Events

Mit dem Programm „Europäische Digitale Souveränität“ will die Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen (SPRIND) richtungweisende Impulse für den Aufbau eines europäischen Open-Source-Ökosystems setzen. Rafael Laguna stellt die relevanten Technologiebereiche der Zukunft vor, in die Europa jetzt investieren muss, um langfristig die digitale Unabhängigkeit Europas zu sichern.

Moderation: Dietmar Harhoff

Die Veranstaltung wird online via Zoom durchgeführt. 

The Digitality Fireside Chat is an informal event format for in-depth talks and discussions on digitality and digital transformation. The aim is to allow for an exchange between researchers and digital pioneers who have come forward with new concepts, proposals and ideas, and are actively shaping digitalization.

How much lower are the career earnings of workers who face large declines in demand for their occupations, compared to similar workers who do not? To answer this question we combine forecasts on occupational employment changes, measures of realized occupational decline and technological replacement, and administrative panel data on the population of Swedish workers, with a highly disaggregated initial occupational classification.  We find that compared to similar workers, those facing occupational decline lost about 2-5 percent of mean cumulative earnings from 1986-2013, with workers at the bottom of their occupation’s initial earnings distribution suffering substantially larger losses.  These earnings losses are partly accounted for by reduced employment and increased time spent in unemployment and retraining.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose

With Dr. Richard Weber (Managing Director), BurdaForward ‒ digital media house of the future

The Max Planck Digitality Fireside Chat is an informal event format for in-depth talks and discussions on digitality and digital transformation. The aim is to allow for an exchange between researchers and digital pioneers who have come forward with new concepts, proposals and ideas, and are actively shaping digitalization.

In jobs where the cost of effort exhibits increasing differences in separate tasks, automation increases productivity by directly eliminating the automated tasks and indirectly by reducing the marginal cost of non-automated tasks. Here, I report a field experiment rotating supermarket cashiers between conventional (where they scanned and collected payment) and scan-only checkouts. Consistent with increasing differences in separate tasks, at conventional checkouts, cashiers who scanned faster collected payments more slowly. At scan-only checkouts, cashiers scanned 10 percent faster, consistent with lower marginal cost of effort in the non-automated task. The faster scanning was not due to learning, less task-witching, or differential shirking.

Contact Person: Lucy Xiaolu Wang

Can artificial intelligence (AI) technologies complement or substitute for human managers in creating greater value for organizations? We argue that managers of the transformational leadership style with greater social skills benefit more from the assistance of AI than do managers of the transactional leadership style with fewer social skills. We provide causal evidence through a field experiment in a fintech firm whose managers provide training to employees on the calls made to collect overdue loans. We randomly assign employees to be trained by one of the following five options: an AI-bot, a transformational leadership-style manager, a transactional leadership-style manager, and both managers assisted by the AI-bot. We find that employees trained by each AI-assisted manager achieved higher performance, by collecting more payments, than did those trained by the manager alone, suggesting that both managers can gain from AI assistance. More interestingly, employees trained by the AI-assisted transformational manager outperformed both those trained by the AI-assisted transactional manager and by the AI-bot alone, indicating complementarity between transformational leadership and AI assistance. By contrast, the employees trained by the AI-assisted transactional manager underperformed those trained by the AI-bot alone, suggesting that the transactional manager is still at risk of being replaced by the AI-bot. These divergent performance outcomes occur because employees learn more from the AI-assisted transformational manager than from the AI-assisted transactional manager. Our findings suggest that, compared with transactional leadership, transformational leadership enable firms to obtain greater economic returns from their investment in deploying AI to manage employees.

Contact Person: Marina Chugunova
 

With

• Prof. Dr. habil. Thomas Klie (EH Freiburg), Professor of Law and Administration, Gerontology; Head of the Center for Civil Society Development - zze in Freiburg and Berlin as well as AGP Social Research; BmBF-funded research projec SoNaTe (Soziale Nachbarschaft und Technik).
• Bernd Mutter (City of Freiburg im Breisgau), Digitalization Officer of the Smart City Freiburg im Breisgau and Department for Digital and IT (DIGIT).

The Max Planck Digitality Fireside Chat is an informal event format for in-depth talks and discussions on digitality and digital transformation. The aim is to allow for an exchange between researchers and digital pioneers who have come forward with new concepts, proposals and ideas, and are actively shaping digitalization.

Innovation under regulatory uncertainty and the role of expectations: Evidence from the U.S. drone market
Presenter: Virginia Herbst (TUM)
Discussant: Lucy Xialou Wang (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)

There and back again: Disruptive transitions in dyadic role relationships
Presenter: Maren Mickeler (LMU ISTO)
Discussant: Daniel Obermeier (TUM)

On 17/18 December 2020, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition will host the 3rd Research on Innovation, Science and Entrepreneurship Workshop, an annual workshop for Ph.D. students and Junior Post-docs in Economics and Management.

The goal of the RISE3 Workshop is to stimulate an in-depth discussion of a select number of empirical research papers. It offers Ph.D. students and Junior Post-docs an opportunity to present their work and to receive feedback.

Keynote speaker of the RISE3 Workshop is Rosemarie Ziedonis (Boston University & NBER).

Get the Program here.
See RISE Workshop.

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent counter-measures, such as school closures, shift to working from home, and social distancing are disrupting economic activity around the world.  As with other major economic shocks, there are winners and losers, leading to increased inequality across certain groups.  In this project, we investigate the effects of COVID-19 on the gender gap in productivity among academics. First, we track the patterns of publications and working paper series submissions of male and female authors before and after COVID-19, performing a simple difference-in-difference analysis to see whether the trends diverge after COVID-19. Preliminary findings from economics suggest that female economists experienced significant declines in submissions in the early months of the pandemic, relative to the mean.  Second, we conduct a broad survey of academics across various disciplines to collect more nuanced data on the respondents’ circumstances, such as spouse employment, the number and age of children, and time use. We find that female academics, particularly those who have children, report a disproportionate reduction in time dedicated to research relative to comparable men and women without children. Both men and women report substantial increases in childcare and housework burdens, but women experienced significantly larger increases relative to men.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

Organizers:

• Applied Research Center for Intellectual Assets and the Law in Asia (ARCIALA), School of Law, Singapore Management University (SMU),
• Max-Planck -Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb,
• Center for Law, Technology and Ethics, College of Law, National Taiwan University,
• Taiwan Intellectual Property Law Association (TIPLA)

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