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we tested whether field marketers’ regulatory focus predicted their performance. Promotion focus spurs eagerness (acting on opportunity, to advance), whereas prevention focus spurs vigilance (not acting, to maintain security). When sales work involves approaching as many new buyers as possible for single transactions (and little else), promotion focus is well suited for sales performance, and prevention focus is counterproductive. Accordingly, prior research found that promotion focus positively, and prevention focus negatively, predicts performance in such a context. We attempt constructive replication of these findings using stronger methodology. Our study (n?=?156) showed that promotion focus positively, and prevention focus negatively, predicted performance. The study replicated previous findings and showed similar, though in most cases slightly smaller, effect sizes than the original study.

We consider a situation in which agents have mutual claims on each other, summarized in a liability matrix. Agents’ assets might be insufficient to satisfy their liabilities, leading to defaults. In case of default, bankruptcy rules are used to specify the way agents are going to be rationed. A clearing payment matrix is a payment matrix consistent with the prevailing bankruptcy rules that satisfies limited liability and priority of creditors. Since clearing payment matrices and the corresponding values of equity are not uniquely determined, we provide bounds on the possible levels equity can take. Unlike the existing literature, which studies centralized clearing procedures, we introduce a large class of decentralized clearing processes. We show the convergence of any such process in finitely many iterations to the least clearing payment matrix. When the unit of account is sufficiently small, all decentralized clearing processes lead essentially to the same value of equity as a centralized clearing procedure. As a policy implication, it is not necessary to collect and process all the sensitive data of all the agents simultaneously and run a centralized clearing procedure. This paper was accepted by Yinyu Ye, optimization.

This research tests the hypothesis that promotion‐focused individuals experience regulatory fit from bottom rank, intermediate performance‐feedback. Prior research suggests promotion‐focused individuals experience fit in high social ranks (power). Bottom performance ranks may appear psychologically opposite to high power, which might lead one to expect that promotion‐focused individuals experience fit at top ranks. We propose that the opposite occurs in intermediate performance ranking feedback, in that promotion‐focused individuals experience regulatory fit at a bottom rank, because bottom rank implies having something to gain (yielding eagerness), whereas top rank implies having something to lose (yielding vigilance). Study 1 (N = 261) supports the notion that ranks affect eagerness/vigilance. Study 2 (N = 199) extends these findings by examining engagement from regulatory fit.

We consider positive zero-sum stochastic games with countable state and action spaces. For each player, we provide a characterization of those strategies that are optimal in every subgame. These characterizations are used to prove two simplification results. We show that if player 2 has an optimal strategy then he/she also has a stationary optimal strategy, and prove the same for player 1 under the assumption that the state space and player 2's action space are finite.

We study a variation of hotelling’s location model in which consumers choose between firms based on travel distances as well as the number of consumers visiting each firm. The model in which the network externality is the same for all firms was proposed by kohlberg (econ lett 11:211–216, 1983), who claims that no equilibrium exists for more than two firms. We assume the network effects to be linear and, in contrast to the claim in kohlberg (econ lett 11:211–216, 1983), derive a condition under which a subgame perfect nash equilibrium exists for four and six firms. Moreover, we show that for more than two firms the equilibrium locations of the firms are different from the equilibrium locations in hotelling’s location model. Our results suggest that a subgame perfect nash equilibrium exists if and only if the number of firms is even. We also provide examples of subgame perfect equilibria in which the network externality is different for some of the firms.

The paper considers a one-to-one matching with contracts model in the presence of price controls. This set-up contains two important streams in the matching literature, those with and those without monetary transfers, as special cases and allows for intermediate cases with some restrictions on the monetary transfers that are feasible. An adjustment process that ends with a stable outcome is presented, thereby proving the existence of stable outcomes. The process contains the deferred acceptance algorithm of Gale and Shapley (1962) and the approximate auction mechanism of Demange, Gale, and Sotomayor (1986) as special cases. The paper presents a notion of competitive equilibrium, called Dreze equilibrium, for this class of models, an extension of the concept as developed by Dreze (1975) for economies with divisible commodities subject to price controls. It is shown that Dreze equilibrium allocations are equivalent to allocations induced by stable outcomes. One implication is the existence of Dreze equilibria. Another implication is the equivalence of a competitive equilibrium concept and the concept of stable outcomes that is valid with and without monetary transfers as well as when monetary transfers are limited.

