Contributions published at Services & Operations Management (Helmut Max Dietl)

Most of today’s manufacturing companies are organized in networks. Discussions concerning these networks include the global footprint, but hardly how the sites can be successfully coordinated. Leaning at coordination mechanisms known from team sports, this article provides five tactics of how the network coordination can be done successfully. These include a consequent reassessment of the global footprint and a consequent closure of obsolete sites, a clear definition of each site’s role in the network, as well as joint learning between sites and celebrating common achievements.

Trade-offs between competitive priorities are often seen as exogenous – managers accept them as a given downside while simultaneously addressing multiple competitive priorities. However, some companies seem to face fewer trade-offs than others. The question is how companies reduce their trade-offs to successfully compete on multiple competitive priorities simultaneously. We address this question by theorising that bundles of action programmes are needed to reduce trade-offs between competitive priorities. We examine four Swiss manufacturing plants and show how the selection of action programmes influences the simultaneous competition on multiple competitive priorities. We show that successful competition on multiple competitive priorities does not happen by accident but is achieved by aligning competitive priorities, action programmes, infrastructural/structural changes and contextual factors.

Im Schatten der Sportwirtschaft lautet der Titel der 16. Jahrestagung des Arbeitskreises Sportökonomie e.V., welche in Magglingen Schweiz vom 3. bis 5. Mai 2012 veranstaltet wurde. Der Tagungsband sammelt Beiträge, welche eine Reihe von Phänomenen, jenseits der stets betrachteten Sonnenseite des Sports diskutieren. Das Hauptinteresse gilt nicht den Preisgeldern, Transfersummen oder Entwicklungen der Marketingrechte der Internationalen Verbände, sondern Phänomenen am Rande oder eben im Schatten der Sportwirtschaft. Die Palette der Beiträge reicht von der Integrität des Positionswettbewerbes zu Fragen der Spielmanipulation durch Spielabsprachen und Doping bis zur Stützung von Vereinen und Verbänden durch das Ehrenamt und Mäzenatentum sowie der Thematik der Markterschließung durch Sport. Durch den Band soll ein Beitrag an eine nachhaltige und positive Entwicklung des Sports geleistet werden. Alles was der Integrität des Wettbewerbs abträglich ist, sollte wenn möglich im Interesse der Glaubwürdigkeit des Sports vermieden werden.

This paper develops a model of a cooperative enterprise and compares it to a vertically separated market. In our model of a multi-stage production process, agents can acquire costly knowledge to decrease production costs. Our model shows that the cooperative acquires less non-generalizable knowledge than the market, but more generalizable knowledge if the large member in the cooperative receives a sufficiently large share of the cooperative's profits. Additionally, we derive that the cooperative generates larger aggregate surplus than the market if the influence of generalizable knowledge on production costs is large.

Several countries have implemented bonus taxes for corporate executives in response to the current financial crisis. Using a principal-agent model, this paper investigates the incentive effects of bonus taxes by analyzing the agent's and principal's behavior. Specifically, we show how bonus taxes affect the agent's incentives to exert effort and the principal's decision regarding the composition of the compensation package (fixed salary and bonus rate). We find that, surprisingly, a bonus tax can increase the bonus rate and decrease the fixed salary if the agent is highly risk averse. Additionally, a bonus tax can induce the principal to pay higher bonuses even though the agent's effort unambiguously decreases. Nevertheless, a bonus tax reduces the overall salary of the agent. Further results are derived with respect to the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium for a general effort cost function.

Based on a model of asymmetric competition between a pay and a free media platform, this paper investigates advertising pricing models. The pay media platform generates revenues from media consumers through subscription fees, while the free media platform generates revenues from charging advertisers either on a lump-sum basis (regime A) or on a per-consumer basis (regime B). We show that the free platform produces a higher advertising level and attracts more consumers in regime A than B although advertisers must pay more for ads and consumers dislike ads. Moreover, the pay media platform faces higher subscription fees and lower consumer demand in regime A than B. Compared to regime B, the profit of the free (pay) media platform is higher (lower) in regime A, while aggregate profits are higher only if the consumers’ disutility from ads is sufficiently low. In addition, advertisers are better off in regime A than B, while the opposite is true for the media consumers. Finally, in small media markets, social welfare is lower in regime A than B, while this is true in large media markets only if the media consumers’ disutility from advertising is sufficiently high.