Ex ante versus Ex post Governance: A Behavioral Perspective

ABSTRACTThis study examines how the design of incentive contracts for tasks defined as workers' official responsibilities (i.e., standard tasks) influences workers' propensity to engage in employee‐initiated innovation (EII). EII corresponds to innovation activities that are not formally assigned to workers but are nonetheless encouraged and considered to be important for the company's success. Like other extra‐role behaviors, EII is difficult to incentivize directly. Therefore, it is important to understand whether and how explicit incentive contracts designed for the workers' standard tasks may indirectly influence their EII activity. We use field data from a manufacturing company that uses a dedicated information system to track workers' EII idea submissions. We find theory‐consistent evidence that, compared to workers receiving fixed pay, employees rewarded for their standard tasks with variable compensation contracts exhibit a lower propensity to engage in EII. This result is concentrated among ideas benefiting other constituents and activities beyond the proponents' standard task (i.e., broad‐scope ideas). In contrast, we find no difference attributable to standard task incentive design in the proposal of innovation ideas narrowly focused on the proponent's standard task (i.e., narrow‐scope ideas). Our findings suggest that variable pay narrows employees' conceptual focus around the standard task and hinders employee engagement in broad‐scope innovation activities compared to fixed compensation contracts. We contribute to the literature on incentives for innovation by showing that standard task compensation contracts have spillover effects on EII behavior. We also contribute to the nascent literature on EII by showing that innovation types, defined based on their relation with the proponent's standard task, matter. Our results are relevant for practitioners in that managers relying on variable pay contracts to incentivize standard task performance should expect lower employee engagement in broad‐scope EII.

ABSTRACT: We develop and empirically test a parsimonious model of how specific knowledge and the value of knowledge sharing influence manufacturing plants' incentive design choices. Our results confirm the prediction that increases in the extent of agents' specific knowledge and the value of knowledge sharing are associated with greater (less) reliance on output (input) performance measures. Moreover, consistent with our model's prediction, we find that plants rely more on group-based (as opposed to individual-based) output performance measures when the value of knowledge sharing is higher, or the extent of agents' specific knowledge is lower. Finally, consistent with previous research, we find that as output performance measures become noisier, firms rely less on these measures in incentive contracts.

Incentive contract design for embedded low-carbon service supply chain under information asymmetry of carbon abatement efficiency

Regulation and promotion of groundwater pollution prevention and control strategies under the scenario of optimal strategy in northern Jiangsu.

Smart irrigation monitoring and control strategies for improving water use efficiency in precision agriculture: A review

Incentive Instruments and the Weighting of Performance Measures

Subjectivity in Tournaments: Implicit Rewards and Penalties and Subsequent Performance

In an elegant study on salesforce incentive design, Steenburgh and Ahearne (2012) have argued that a multi‐faceted portfolio approach, based on the classification of workers into laggards, core, and star performers, can induce better result from the salesforce, compared to traditional approaches used in companies. In this paper, we construct a portfolio of incentive contracts with a three‐piece “linear–quadratic–linear” structure and study their incentive effects. It is well known that such contracts can extract 100% of the incremental benefits (i.e., optimal) when the performance levels of the agents are exponentially or uniformly distributed, but its effect is still unknown in the more natural case when performance levels are normally distributed. We show that the proposed three‐piece contract can capture more than 95.32% of the incremental benefits, obtained from the optimal incentive contract over fixed salary contract, when the cost functions of efforts are quadratic, and the performance levels are normally distributed. In this case, the more traditional three‐piece linear contract has a corresponding tight lower bound of 82.64%. Interestingly this is the same as the tight lower bound from a two‐piece linear contract, and thus adding more linear pieces to the contract does not help to improve the lower bound when the performance levels follow the normal distributions. This provides a partial theoretical explanation for the superiority of the portfolio approach advocated by Steenburgh and Ahearne (2012).