In high-stakes contexts such as job interviews, people seek to be evaluated favorably by others and they attempt to accomplish such favorable judgments particularly through self-promotional behaviors. We sought to examine the persuasiveness of job candidates' self-promotion by examining job applicants' subjective hireability from the perspective of construal-level theory. Construal-level theory states that perceptions occur from different levels of psychological distance (i.e., distal vs. proximal). This distance is created by other dimensions of distance (e.g., spatial or social distance) and affects how individuals construe incoming information. From a large distance, people more readily process abstract information, whereas from a close distance, people more readily process concrete information. Specifically, construal compatibility occurs when abstract versus concrete features of a stimulus match the psychological distance experienced by message-recipients. Construal compatibility (vs. incompatibility) makes evaluations (e.g., of messages) more favorable. To apply this principle to self-promotion, we created self-promotional videos of a job interview, in which the applicant sat either far away from or close to the hiring manager (manipulating psychological distance); the applicant, then, used either direct or indirect self-promotion (manipulating message construal level). The results showed participants reported stronger intention to hire the applicant when distance matched (vs. did not match) the type of self-promotion the applicant used.

Battigalli (1997) has shown that in dynamic games with perfect information and without relevant ties, the forward induction concept of extensive-form rationalizability yields the backward induction outcome. In this paper we provide a new proof for this remarkable result, based on four steps. We first show that extensive-form rationalizability can be characterized by the iterated application of a special reduction operator, the strong belief reduction operator. We next prove that this operator satisfies a mild version of monotonicity, which we call monotonicity on reachable histories. This property is used to show that for this operator, every possible order of elimination leads to the same set of outcomes. We finally show that backward induction yields a possible order of elimination for the strong belief reduction operator. These four properties together imply Battigalli's theorem.

This paper investigates the deterrent impact of anti-cartel enforcement. It is shown theoretically that if enforcement is effective in deterring and constraining cartels then there will be fewer cartels with low overcharges and fewer with high overcharges. This prediction provides an indirect method for testing whether the enforcement of competition law is effective. Using historical data on legal cartels to generate the counterfactual, we find significantly less mass in the tails of the overcharge distribution, compared to illegal cartels. This result is robust to controlling for confounding factors, and we interpret this as the first tentative confirmation of effective deterrence.

We study the division of a surplus under majoritarian bargaining in the three-person case. In a stationary equilibrium as derived by Baron and Ferejohn (1989), the proposer offers one third times the discount factor of the surplus to a second player and allocates no payoff to the third player, a proposal which is accepted without delay. Laboratory experiments show various deviations from this equilibrium, where different offers are typically made and delay may occur before acceptance. We address the issue to what extent these findings are compatible with subgame perfect equilibrium and characterize the set of subgame perfect equilibrium payoffs for any value of the discount factor. We show that for any proposal in the interior of the space of possible agreements there exists a discount factor such that the proposal is made and accepted. We characterize the values of the discount factor for which equilibria with one-period delay exist. We show that any amount of equilibrium delay is possible and we construct subgame perfect equilibria such that arbitrary long delay occurs with probability one. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper analyzes the problem of a contest designer who chooses a starting time and a deadline of the contest to maximize discounted total effort by the contestants. Each contestant secretly decides how much effort to exert between the starting time and the deadline. At the deadline, the contestant who exerted most effort wins a prize, which consists of the endowment of the designer and collected interest. The contest has a unique Nash equilibrium. In the main model, the designer should announce the contest immediately with a short deadline to promote intense competition. I analyze how the optimal starting time and deadline change for a variable contest prize, different types of asymmetries, a Tullock lottery contest success function, and different goal functions of the designer.

This paper uses a dynamic stochastic model to solve for the optimal pricing policy of music recordings in the presence of P2P file-sharing networks eroding their sales. We employ a policy iteration algorithm on a discretized state space to numerically compute the optimal pricing policy. The realistically calibrated model reflects the real-world figures we observe and provides estimates of the optimal pricing policy as well as comparative statics figures. The pricing policy is such that, for a given P2P network size, prices are increasing in the number of buyers of the product and, for a given number of buyers of the product, prices are non-monotonic in the P2P network size. Surprisingly, in the presence of P2P networks, increases in production costs and decreases in the valuation of the product increase the consumer and total surplus. A higher valuation of the product leads to a lower steady state price. Increased switching costs have a negative effect on prices and profits, so the long term incentive to attract new consumers dominates the short term incentive to harvest loyal consumers. The full enforcement of intellectual property rights has adverse effect on both consumer surplus and total welfare. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We axiomatically develop a class of power indices for effectivity functions, both for the case where the set of alternatives is finite and where it is infinite. Such power indices make it possible to take the issues under consideration into account, in contrast to power indices defined just for simple games. As an example, we consider the US legislative system. We also show that our approach can be used to develop power indices for spatial political games. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

