Economics Insights @ CBS

Business collective action (BCA) has long been a topic of interest to management scholars. However, our theoretical understanding of this important phenomenon has been hindered by its fragmented development in the literature. To address this shortcoming, we conduct a comprehensive review of BCA across a wide range of disciplines in management including corporate political activity, private regulation, strategic management, and organizational institutionalism.

A growing body of research has revealed that firms leverage nationalism in their strategies. However, it is unclear why some firms are more likely to do so than others. This paper uses institutional theory to address this question and examines the influences of domestic and foreign customers. We study firms’ responses to nationalist movements, a type of sociopolitical mobilization arising in response to international controversies.

Firms increasingly delegate job screening to third-party recruiters, who must not only satisfy employers' demand for different types of candidates, but also manage yield by anticipating candidates' likelihood of accepting offers. We study how recruiters balance these objectives in a novel, two-sided field experiment. Our results suggest that candidates' behavior towards employers is very correlated, but that employers' hiring behavior is more idiosyncratic.

We study optimal workforce and contract design for a firm that employs a team of two agents. The agents have possibly diverse demographic characteristics captured by their discount factors. We also study optimal team design for four agents with given discount factors—two with low discount factors and two with high discount factors—who are to be assigned to two teams and identify conditions under which diverse assignment is optimal.