The Relationship Between the Ownership Structure and Board Effectiveness

A lithography workcell monitoring and modeling scheme

The design for the new Federal Building for San Francisco includes an office tower that is to be naturally ventilated. Each floor is designed to be cross-ventilated, through upper windows that are controlled by the building management system. Users have control over lower level windows, which can be as much as 50% of the total openable area. There are significant differences in the performance and the control of the windward and leeward sides of the building, and separate monitoring and control strategies are determined for each side. The performance and control of the building has been designed and tested using a modified version of EnergyPlus. Results from studies with EnergyPlus and computational fluid dynamics are used in designing the control strategy. Wind-driven cross-ventilation produces a main jet through the upper openings of the building, across the ceiling from the windward to the leeward side. Below this jet, the occupied regions are subject to a recirculating airflow. Results show that temperatures within the building are predicted to be satisfactory, provided a suitable control strategy is implemented that uses night cooling in periods of hot weather. The control strategy has 10 window opening modes. EnergyPlus was extended to simulate the effects of these modes, and to assess the effects of different forms of user behaviour. The results show how user behaviour can significantly influence the building performance.

A new monitoring strategy for PI slip control in an autonomous electric vehicle with two independent in-wheel motors is presented. The distributed motors are employed to regulate the longitudinal speed and yaw-rate. Based on such regulation errors, each motor is given a suitable tire-slip/angular-speed set point. To drive independently each motor to its reference speed, the individual control loops lead to the online steady-state estimation of each actual wheel load-torque which is compensated. Simultaneous information on each tire torque-slip pair allow for a steady-state monitoring of tire operations on force-slip characteristics. An automatic longitudinal speed reduction action is performed to prevent tire forces saturation. An experimental setup is designed on a 1:10 scale autonomous vehicle equipped with 2-rear in-wheel DC brushless motors, aiming to show the reliability of such tire operation monitoring from rear wheel speed real measurements, conditioned by a Kalman filter. A path-following algorithm is developed for the autonomous guidance. The experiment illustrates the automatic speed reduction when the vehicle encounters an adherence jump.

This paper presents an integrated approach for the monitoring and control of abrasive waterjet (AWJ) cutting process. A machine-vision-based monitoring approach was proposed to obtain the bore diameter of the focusing nozzle from time to time. A neuro-genetic approach, proposed by Srinivasu and Ramesh Babu (Appl Soft Comput 8(1):809–819, 2008) was employed as a control strategy to modify the process parameters, such as water pressure, abrasive flow rate, and jet traverse rate, so as to maintain the desired depth of cut, with changes in the diameter of the focusing nozzle monitored with a machine vision system. By combining the monitoring and control strategies, an integrated approach for adaptive control of AWJ cutting process is realized. The effectiveness of the proposed integrated approach for adaptive control of AWJ cutting process was shown by comparing the results obtained from the experiments with the process parameters suggested by the control strategy to achieve the desired depth of cut. From the results of the study, it is seen that the proposed monitoring system is capable of monitoring the focusing nozzle diameter with a mean absolute deviation of 0.05 mm and that the neuro-genetic strategy is capable of modifying the controllable process parameters to maintain the desired depth of cut with a mean absolute deviation of 0.87 mm.

The article delves into the development of a Non-Gaussian Process Monitoring Strategy for a Copper Cathode Manufacturing Unit (CCMU). The monitoring strategy being devised highlighted the issue of multi-stage process monitoring via the usage of Multi-block Independent Component Analysis (MBICA) techniques. MBICA is the multi-block variant of ICA technique which is prevalently used for process laden with non-Gaussian or non-normal data. Development of the monitoring strategy involved detection of fault(s) and their subsequent diagnosis. Detection of fault(s) was carried out by employment of I2 control chart whose control limit was established via Bootstrap procedure. The diagnosis of the detected fault was carried out by employment of fault diagnostic statistic. An amalgamation of MBICA and Multivariate Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (MEWMA) are also known as MBICA-MEWMA approach was also proposed for detection of incipient fault(s). The monitoring strategy thus developed was showcased for a CCMU which specialised in the manufacture of copper cathode which has got varied practical applications. The monitoring strategy thus devised was able to detect and diagnose the faults with appreciable accuracy.

From design to reflection: Effects of peer-scoring and comments on students’ behavioral patterns and learning outcomes in musical theater performance