International audience; Change and unpredictability characterize today's business environment. Organizational teams must effectively cope with this reality and ensure that high levels of performance are not compromised. By refining team adaptation with the integration of team improvisation, this study tests a team adaptation temporal framework comprising two processes - team improvised adaptation and team preemptive adaptation. We also investigate the relationships between these constructs and shared temporal cognitions, team learning behaviors, and team performance. We conducted four studies with three different samples, and the results suggest that the two framework constructs are distinct. The results also indicate that team improvised adaptation behaviors mediate the relationship between shared temporal cognitions and team performance, and that team learning behaviors moderate this mediation.

I consider contracting with information disclosure in the sense of Bayesian persuasion. A result by Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011) implies that if the principal contracts with a single, uninformed agent, the signal realization set can be restricted to the type set. I show that, otherwise, having additional signal realizations can be advantageous.

Team turnover can be harmful to a team in many ways. This study examined whether a team’s collective experience (team organizational tenure) attenuates the association between team turnover and task conflict changes. Differing from prior research, our study used a longitudinal design to assess the effects of team turnover, accounting for the competence of those leaving the team. We built on context-emergent turnover theory and tested a random coefficient growth model by utilizing data from 74 health-care teams. We found support for the hypothesized interaction: The more collective experience the team had, the less likely it was that team turnover associated with increases in task conflict. We discuss implications for theory and practice.

This paper studies coalition formation among individuals who differ in productivity. The output of a coalition is determined by the sum of the productivities and the size of the coalition. We consider egalitarian societies in which coalitions split their surplus equally and individualistic societies in which the surplus of a coalition is split according to productivity. Preferences of coalition members depend on their material payoffs, but are also influenced by relative payoff concerns, which relate their material payoffs to the average material payoff in the coalition. Our analysis uses two stability notions, the Core and the Myopic Stable Set. The stable partitions in both egalitarian and individualistic societies are segregated, i.e., individuals with adjacent productivities form coalitions. If some individuals are not part of a productive coalition, then these are the least productive ones for egalitarian societies and the most productive ones for individualistic societies. If all individuals have different productivity levels and there are sufficient complementarities in production, egalitarian societies induce more efficiency than individualistic societies.

A Sender wants to persuade multiple Receivers with homogeneous preferences and a common belief about the state of the world to vote in favor of a proposal. Prior to the vote Sender commits to a communication strategy which sends private, potentially correlated, signals to Receivers that are contingent on the true state of the world. While Sender benefits from using private messages rather than public communication if Receivers vote sincerely, under the optimal communication strategy, sincere voting is not in any Receiver’s best interest. If the proposal does not require unanimous agreement, Sender’s optimal communication strategy after which sincere voting indeed constitutes a Bayes-Nash equilibrium is such that no voter is ever pivotal.

Subgame perfect equilibrium in stationary strategies (SSPE) is the most important solution concept used in applications of stochastic games, which makes it imperative to develop efficient numerical methods to compute an SSPE. For this purpose, this paper develops an interior-point path-following method (IPM), which remedies a number of issues with the existing method called stochastic linear tracing procedure (SLTP). The homotopy system of IPM is derived from the optimality conditions of an artificial barrier game, whose objective function is a combination of the original payoff function and a logarithmic term. Unlike SLTP, the starting stationary strategy profile can be arbitrarily chosen and IPM does not need switching between different systems of equations. The use of a perturbation term makes IPM applicable to all stochastic games, whereas SLTP only works for a generic stochastic game. A transformation of variables reduces the number of equations and variables of by roughly one half. Numerical results show that our method is more than three times as efficient as SLTP.

We consider a discrete-time dynamic search game in which a number of players compete to find an invisible object that is moving according to a time-varying Markov chain. We examine the subgame perfect equilibria of these games. The main result of the paper is that the set of subgame perfect equilibria is exactly the set of greedy strategy profiles, i.e. those strategy profiles in which the players always choose an action that maximizes their probability of immediately finding the object. We discuss various variations and extensions of the model., Comment: 14 pages, 0 figures

This paper studies coalition formation among individuals who differ in productivity. The output of a coalition is determined by the sum of the productivities and the size of the coalition. We consider egalitarian societies in which coalitions split their surplus equally and individualistic societies in which the surplus of a coalition is split according to productivity. Preferences of coalition members depend on their material payoffs, but are also influenced by relative payoff concerns, which relate their material payoffs to the average material payoff in the coalition. Our analysis uses two stability notions, the Core and the Myopic Stable Set. The stable partitions in both egalitarian and individualistic societies are segregated, i.e., individuals with adjacent productivities form coalitions. If some individuals are not part of a productive coalition, then these are the least productive ones for egalitarian societies and the most productive ones for individualistic societies. If all individuals have different productivity levels and there are sufficient complementarities in production, egalitarian societies induce more efficiency than individualistic societies.

Research on collusion in vertically differentiated markets is conducted under one or two potentially restrictive assumptions. Either there is a single industry-wide cartel or costs are assumed to be independent of quality or quantity. We explore the extent to which these assumptions are indeed restrictive by relaxing both. For a wide range of coalition structures, profit-maximizing cartels of any size price most of their lower quality products out of the market as long as production costs do not increase too much with quality. If these costs rise sufficiently, however, then market share is maintained for all product variants. All cartel sizes may emerge in equilibrium when exclusively considering individual deviations, but the industry-wide cartel is the only one immune to deviations by coalitions of members. Overall, our findings suggest that firms have a strong incentive to coordinate prices when the products involved are vertically differentiated. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We provide an existence result for the solution concept of generalized Nash equilibrium, which can be viewed as the direct incomplete information analogue of Nash equilibrium. Intuitively, a tuple consisting of a probability measure for every player on his choices and utility functions is a generalized Nash equilibrium, whenever some mutual optimality property is satisfied. This incomplete information solution concept is then epistemically characterized in a way that common belief in rationality is neither used nor implied. For the special case of complete information, an epistemic characterization of Nash equilibrium ensues as a corollary.

A positive zero-sum stochastic game with countable state and action spaces is shown to have a value if, at every state, at least one player has a finite action space. The proof uses transfinite algorithms to calculate the upper and lower values of the game. We also investigate the existence of ( $$\epsilon $$ -)optimal strategies in the classes of stationary and Markov strategies.

Research Summary: Specialized knowledge can be a facilitator of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), but little is known about how management teams transform their knowledge resources into entrepreneurial activity. Complementing the knowledge-based view with social interdependence theory, we suggest that team processes mediate the impact of teams' transactive memory system (TMS) on EO. Our empirical analysis of data from interdisciplinary management teams shows that a strong TMS serves as a starting point to initiate a beneficial “domino effect” of positive team interaction patterns (enhanced team learning and participative decision-making) and positive team psychological processes (enhanced team identification), which, in turn, foster the development of EO. We thereby contribute new insights to the largely unresolved questions about the “where” and “why” of EO genesis within organizations. Managerial Summary: Enhancing entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is of major importance for established firms to stay competitive in the market. This study sheds light on the question how EO emerges within management teams of a firm's decentralized units and specifically gives insights about how team design and team processes can foster the EO of these units. We find that teams with specialized experts who share a common meta-knowledge about who knows what in their team (i.e., teams with a strong transactive memory system) engage in more team learning and participative decision-making and identify themselves more strongly with their team, which consequently spurs unit EO. Our results highlight that well-designed and well-functioning management teams below the executive level can play an important role in fostering entrepreneurship in multiunit organizations.

We study firm-level expansionary investment activities in both equipment and buildings—the so-called investment spikes. Our identification strategy decomposes firm investment spikes into three streams: a spike in equipment only, buildings only, or a simultaneous spike. Empirically, we find that the timing and size of investment in equipment and buildings are not independent. Firms conducting a simultaneous spike enhance firm scale more than in the case of a spike in equipment or buildings alone. Employment growth occurs when a firm builds structures. Investment in equipment affects the optimal input mix and high productivity in equipment and buildings provides investment timing signals. In low-tech sectors firm production growth depends on investment in buildings. In contrast, a necessary condition for firms in high-tech sectors to grow their production is investment in equipment.keywordsinvestment spikesequipmentbuildingsinterrelationscaleproductivityinput mixefficiencylow- and high-techlabour intensity.

This thesis develops new insights in the computation of good strategies for games with a dynamic end. The research focuses on games where the actions chosen by the players in very late stages may have a significant impact on their reward.

In cooperative games, the coalition structure core is, despite its potential emptiness, one of the most popular solutions. While it is a fundamentally static concept, the consideration of a sequential extension of the underlying dominance correspondence gave rise to a selection of non-empty generalizations. Among these, the payoff-equivalence minimal dominant set and the myopic stable set are defined by a similar set of conditions. We identify some problems with the payoff-equivalence minimal dominant set and propose an appropriate reformulation called the minimal dominant set. We show that replacing asymptotic external stability by sequential weak dominance leaves the myopic stable set unaffected. The myopic stable set is therefore equivalent to the minimal dominant set.

We provide comparable algorithms for the Dekel-Fudenberg procedure, iterated admissibility, proper rationalizability and full permissibility by means of the notions of likelihood orderings and preference restrictions. The algorithms model reasoning processes whereby each player's preferences over his own strategies are completed by eliminating likelihood orderings. We apply the algorithms for comparing iterated admissibility, proper rationalizability and full permissibility, and provide a sufficient condition under which iterated admissibility does not rule out properly rationalizable strategies. We also use the algorithms to examine an economically relevant strategic situation, namely a bilateral commitment bargaining game. Finally, we discuss the relevance of our algorithms for epistemic analysis.

Using a network approach we provide a characterization of a separating equilibrium for standard signaling games where the sender's payoff function is quasi-linear. Given a strategy of the sender, we construct a network where the node set and the length between two nodes are the set of the sender's type and the difference of signaling costs, respectively. Construction of a separating equilibrium is then equivalent to constructing the length between two nodes in the network under the condition that the response of the receiver is a node potential. When the set of the sender's type is a real interval, shortest path lengths are antisymmetric and a node potential is unique up to a constant. A strategy of the sender in a separating equilibrium is characterized by some differential equation with a unique solution. Our results can be readily applied to a broad range of economic situations, such as for example the standard job market signaling model of Spence, a model not captured by earlier papers.

We consider discrete-time Markov decision processes in which the decision maker is interested in long but finite horizons. First we consider reachability objective: the decision maker's goal is to reach a specific target state with the highest possible probability. Formally, strategy $\sigma$ overtakes another strategy $\sigma'$, if the probability of reaching the target state within horizon $t$ is larger under $\sigma$ than under $\sigma'$, for all sufficiently large $t\in\NN$. We prove that there exists a pure stationary strategy that is not overtaken by any pure strategy nor by any stationary strategy, under some condition on the transition structure and respectively under genericity. A strategy that is not overtaken by any other strategy, called an overtaking optimal strategy, does not always exist. We provide sufficient conditions for its existence. Next we consider safety objective: the decision maker's goal is to avoid a specific state with the highest possible probability. We argue that the results proven for reachability objective extend to this model. We finally discuss extensions of our results to two-player zero-sum perfect information games.

An investigator is interested in arbitrarily approximating a subject's latent beliefs in obviously dominant strategies (Li, 2017). We prove that Karni's ascending mechanism (Karni, 2009) does not have an obviously dominant strategy. Thus, we introduce the novel descending Karni mechanism which always has obviously dominant strategies. Furthermore, under the assumption that the subject chooses an obviously dominant strategy, the true beliefs can be approximated with arbitrary precision with our mechanism. All our results hold for a very broad class of likelihood relations, going well beyond those that are represented by probabilistic beliefs. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We consider domains that satisfy pervasiveness and top-connectedness, and we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of non-dictatorial, Pareto optimal, and group strategy-proof choice rules on those domains.

This article investigates the gap-filling explanation for corporate debt maturity choices in a multi-country setting. We argue that companies adjust their debt maturity in response to shocks in government debt maturity both at home and abroad; the difference between the two effects depends on the markets’ relative size and level of integration. Focusing on the European case and treating the Economic and Monetary Union as a shock in market integration, we find strong empirical support for our predictions. Our results have relevant implications for the opportunity for individual governments to use their debt maturity structure as a policy tool.

© 2019, The Author(s). We consider a Bertrand duopoly with homogeneous goods and we allow for asymmetric marginal costs. We derive the Myopic Stable Set in pure strategies as introduced by Demuynck et al. (Econometrica 87:111–138, 2019). In contrast to the set of Nash equilibria, the unique Myopic Stable Set can be easily characterized in closed form and it provides an intuitive set-valued prediction. ispartof: THEORY AND DECISION vol:87 issue:2 pages:147-154 status: published

Economic agents with an increased sophistication sometimes use their advantage to exploit their more naive counterparts. In public goods games played on networks, such an agent will attempt to manipulate as many of his neighbors as possible to produce the public good. We study the exploitation of a myopic population by a single farsighted player in such games. We show the existence and payoff-uniqueness of optimal farsighted strategies in every network structure. In the long run, the farsighted player’s effects are only felt locally. A simple dependence-withdrawal strategy reaches the optimal outcome for every network if the starting state is unfavorable, and reaches it for every starting state if the farsighted player is linked to all opponents. We characterize the lower and upper bounds of long-run payoffs the farsighted player can attain in a given network and make comparative statics with respect to adding a new link. The farsighted player always benefits from linking to more opponents (sociability) and is always harmed by his neighbors linking to each other (jealousy).

We consider a network pricing game on a parallel network with congestion effects in which link owners set tolls for travel so as to maximize profit. A central authority is able to regulate this competition by means of a (uniform) price cap. The first question we want to answer is how such a cap should be designed in order to minimize the total congestion. We provide an algorithm that finds an optimal price cap for networks with affine latency functions and a full support Wardrop equilibrium. Second, we consider the induced network performance at an optimal price cap. We show that for two link networks with affine latency functions, the congestion costs at the optimal price cap are at most $8/7$ times the optimal congestion costs. For more general latency functions, this bound goes up to 2 under the assumption that an uncapped Nash equilibrium exists. However, in general such an equilibrium need not exist and this can be used to show that optimal price caps can induce arbitrarily inefficient flows., 25 pages, 8 figures

We introduce the concept of a horizon-K farsighted set to study the influence of the degree of farsightedness on network stability. The concept generalizes existing concepts where all players are either fully myopic or fully farsighted. A set of networks $$G_{K}$$ is a horizon-K farsighted set if three conditions are satisfied. First, external deviations should be horizon-K deterred. Second, from any network outside of $$G_{K}$$ there is a sequence of farsighted improving paths of length smaller than or equal to K leading to some network in $$G_{K}$$ . Third, there is no proper subset of $$G_{K}$$ satisfying the first two conditions. We show that a horizon-K farsighted set always exists and that the horizon-1 farsighted set $$G_{1}$$ is always unique. For generic allocation rules, the set $$G_{1}$$ always contains a horizon-K farsighted set for any K. We provide easy to verify conditions for a set of networks to be a horizon-K farsighted set, and we consider the efficiency of networks in horizon-K farsighted sets. We discuss the effects of players with different horizons in an example of criminal networks.

We discuss German and French competition policy in relation to the Hierarchical and Coordinated free market models. It is shown that both policies initially fitted well to the Hierarchical model, but over time transformed to a system primarily compatible with the Coordinated free market philosophy. We furthermore argue that this transformation is not (yet) complete in the sense that both the German and the French government can still intervene directly in competition cases concerning market structure.

We consider collective decision rules placing finitely many public bads in a region, modeled by a line segment. Agents’ preferences are lexicographic extensions (lexmin) of euclidean single dipped preferences on this interval. The class of all rules satisfying strategy-proofness and pareto optimality is characterized. These rules pick only boundary locations by monotone voting.

The different contributions made to this edited book illustrate that the study of psychological contracts has offered critical scholarly and practical insights into the functional and dysfunctional aspects of the employment relationship for several decades. However, as with other fields of research, it behooves the psychological contract field to pause periodically, take stock, explore gaps, and identify new research streams to maintain and expand its impact upon scholarship and practice. An edited book like this offers a good opportunity to see how far we have come with the psychological contract and where the challenges lie ahead. In the chapter, the authors identify and develop three key areas that promise to enrich psychological contract research: 1) time; 2) social context; and 3) the changing nature of work. For each of these key areas, they formulate promising future research questions.

We identify the maximal voting correspondence which is Condorcet Consistent and satisfies two participation conditions, namely the Top Property and the Bottom Property — thereby extending a result in Perez (2001). The former participation condition says that if an alternative is in the chosen set at a profile of rankings and a ranking is added with that alternative on top, then it remains to be a member of the chosen set. The latter says that if an alternative is not in the chosen set at a profile of rankings and a ranking is added with that alternative at bottom, then the alternative is again not in the chosen set. In particular, voting functions (single-valued voting correspondences) with these three properties select from this maximal correspondence, and we demonstrate several ways in which this can or cannot be done.

In a local interaction model agents situated on a circle play bilateral prisoners’ dilemmas with their immediate neighbors and have three possible strategies: cooperate in all interactions (altruistic), defect in all interactions (egoistic), or cooperate with one immediate neighbor with probability 1=2 (partial cooperation). After each period the agents adopt the strategy with the highest average payoff in their observed local neighborhood (naïve imitation). The absorbing states of the process are outlined and analysed. There does not exist an absorbing state in which the partially cooperative strategy coexists with any of the other strategies. The partially cooperative strategy limits the diffusion of altruistic behavior in the population. Even though clustering of altruists is generally beneficial for sustaining altruism, relatively big groups of altruists at the onset actually enable the spread of the partially cooperative strategy.

We consider the one-to-one two-sided matching with contracts model in which buyers face financial constraints. In this model there is a stable outcome, but not necessarily a competitive equilibrium as defined in the standard way. We propose a new equilibrium notion, quantity-constrained competitive equilibrium (QCCE) that allows buyers to form rational expectations on the lack of supply when their financial constraints are binding. We show the existence of QCCEs and establish the equivalence among QCCE outcomes, stable outcomes, and core outcomes. We also analyze the existence of QCCEs with uniform prices, the lattice property of QCCEs, and the rural hospital theorem of QCCEs. We finally examine the relation between models with financial constraints and models with price controls.

At each moment in time, an alternative from a finite set is selected by a stochastic process. Players observe the selected alternative and sequentially cast a yes or a no vote. If the set of players casting a yes vote is decisive for the selected alternative, it is accepted and the game ends. Otherwise the next period begins. We refer to this class of problems as stopping games. Collective choice games, quitting games, and coalition formation games are particular examples. When the core of a stopping game is non-empty, a subgame perfect equilibrium in pure stationary strategies is shown to exist. But in general, even subgame perfect equilibria in mixed stationary strategies may not exist. We show that aggregate voting behavior can be summarized by a collective strategy. We insist on pure strategies, allow for simple forms of punishment, and provide a constructive proof to show that so-called two-step simple collective equilibria always exist. This implies the existence of a pure strategy subgame perfect equilibrium. We apply our approach to the case with three alternatives exhibiting a Condorcet cycle and to a model of redistributive politics.

This paper explicitly incorporated the impact that realized investments in new transportation infrastructure have on adoption speed in a real option framework for taking sustainable investment decisions under uncertainty and analyzed the consequences of this dependence for optimal business investment strategies. We used a modified Generalized Bass Model to shape the adoption diffusion process and incorporate this approach into an N-fold compound real option framework. We applied the combined model to the case study of the introduction of hydrogen fuel stations for hydrogen cars in the Netherlands. We performed a scenario analysis for six different transportation infrastructure investment strategies combined with four different parameterizations. The results show the risk of ignoring the potential interaction between the adoption process and the speed with which the required transportation infrastructure will become available. This may lead to suboptimal decisions with respect to the optimal timing of corporate investment spending, as well as with respect to the assessment of the overall feasibility of the project.

Despite the wealth of research showing that psychological contract breach (PCB) has negative outcomes for individuals, knowledge about the influence of the social context in which breaches are experienced is still scarce. This is surprising, as scholars have argued that work climates, such as when unit members are generally highly committed, could buffer an individual's negative experiences at work. Yet, to date, the unit climate and PCB literatures have largely remained separated and our main goal is to integrate these fields. This is especially timely and relevant, because recent work in the unit climate literature indicates that merely looking at the average climate level might not be enough, because the climate's strength (i.e., the agreement or homogeneity within the unit) could also provide important social cues. Building on these recent advances, we develop and test a theoretical framework which links both climate concepts to PCB. More specifically, we hypothesized that especially when all unit members are highly and homogeneously committed, an employee would reframe their PCB in such a way that it would less adversely affect work engagement and turnover intentions. Using data from 1,272 employees across 36 healthcare units, multilevel structural path analyses supported this three-way interaction. By answering recent calls for more "social PCB research" and integrating the unit climate and PCB literatures, we aim to provide guidance to scholars and practitioners who want to understand in more depth the social context's influence on PCB.