: Industry Litigation Against Local Government Regulations to Promote Healthy Diets

Diets high in fats, sugars, and sodium are contributing to alarming levels of obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers throughout the United States. Sugary drinks, which include beverages that contain added caloric sweeteners such as flavored milks, fruit drinks, sports drinks, and sodas, are the largest source of added sugar in the American diet and an important causative factor for obesity and other diet-related diseases. City and county governments have emerged as key innovators to promote healthier diets, adopting menu labeling laws to facilitate informed choices and soda taxes, warnings labels, and a soda portion cap to discourage consumption. These measures raise tension between the public health promotion and the food and beverage industry’s interests in maximizing profits. This article analyzes the food and beverage industry’s efforts to undermine local government nutrition promotion measures, including lobbying, funding scientific research, public messaging, and litigation. It examines four case studies (New York City’s soda portion cap, San Francisco’s soda warnings ordinance, and soda taxes in Philadelphia and Cook County), and distills steps that local governments can take to address industry opposition and help ensure the legal viability and political sustainability of key public health interventions

Public Employee Free Speech After \u3cem\u3eGarcetti\u3c/em\u3e: Has the Seventh Circuit Been Ignoring a Question of Fact?

Before the United States Supreme Court decided Garcetti v. Ceballos in 2006, courts decided the question whether a public employee\u27s speech was protected by the First Amendment as a matter of law. Courts asked whether the speech addressed a matter of public concern. If it did, then the speech was protected if the employee\u27s interest in exercising her First Amendment rights outweighed the employer\u27s interest in maintaining an efficient workplace. Garcetti introduced a new threshold question: whether the public employee spoke pursuant to her official duties. This seems to introduce a factual question to the public employee free speech inquiry: what exactly were the employee\u27s job duties? However, most of the United States Circuit Courts of Appeals, including the Seventh Circuit, have continued to treat the inquiry as purely legal. In several cases, the Seventh Circuit has decided as a matter of law that an employee spoke pursuant to his job duties and affirmed summary judgment against him, even where he argued that his duties did not include making the kind of speech at issue. Because this reasoning leads to unfair results, this Note argues that the Seventh Circuit should treat the question of what a public employee\u27s job duties were as a question of fact

Public Employee Free Speech After \u3cem\u3eGarcetti\u3c/em\u3e: Has the Seventh Circuit Been Ignoring a Question of Fact?

Before the United States Supreme Court decided Garcetti v. Ceballos in 2006, courts decided the question whether a public employee\u27s speech was protected by the First Amendment as a matter of law. Courts asked whether the speech addressed a matter of public concern. If it did, then the speech was protected if the employee\u27s interest in exercising her First Amendment rights outweighed the employer\u27s interest in maintaining an efficient workplace. Garcetti introduced a new threshold question: whether the public employee spoke pursuant to her official duties. This seems to introduce a factual question to the public employee free speech inquiry: what exactly were the employee\u27s job duties? However, most of the United States Circuit Courts of Appeals, including the Seventh Circuit, have continued to treat the inquiry as purely legal. In several cases, the Seventh Circuit has decided as a matter of law that an employee spoke pursuant to his job duties and affirmed summary judgment against him, even where he argued that his duties did not include making the kind of speech at issue. Because this reasoning leads to unfair results, this Note argues that the Seventh Circuit should treat the question of what a public employee\u27s job duties were as a question of fact

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

This paper reports on a field study of strategy making in one organization facing an industry crisis. In a comparison of five strategy projects, we observed that organizational participants struggled with competing interpretations of what might emerge in the future, what was currently at stake, and even what had happened in the past. We develop a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action. We found that settling on a particular account required it to be coherent, plausible, and acceptable; otherwise, breakdowns resulted. Such breakdowns could impede progress, but they could also be generative in provoking a search for new interpretations and possibilities for action. The more intensely actors engaged in temporal work, the more likely the strategies departed from the status quo. Our model suggests that strategy cannot be understood as the product of more or less accurate forecasting without considering the multiple interpretations of present concerns and historical trajectories that help to constitute those forecasts. Projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them. These insights into the mechanisms of strategy making help explain the practices and conditions that produce organizational inertia and change.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant #IIS - 0085725)Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Microphotonics Center (MIT Communications Technology Roadmap Project)Wharton School. Center for Leadership and Change Managemen

Are Patents Impeding Medical Care and Innovation?

This month's debate examines whether the current patent system is crucial for stimulating health research or whether it is stifling biomedical research and impeding medical care. Background to the debate: Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers argue that the current patent system is crucial for stimulating research and development (R&D), leading to new products that improve medical care. The financial return on their investments that is afforded by patent protection, they claim, is an incentive toward innovation and reinvestment into further R&D. But this view has been challenged in recent years. Many commentators argue that patents are stifling biomedical research, for example by preventing researchers from accessing patented materials or methods they need for their studies. Patents have also been blamed for impeding medical care by raising prices of essential medicines, such as antiretroviral drugs, in poor countries. This debate examines whether and how patents are impeding health care and innovation

Representations of the Multicast Network Problem

We approach the problem of linear network coding for multicast networks from different perspectives. We introduce the notion of the coding points of a network, which are edges of the network where messages combine and coding occurs. We give an integer linear program that leads to choices of paths through the network that minimize the number of coding points. We introduce the code graph of a network, a simplified directed graph that maintains the information essential to understanding the coding properties of the network. One of the main problems in network coding is to understand when the capacity of a multicast network is achieved with linear network coding over a finite field of size q. We explain how this problem can be interpreted in terms of rational points on certain algebraic varieties.Comment: 24 pages, 19 figure

Reconciling optical and radio observations of the binary millisecond pulsar PSR J1640+2224

Previous optical and radio observations of the binary millisecond pulsar PSR J1640+2224 have come to inconsistent conclusions about the identity of its companion, with some observations suggesting the companion is a low-mass helium-core (He-core) white dwarf (WD), while others indicate it is most likely a high-mass carbon-oxygen (CO) WD. Binary evolution models predict PSR J1640+2224 most likely formed in a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) based on the pulsar's short spin period and long-period, low-eccentricity orbit, in which case its companion should be a He-core WD with mass about $0.35 - 0.39 \, M_\odot$, depending on metallicity. If it is instead a CO WD, that would suggest the system has an unusual formation history. In this paper we present the first astrometric parallax measurement for this system from observations made with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), from which we determine the distance to be $1520^{+170}_{-150}\,\mathrm{pc}$. We use this distance and a reanalysis of archival optical observations originally taken in 1995 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in order to measure the WD's mass. We also incorporate improvements in calibration, extinction model, and WD cooling models. We find that the existing observations are not sufficient to tightly constrain the companion mass, but we conclude the WD mass is $>0.4\,M_\odot$ with $>90\%$ confidence. The limiting factor in our analysis is the low signal-to-noise ratio of the original HST observations.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure