Veranstaltungen

Titel und Abstract folgen.

Ansprechperson: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Titel und Abstract folgen.

Ansprechpartner: Malte Toetzke

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Open source is key to innovation yet is assumed to be done largely through intrinsic motivation. How can we incentivize it? In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors program was introduced by GitHub in May 2019 and enabled organizations and individuals alike to pay developers for their open source work. We study this program by collecting fine-grained data on nearly 100,000 GitHub users, their activities, and sponsorship events. We first, using a difference-in-differences approach, document two main effects. One, developers who opted into the program, an action that does not itself entail a financial reward, increased their output after the program’s launch. Two, the actual receipt of a financial sponsorship has a long-lasting negative effect on two measures of innovation –repository creation and community-oriented tasks– but not in coding effort. Despite a net positive effect on innovation, sponsorship appears to crowd out intrinsic motivation, shifting effort toward self-promoting activities. Results from a pre-registered survey and experiment reinforce these findings, showing that modest sponsorship (USD 20) deters collaborative contributions compared to no compensation, larger rewards (USD 1000), or company sponsorships.

Ansprechpartner: Daehyun Kim

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Mehr Informationen folgen.

Ansprechpartnerin: Elisabeth Hofmeister

In this paper we study alliance formation and non-formation by presenting a model involving two rivals and a third, neutral, player acting as a buffer. Such player may join one of the rivals or stay neutral in our infinitely repeated game with a stochastic conflict between the rivals. Our main goal is to study under what conditions the neutral player would be willing to pay one of the rivals to join and under what conditions the neutral player would extract rents – receive payments from the rivals for agreeing to stay neutral. We characterize all families of symmetric equilibria and study the corresponding comparative statics. For a low conflict probability, the rivals effectively cooperative, in which case the neutral player extracts rents. As the conflict probability increases, the rivals start competing in an attempt to convince the neutral player to join. Lastly, for a high conflict probability, the neutral player seeks to join an alliance even if it requires paying a fee to a rival.

Ansprechpartnerin: Marina Chugunova

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

How does industrial policy affect technological change? To analyze this question, we focus on a period of unprecedented state intervention: the economic system of Nazi Germany. After 1933, the government not only tightened and introduced market restrictions, such as foreign exchange and domestic price controls, but also subsidized private investment in autarky and armament industries on a large scale. While previous research has focused on estimating aggregate investment in these industries and the extent to which private firms were forced to invest by the state, this paper analyzes the impact of these policies on R&D activities and, consequently, on technological change. To analyze the direction of technological change, we use a newly constructed patent dataset that includes a sample of over 80,200 patents filed between 1928 and 1941. We use these data to analyze three main research questions. First, did the promotion of investment in autarky industries (e.g. fuel production or ore mining) and armament industries increase patenting in the technology classes associated with these industries? Second, do we observe an increase in the importance of state-owned enterprises or military institutions for R&D? Third, do we find evidence of a change in the direction of R&D activities within large firms? 

Ansprechpartner: Michael Rose

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

We return to the theoretical foundations of absorptive capacity and test the idea that personal experience in a field makes it easier for firms’ inventors to recognize and build upon local knowledge spillovers from other firms in that field. We propose a new empirical model of localized knowledge diffusion, which 1) measures a firm’s absorptive capacity by its inventors’ prior experience in a field, 2) uses a death instrument to exogenously vary the availability of knowledge of the same collaborative patent in different regions, and 3)estimates the difference in citation likelihood from all subsequent inventors across both regions, as a function of a potentially citing inventor’s prior experience in the field. Consistent with the original theory, firms whose inventors have prior experience in a field are more likely to use locally available spillovers from other firms. No such localization occurs for within firm knowledge diffusion. The effects are stronger for collaborative inventors and more recent knowledge.  (with Benjamin Balsmeier and Sonja Lück)

Ansprechpartnerin: Marina Chugunova

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Medical devices are critical to the delivery of health care, but malfunctioning products can pose a threat to patients, necessitating product recalls. In addition to the direct effects of medical device recalls, such as public health protection and negative reputational and financial consequences for the recalling firm, there may be spillover effects on product development. In particular, the vacuum left by the recalled product and its reputational damage may incentivize competing firms to introduce new medical devices to the market. This study examines the impact of serious medical device recalls on subsequent new product development by competitors, as measured by new medical device submissions to the FDA. We compile data from three regulatory databases representing 11,724 new product submissions and 2,647 recalls for 7,208 unique medical device firms over a 17-year period. Using a fixed effect model and institutional features of the FDA’s clearance process, we find that serious recalls increase other firms’ new product submissions in the affected product market. We estimate that a single recall in a product market increases subsequent submissions by approximately eight percent. Moreover, we find that this relationship is attenuated in markets with more competitors. Our results indicate that firms may currently undervalue actions to avoid product recalls, and that the medical device market may be improved by regulatory efforts to enhance transparency in the recall process.

Ansprechperson: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Firms are known to provide information to policymakers, but little is known about the conditions under which that information is used in shaping public policy. We theorize that self-interested organizations can strategically use information that is socially constructed as disinterested—scientific knowledge—to shape the language of policies. We also explore how companies’ degree of self-interest and social ties affect policymakers’ willingness to use such information. Focusing on corporate political activity in the form of voluntary filings of amicus briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court, we analyze patent-related cases that the Court considered between 2000 and 2015. We find that firms that cite social science articles in their briefs are more likely to have their arguments reflected in the Court’s opinions. This relationship is positively moderated when the firm’s lawyer has prior clerkship experience at the Supreme Court, highlighting the role of social ties in tailoring briefs to the Court. However, the degree of self-interest negatively moderates the positive impact of scientific information, suggesting that credibility is compromised when firms appear overly vested in the Court ruling.  (with John P. Walsh)

Ansprechpartner: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology demonstrate considerable potential to complement human capital intensive activities. While an emerging literature documents wide-ranging productivity effects of AI, relatively little attention has been paid to how AI might change the nature of work itself. How do individuals, especially those in the knowledge economy, adjust how they work when they start using AI? Using the setting of open source software, we study individual level effects that AI has on task allocation. We exploit a natural experiment arising from the deployment of GitHub Copilot, a generative AI code completion tool for software developers. Leveraging millions of work activities over a two year period, we use a program eligibility threshold to investigate the impact of AI technology on the task allocation of software developers within a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design. We find that having access to Copilot induces such individuals to shift task allocation towards their core work of coding activities and away from non-core project management activities. We identify two underlying mechanisms driving this shift - an increase in autonomous rather than collaborative work, and an increase in exploration activities rather than exploitation. The main effects are greater for individuals with relatively lower ability. Overall, our estimates point towards a large potential for AI to transform work processes and to potentially flatten organizational hierarchies in the knowledge economy.

Ansprechpartner: Cheng Li

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.