Dr. Marco Kleine

Articles in Refereed Journals

Kleine, Marco; Langenbach, Pascal; Zhurakhovska, Lilia (2017). How Voice Shapes Reactions to Impartial Decision-makers: An Experiment on Participation Procedures, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 143, 241-253. DOI

• This paper studies how participation in decision procedures affects people’s reactions to the deciding authority. In our economic experiment, having voice, i.e., the opportunity to state one’s opinion prior to a decision, significantly increases subordinates’ subsequent kindness towards the authority. These positive effects occur irrespectively of the decisions’ content. The experimental findings stress the positive effects of voice when subordinates and authorities interact. Our results suggest that in organizations, but also in the legal and political arena, participative decision-making can be used to guide people’s actions after decisions have been made.
• Also published at SSRN as: MPI Collective Goods Preprint, No. 2013/11

Kleine, Marco; Langenbach, Pascal; Zhurakhovska, Lilia (2016). Fairness and Persuasion: How Stakeholder Communication Affects Impartial Decision Making, Economics Letters, 141, 173-176. DOI

• We study experimentally to what extent distributive fairness decisions by impartial authorities are influenced by stakeholders’ fairness opinions. In a three-player allocation game, we compare Communication treatments, in which one of the stakeholders states her opinion prior to the allocation decision, to a Baseline without communication. We find that stakeholders who state their opinion are allocated significantly less money than their counterparts in the Baseline. Asymmetric reactions to the statements appear to be the driving force behind this result: Authorities deviate from their initial fairness judgment and follow stakeholders’ opinions if the requests are moderate; they largely ignore high monetary requests.

Engel, Christoph; Kleine, Marco (2015). Who Is Afraid of Pirates? An Experiment on the Deterrence of Innovation by Imitation, Research Policy, 44 (1), 20-33. DOI

• In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now, in most industries and for most potential users, appropriating a foreign innovation is itself an investment decision fraught with cost and risk. Nonetheless, standard theory predicts too little innovation. Arguably the problem is exacerbated by the sensitivity of innovators to fairness; imitators do get a free lunch, after all. We model the situation as a game and test it in the lab. We find more appropriation, but also more innovation than predicted by standard theory. In the lab, the prospect of giving imitators a free lunch does not have a chilling effect on innovation. This even holds if innovation automatically spills over to an outsider and if successful imitation reduces the innovator's profit. Beliefs and the analysis of experiences in the repeated game demonstrate that participants are sensitive to the fairness problem. But this concern is not strong enough to outweigh the robust propensity to invest even more in innovation than predicted by standard theory. The data suggest that this behavior results from the intention not to be outperformed by one's peers.

Monographies

Kleine, Marco (2015). Communication and Fairness: An Experimental Economics Approach. Jena: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität.

• http://www.gbv.de/dms/zbw/821467794.pdf

Discussion Papers

Kleine, Marco; Heite, Jonas; Rosendahl Huber, Laura (2020). Subsidized R&D Collaboration: The Causal Effect of Innovation Vouchers on Innovation Performance, Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Research Paper, No. 20-11.

• We study the causal effect of subsidized R&D collaboration on innovation performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In particular, we make use of a randomized controlled trial to analyze the effect of a nationwide innovation voucher scheme in the United Kingdom that grants SMEs across all industries financial support of up to 5,000 GBP for engaging the services of experts, e.g., from universities, research institutes or IP advisors, when pursuing an innovation-related project. Our results show that the innovation voucher program successfully promotes the execution of these innovation projects with positive short- and medium-term effects on product and service development, internal processes and intellectual property protection. Based on our results, we also provide some practical guidance to further improve the effectiveness of voucher programs.

Mickeler, Maren; Khashabi, Pooyan; Kleine, Marco; Kretschmer, Tobias (2019). No Face, No Name, No Shame? Overcoming Barriers to Intra-Organizational Public Knowledge-Seeking, Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Research Paper, No. 19-17. DOI

• While organizational platforms are becoming more prevalent for the integration and exchange of organizational knowledge, employee engagement remains a barrier for the success of these platforms. Extending socio-technical systems (STS) research, we focus on individual knowledge seeking in an organizational platform context. We follow a cost-benefit approach and argue that individual knowledge seeking is influenced by (a) economic cost concerns and (b) psychological cost considerations. To test our theoretical arguments, we run a lab experiment altering the costs associated with individuals’ decision to seek knowledge on the platform. While knowledge seeking is lowest in settings with both economic and psychological costs, we observe significant increases by (a) eliminating economic consequences, and (b) removing social psychological cost considerations by inducing anonymity on the platform. In addition, our results suggest the presence of gender-related differences in knowledge-seeking behavior on organizational platforms: Male participants are chiefly discouraged by economic considerations, while females place more emphasis on social considerations. Our results highlight the facilitating role of platform anonymity on employee engagement and have implications for the efficient design of these platforms.

Fischer, Sven; Kleine, Marco; Zizzo, Daniel John (2017). The Effect of Compliance Time in Patent Examination: An Experimental Study, Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Research Paper, No. 17-05.

• Using controlled and incentivized decision experiments, we explore whether the length of compliance periods in patent examinations affects behaviour and the overall efficiency of the system. In our stylized experiments, participants decide in the role of a patentee who faces uncertainty about the prospects of the application and must invest real effort over an extended period of time, in order to reach a minimum threshold. Overall, we find some evidence that a very long time horizon outperforms a short one.
• SSRN

Kleine, Marco; Kube, Sebastian (2015). Communication and Trust in Principal-Team Relationships: Experimental Evidence, Preprints of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn/6. Bonn: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.

• We study how upward communication – from workers to managers – about individual efforts affects the effectiveness of gift exchange as a contract-enforcement device for work teams. Our findings suggest that the use of such self-assessments can be detrimental to workers’ performance. In the controlled environment of a laboratory gift-exchange experiment, our workers regularly overstate their own contribution to the joint team output. Misreporting seems to spread distrust within the team of workers, as well as between managers and workers. This manifests itself in managers being less generous with workers’ payments, and in workers being more sensitive to the perceived kindness of their relative wage payments. By varying the source and degree of information about individual efforts between treatments, we see that precise knowledge about workers’ actual contributions to the team output is beneficial for the success of gift-exchange relationships. Yet, workers’ self-assessments can be a problematic tool to gather this information.
• http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2015_06online.pdf