To motivate user contributions, UGC (User-generated content) websites routinely deploy incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher statuses in the community after achieving increasingly more difficult goals. Yet the existing empirical literature remains largely unclear whether...

The productivity of firms is, at least partly, determined by a firm's actions and decisions. One of these decisions involves the organization of production in terms of the number of layers of management the firm decides to employ. Using detailed employer-employee matched data and firm production...

We consider boards as human groups in the uppermost echelon of corporations and examine how an informal hierarchy that tacitly forms among a firm's directors affects firm financial performance. This informal hierarchy is based on directors' deference for one another. We argue that the clarity of...

This paper assesses the extent to which the organization of the innovation effort in firms, as well as the geographical scale at which this effort is pursued, affects the capacity to benefit from product innovations. Three alternative modes of organization are studied: hierarchy, market and...

The paper begin with a reprise of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), and the logic behind them. I describe briefly how they have cascaded beyond the realms of governments and businesses, into the legal profession and even into the world of football (or soccer to...

The paper considers a hierarchical theory that combines concern for two values: individual well-being – as a fundamental, first-order value – and (distributive) fairness – as a high-order value that its exclusive function is to complete the value of individual well-being by resolving...

We examine a supply chain with a single supplier and multiple retailers to predict retailers’ actual ordering behaviors. If retailer orders exceed supplier capacity, a proportional rationing rule applies to capacity allocation among retailers. We propose a behavior model based on cognitive...

We study a population of first year midshipmen within an elite military academy to explore the relationship between individuals’ sociometric status (e.g., status conferrals based on positive interpersonal affect and perceived competence, and status degradations based on negative interpersonal...