scholarly journals What Determines Productivity?

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Syverson
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Organization ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Current State ◽  
Operating Environments ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
Research Agendas

Economists have shown that large and persistent differences in productivity levels across businesses are ubiquitous. This finding has shaped research agendas in a number of fields, including (but not limited to) macroeconomics, industrial organization, labor, and trade. This paper surveys and evaluates recent empirical work addressing the question of why businesses differ in their measured productivity levels. The causes are manifold, and differ depending on the particular setting. They include elements sourced in production practices—and therefore over which producers have some direct control, at least in theory—as well as from producers' external operating environments. After evaluating the current state of knowledge, I lay out what I see are the major questions that research in the area should address going forward. (JEL D24, G31, L11, M10, O30, O47)

scholarly journals Empirical Industrial Organization: A Progress Report

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liran Einav ◽  
Jonathan Levin
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Organization ◽  
Imperfect Competition ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Empirical Methods ◽  
Firm Level ◽  
Regulatory Decision ◽  
Empirical Industrial Organization ◽  
Current State ◽  
Level Data

The field of industrial organization has made dramatic advances over the last few decades in developing empirical methods for analyzing imperfect competition and the organization of markets. These new methods have diffused widely: into merger reviews and antitrust litigation, regulatory decision making, price setting by retailers, the design of auctions and marketplaces, and into neighboring fields in economics, marketing, and engineering. Increasing access to firm-level data and in some cases the ability to cooperate with firms or governments in experimental research designs is offering new settings and opportunities to apply these ideas in empirical work. This essay begins with a sketch of how the field has evolved to its current state, in particular how the field's emphasis has shifted over time from attempts to relate aggregate measures across industries toward more focused studies of individual industries. The second and primary part of the essay describes several active areas of inquiry. We also discuss some of the impacts of this research and specify topics where research efforts have been more or less successful. The last section steps back to offer a broader perspective. We address some current debates about research emphasis in the field, and more broadly about empirical methods, and offer some thoughts on where future research might go.

scholarly journals Keeping a cool head at all times. What determines choice consistency?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Jan Nitsch ◽  
Tobias Kalenscher
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Work ◽  
Neurological Status ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Expected Returns ◽  
Current State ◽  
Subjective Value ◽  
Choice Consistency ◽  
Blood Alcohol Levels ◽  
Rational Choice Theories ◽  
Trait Factors

Many rational choice theories posit that rational decision makers assign subjective values to all available choice options and choose the option with highest subjective value. Choice options are usually composed of multiple attributes, e.g. healthiness and taste in dietary choice or risk and expected returns in financial choice. These attributes have to be integrated into a single subjective value. Subjective value maximizing choice requires choice consistency, i.e. consistent weighing of the choice attributes across choices. However, empirical work suggests that perfect choice consistency is often violated, for example when decision makers weigh choice attributes differently across multiple decisions. Some researchers propose to extend certain bounds of rationality or to abandon the concept of rationality as adherence to consistency principles altogether. A more conservative stance assumes that perfect consistency can be violated by decision makers in practice, but that consistency principles still can explain large parts of behavior. In a review of the recent literature, we identify factors for compromised consistency relative to baseline conditions. Broadly, we distinguish between undynamic trait factors and fluid state factors. We find evidence for an influence of age, education, intelligence, and neurological status. In contrast, choice consistency appears to be relatively robust to the influence of sex, personality traits, cognitive load, sleepiness and blood alcohol levels. We conclude, that, according to the current state of the literature, only fundamental differences in decision makers, that is, trait differences, have a significant impact on choice consistency.

scholarly journals The psychology of primate cooperation and competition: a call for realigning research agendas

2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1686) ◽  
pp. 20150067 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Schmelz ◽  
Josep Call
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Competition And Cooperation ◽  
Cooperation And Competition ◽  
Current State ◽  
Common Goals ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Other Regarding ◽  
Sense Of Justice ◽  
Two Bodies

Cooperation and competition are two key components of social life. Current research agendas investigating the psychological underpinnings of competition and cooperation in non-human primates are misaligned. The majority of work on competition has been done in the context of theory of mind and deception, while work on cooperation has mostly focused on collaboration and helping. The current impression that theory of mind is not necessarily implicated in cooperative activities and that helping could not be an integral part of competition might therefore be rather misleading. Furthermore, theory of mind research has mainly focused on cognitive aspects like the type of stimuli controlling responses, the nature of representation and how those representations are acquired, while collaboration and helping have focused primarily on motivational aspects like prosociality, common goals and a sense of justice and other-regarding concerns. We present the current state of these two bodies of research paying special attention to how they have developed and diverged over the years. We propose potential directions to realign the research agendas to investigate the psychological underpinnings of cooperation and competition in primates and other animals.

Brain, Beauty, and Art

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Work ◽  
Creative Arts ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Short History ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music And Architecture ◽  
Volume Targets ◽  
Near Future

Neuroscience joins the long history of discussions about aesthetics in psychology, philosophy, art history, and the creative arts. In this volume, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume will inform and stimulate anyone with an abiding interest in why it is that, across time and culture, we respond to beauty, engage with art, and are affected by music and architecture. The volume consists of essays from foundational researchers whose empirical work launched the field. Each essay is anchored to an original, peer-reviewed paper from the short history of this new and burgeoning subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience. Authors of each essay were asked three questions: (1) What motivated the original paper? (2) What were the main findings or theoretical claims made?, and (3) How do those findings or claims fit with the current state and anticipated near future of neuroaesthetics? Together, these essays establish the territory and current boundaries of neuroaesthetics and identify its most promising future directions. Topics include models of neuroaesthetics and discussions of beauty, art, dance, music, literature, and architecture. The volume targets the general public; it also serves as an important resource for scientists, humanitarians, educators, and newcomers to the field, and it will catalyze interdisciplinary conversations critical to the maturation of this young field.

Wireless Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming

2011 ◽  
pp. 190-217
Author(s):  
Mark Kai-Ho Yeung ◽  
Yu-Kwong Kwok
Keyword(s):  
Energy Cost ◽  
Media Streaming ◽  
Hybrid Wireless Networks ◽  
Current State ◽  
Operating Environments ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
And Performance ◽  
New Research ◽  
Network Interfaces ◽  
Consumption Constraints

The widespread deployment of competing wireless technologies has created new research opportunities. In particular, the authors consider media streaming in hybrid wireless networks where each mobile device is equipped with two wireless network interfaces: server interface and peer interface. The server interface connects wireless clients to the server while the peer interface allows neighboring clients to communicate with one another. The two interfaces have different energy characteristics. In this chapter, the authors first give a brief account of P2P media streaming in wireless operating environments. They then survey and analyze the current state-of-the-art in tackling the security and performance issues in P2P media streaming systems. In view of the deficiencies of the existing approaches, they introduce new approaches based on game theoretic concepts. Specifically, the authors propose two collaborating relationships in which neighboring clients utilize both interfaces to share the energy cost of retrieving media content from the server. Their results show that the proposed relationships improve the streaming performance of peers without violating their energy consumption constraints. Moreover, both relationships are stable when clients neither unilaterally deviate nor voluntarily leave as a group.

Disciplined or Agile?

2022 ◽  
pp. 1980-2000
Author(s):  
Danyllo Wagner Albuquerque ◽  
Everton Tavares Guimarães ◽  
Felipe Barbosa Araújo Ramos ◽  
Antonio Alexandre Moura Costa ◽  
Alexandre Gomes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Software Process ◽  
Software Requirements ◽  
Customer Requirements ◽  
Main Contributor ◽  
Current State ◽  
Operating Environments ◽  
Requirements Change ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Requirements Development ◽  
Software Practitioners

Software requirements changes become necessary due to changes in customer requirements and changes in business rules and operating environments; hence, requirements development, which includes requirements changes, is a part of a software process. Previous studies have shown that failing to manage software requirements changes well is a main contributor to project failure. Given the importance of the subject, there is a plethora of efforts in academia and industry that discuss the management of requirements change in various directions, ways, and means. This chapter provided information about the current state-of-the-art approaches (i.e., Disciplined or Agile) for RCM and the research gaps in existing work. Benefits, risks, and difficulties associated with RCM are also made available to software practitioners who will be in a position of making better decisions on activities related to RCM. Better decisions can lead to better planning, which will increase the chance of project success.

scholarly journals Taking the Dogma out of Econometrics: Structural Modeling and Credible Inference

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aviv Nevo ◽  
Michael D Whinston
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Organization ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Structural Modeling ◽  
Computational Techniques ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Econometric Methods ◽  
Structural Methods

Without a doubt, there has been a “credibility revolution” in applied econometrics. One contributing development has been in the improvement and increased use in data analysis of “structural methods”; that is, the use of models based in economic theory. Structural modeling attempts to use data to identify the parameters of an underlying economic model, based on models of individual choice or aggregate relations derived from them. Structural estimation has a long tradition in economics, but better and larger data sets, more powerful computers, improved modeling methods, faster computational techniques, and new econometric methods such as those mentioned above have allowed researchers to make significant improvements. While Angrist and Pischke extol the successes of empirical work that estimates “treatment effects” based on actual or quasi-experiments, they are much less sanguine about structural analysis and hold industrial organization up as an example where “progress is less dramatic.” Indeed, reading their article one comes away with the impression that there is only a single way to conduct credible empirical analysis. This seems to us a very narrow and dogmatic approach to empirical work; credible analysis can come in many guises, both structural and nonstructural, and for some questions structural analysis offers important advantages. In this comment, we address the criticism of structural analysis and its use in industrial organization, and consider why empirical analysis in industrial organization differs in such striking ways from that in field such as labor, which have recently emphasized the methods favored by Angrist and Pischke.

scholarly journals On Testing for Speculative Bubbles

1990 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P Flood ◽  
Robert J Hodrick
Keyword(s):  
Stock Prices ◽  
Rational Expectations ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Free Markets ◽  
Equity Prices ◽  
Speculative Bubbles ◽  
Market Participants ◽  
Current State ◽  
Rational Bubble

The possibility that movements in prices could be due to the self-fulfilling prophecies of market participants has long intrigued observers of free markets. This paper surveys the current state of the empirically-oriented literature concerning rational dynamic indeterminacies, by which we mean a situation of self-fulfilling prophecy within a rational expectations model. Empirical work in this area concentrates primarily on indeterminacies in price levels, exchange rates, and equity prices. We first examine a particular type of explosive indeterminacy, usually called a rational bubble, in an example of the market for equities. Then, we consider empirical work relating to price-level and exchange-rate indeterminacies and empirical studies of indeterminacies in stock prices. Finally, we take up some interpretive issues.

scholarly journals Male-to-Female Sexual Violence in Rural Communities: A Sociological Review

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter DeKeseredy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Adult Women ◽  
Sociological Knowledge ◽  
Female Violence ◽  
Current State ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
Male To Female

The extant sociological literature on male-to-female violence in rural communities reveals that the bulk of the empirical work on this problem focuses mainly on non-lethal physical assaults, such as beatings. Much more research on sexual violence is sorely needed. The main objective of this review is twofold: (1) to describe the current state of international sociological knowledge about male sexual violence against adult women and (2) to suggest new directions in research and theory.

scholarly journals Empirical Industrial Organization: A Progress Report

2012 ◽  
pp. 21-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Levin ◽  
L. Einav
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Organization ◽  
Progress Report ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Empirical Methods ◽  
Empirical Industrial Organization ◽  
Current State ◽  
Over Time

The article sketches how the field of industrial organization has evolved to its current state, in particular how the emphasis has shifted over time from attempts to relate aggregate measures across industries toward more focused studies of individual industries. The authors describe several active areas of inquiry, discuss some of the impacts of this research and specify topics where research efforts have been more or less successful. They also address some current debates about research emphasis in the field, and more broadly about empirical methods, and offer some ideas on where future research might go.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document