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Competition, Cooperation, and Corporate Culture

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Author Info
Michael Kosfeld
Ferdinand von Siemens

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Abstract

Teamwork and cooperation between workers can be of substantial value to a firm, yet the level of worker cooperation often varies between individual firms. We show that these differences can be the result of labor market competition if workers have heterogeneous preferences and preferences are private information. In our model there are two types of workers: selfish workers who only respond to monetary incentives, and conditionally cooperative workers who might voluntarily provide team work if their co-workers do the same. We show that there is no pooling in equilibrium, and that workers self-select into firms that differ in their incentives as well as their resulting level of team work. Our model can explain why firms develop different corporate cultures in an ex-ante symmetric environment. Moreover, the results show that, contrary to first intuition, labor market competition does not destroy but may indeed foster within-firm cooperation.

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Paper provided by Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - IEW in its series IEW - Working Papers with number iewwp328.

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Date of creation: Jul 2007
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Handle: RePEc:zur:iewwpx:328

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Related research
Keywords: Competition conditional cooperation asymmetric information self-selection corporate culture

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information
L23 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Organization of Production
M54 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Personnel Economics - - - Labor Management

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  1. Industrial Sociology (at Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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  3. Van den Steen, Eric, 2005. "On the Origin of Shared Beliefs (and Corporate Culture)," Working papers 27855, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management. [Downloadable!]
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  5. Ichino, Andrea & Maggi, Giovanni, 2000. "Work Environment And Individual Background: Explaining Regional Shirking Differentials In A Large Italian Firm," CEPR Discussion Papers 2387, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  6. Barton H. Hamilton & Jack A. Nickerson & Hideo Owan, 2003. "Team Incentives and Worker Heterogeneity: An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Teams on Productivity and Participation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(3), pages 465-497, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. Kremer, M & Maskin, E, 1996. "Wage Inequality and Segregation by Skill," Working papers 96-23, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
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  8. Timothy Besley & Maitreesh Ghatak, 2005. "Competition and Incentives with Motivated Agents," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 616-636, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  9. Benjamin E. Hermalin, 1994. "Heterogeneity in Organizational Form: Why Otherwise Identical Firms Choose Different Incentives for Their Managers," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 25(4), pages 518-537, Winter. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Oriana Bandiera & Iwan Barankay & Imran Rasul, 2005. "Social Preferences and the Response to Incentives: Evidence from Personnel Data," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 120(3), pages 917-962, August.
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  17. Simon Gächter & Christian Thöni, 2005. "Social Learning and Voluntary Cooperation Among Like-Minded People," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 3(2-3), pages 303-314, 04/05. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  21. Gilles Saint-Paul, 2001. "On the Distribution of Income and Worker Assignment under Intrafirm Spillovers, with an Application to Ideas and Networks," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(1), pages 1-37, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Guido Friebel & Wendelin Schnedler, 2007. "Team Governance: Empowerment or Hierarchical Control," IZA Discussion Papers 3143, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Sabrina Teyssier, 2007. "Optimal Group Incentives with Social Preferences and Self-Selection," Working Papers 0710, Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique (GATE), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Université Lyon 2, Ecole Normale Supérieure. [Downloadable!]
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