Events

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

We conducted a field experiment to identify the causal effects of extrinsic incentive cues on the sorting and performance of nascent social entrepreneurs. The experiment, carried out with one of the United Kingdom's largest support agencies for social entrepreneurs, encouraged 431 nascent social entrepreneurs to submit a full application for a grant competition that provides cash and in-kind mentorship support through a one-time mailing sent by the agency. The applicants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one group received a standard mailing that emphasized the intrinsic incentives of the program, or the opportunity to do good (Social treatment), and the other two groups received a mailing that instead emphasized the extrinsic incentives - either the financial rewards (Cash treatment) or the in-kind rewards (Support treatment). Our results show that an emphasis on extrinsic incentives strongly affects who applies for the grant and consequently the type of submissions received. The extrinsic reward cues "crowded out" the more prosocial candidates, leading fewer candidates to apply and fewer applicants targeting disadvantaged groups. Importantly, while the full applications submitted by candidates in the extrinsic incentives groups were more successful in receiving the grant, their social enterprises were less likely to be successful at the end of the one-year grant period. Our results highlight the critical role of intrinsic motives to the selection and performance of social enterprises and suggest that using extrinsic incentives to promote the development of successful social enterprises may backfire in the longer run. (Joint work with Ina Ganguli and Chloé Le Coq)

Contact Person: Dr. Marina Chugunova

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Despite increasing gender equality across many domains women remain underrepresented in leading positions. In two experiments, we study whether one reason for this gender gap may be that women are less effective in eliciting coordinated support from followers. Both experiments use coordination games, in which a leader must convince followers to select a particular equilibrium. Our first experiment employs a widely used paradigm to study leader effectiveness, the minimum-effort coordination game, while the second uses a novel game to more directly compare the strength of requests from male versus female leaders. While we find, using explicit and implicit attitude measures, that our participants possess stereotypical associations between gender and leadership, we find no evidence that such bias impacts actual leadership performance. We show that this absence of an effect is surprising, relative to the priors of expert researchers (joint work with Eva Ranehill and Roberto Weber).

Contact Person: Dr. Marina Chugunova

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, room 313

When international patent applications are examined sequentially at different patent offices, examiners at following offices may be able to take advantage on the earlier results provided by another office. By way of focusing on rejection citations added by examiners for a set of triadic patent families, this study examines the influence (spillover) of patent examinations across patent offices. Variations over examiners as well as outcome on the applicants’ responses to the examiner disposals will be discussed.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E10

Moderation: Tobias Endrich-Laimböck

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Recently, a new class of bibliometric indicators has been introduced, which are intended to measure whether a scientific publication is disruptive to a field or tradition of research. Disruptiveness is connected to the ‘scientific revolutions’ concept of Thomas S. Kuhn and refers to exceptional research which is characterized by an overthrow of established thinking. The general approach that all of these indicators build upon is rooted in patent analysis and considers the relations of citing papers and cited references for a given focal paper in the citation network. This seminar will give an overview of the different indicators following this approach and present results that allow a first assessment of whether they measure what they propose to measure. Our results suggest that a modified version of the indicators proposed so far could improve the ability to measure the disruptiveness of papers.

Contact Person: Fabian Gaessler

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Cooperation with Münchner Kartellrechtsforum (Munich Antitrust Law Forum)

Dr. Thorsten Käseberg, LL.M. (NYU) is Head of the Department of Competition and Consumer Policy, Competition Policy Issues in the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy.


We look forward to seeing you and ask you to register by Tuesday, 21.1.2020, at delia.zirilli(at)ip.mpg.de.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room E10

Fire and Mice: The Effect of Supply Shocks on Basic Science
Stefano Baruffaldi, Dennis Byrski, Fabian Gaessler
Speaker: Dennis Byrski

We study how a negative supply shock to research-related assets affects the production of scientific knowledge. In particular, we exploit the 1989 Morrell Park fire that destroyed a considerable share of the world’s largest mice breeding facility, the Jackson Laboratory, and killed approximately 400,000 mice. This fire led to an unforeseen and substantial supply shortage in mice for the North American biomedical research community, which we can isolate at the strain and scientist level based on proprietary archival data. Using difference-in-differences estimations, we find that the scientific productivity of affected scientists decreases when measured in simple publication counts, but much less so when we adjust for the publications’ quality. Moreover, affected researchers are more likely to initiate research that is unrelated to their previous work. This indicates that affected scientists switched research trajectories but maintained their scientific impact. In the aggregate, the temporary supply shortage of particular mice strains led to a permanent decrease in their usage among U.S. scientists. These results highlight the important role of supply chains in basic science.

Strategy Development in Project-Based Organizations
Speaker: Georg Windisch (TUM)

Research has established that learning at and across different level is of utmost importance for project-based organizations (PBOs) to identify and develop new strategies. At the same time, pbo’s face inherent weaknesses in exactly these areas: organizational learning and firm-level strategizing. Literature to date has created a large body of knowledge on learning and capability building in support or in consequence of pursuing new strategies, that is a new strategy is already defined and firms improve on executing it through vanguard (also called “innovative”) projects. Yet, apart from few conceptual attempts, a profound empirical analysis of learning mechanisms that lead to the identification and development of new strategies – as prerequisite to initiate innovative projects - is missing so far. Consequently, the question this study aims to answer is the following: How does learning in project-based organizations lead to the development of new strategies? We put particular emphasis on which learning mechanisms occur throughout strategy development and which obstacles might lead to the difficulties on organizational learning, as identified by previous research. To answer this question, the author conducted a 16-month ethnographic case study on a pbo in the rail transport industry that faced a fundamental change in its business environment and, over a period of almost two decades and with the extensive help of internal consultants, managed to successfully identify and develop a new strategy to adapt to its new competitive landscape. Building on this, we put forward the concept of a self-locking cycle, which hindered the firm to conduct strategy development by their own efforts. Further we identified three learning mechanisms conducted by the internal consultants that allowed to overcome this self-locking cycle in our focal firm and finally enabled successful strategy development: project-oriented, business environment-oriented, and organization-oriented learning.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E 10

Moderation: Ansgar Kaiser

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

I study the relationship between the use of continuations and patent litigation in the United States. Continuations are applications that delay claim issuance, thereby providing another chance to obtain rejected claims, draft new claims and modify the scope of protection of issued patents. I show that patents from continuations are litigated more often and earlier than ordinary patents, even after controlling for patent and invention characteristics. Moreover, I exploit patent-family linkages and the relationship between the timing of continuation issuance and litigation to show that continuations likely lead to more litigation related to an invention.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose