Mining the gold of the 21st century

Hofmann, Michael (2023): Mining the gold of the 21st century: studying markets and organizations using observational data. Dissertation, LMU München: Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract

We study the role of left-digit bias — a tendency to focus on the leftmost digit of a number — in the rent-price-setting behavior of landlords. We show that there are two types of landlords — which we name charmers and rounders — and that their strategic behavior differs systematically. Using web data on German apartment listings we document that charmers exploit left-digit bias by increasing rent prices at salient apartment-size measures. In contrast, rounders aim to increase rent prices for all apartments, not taking advantage of limited attention. In addition, we provide evidence that landlords exploit behavioral biases to a larger extent in markets that grant them higher market power. Being able to identify heterogeneity in bias-exploiting behavior allows us to further our understanding of how price discontinuities evolve, even in high-stakes settings such as the housing market. How can teams organize for productive online collaboration? The coronavirus pandemic has led to a large and persistent shift toward remote work. Using fine-grained data from the world’s largest platform for open-source software development, we find that although its importance has slightly decreased, geographic proximity still matters for knowledge workers. We find that the pandemic reduced the productivity of previously co-located teams substantially, whereas teams with remote work experience remained resilient. A large set of controls and matching approaches show that this result is not driven by pre-existing differences between co-located and distributed teams. While access to remote talent and experience are important for overall success, our results highlight the crucial role of communication for productive online collaboration. We find suggestive evidence that, with their peers shifting to online work, remote workers become better integrated into their teams’ communication. We conclude that while teams’ performance may suffer from the shift to remote work, setting up systems for effective online communication can help mitigate productivity loss. I study how firms adjust the bundles of management practices they adopt over time, using repeated survey data collected in Germany from 2012 to 2018. Employing unsupervised ma- chine learning, I leverage high-dimensional data on human resource policies to describe clus- ters of management practices (management styles). My results suggest that two management styles exist, one of which employs many and highly structured practices, while the other lacks these practices but retains training measures. I document sizeable differences in styles across German firms, which can (only) partially be explained by firm characteristics. Further, I show that management is highly persistent over time, in part because newly adopted practices are discontinued after a short time. I discuss two potential hindrances to the adoption of struc- tured management, miscalculations of cost-benefit trade-offs and non-fitting corporate culture, which should be further investigated. In light of previous findings that structured management increases firm performance, my findings have important policy implications since they show that firms which are managed in an unstructured way will continue to underperform.

• Dokumententyp: Dissertationen (Dissertation, LMU München)
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften ; 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 330 Economics
• Fakultäten: Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät
• Sprache der Hochschulschrift: Englisch
• Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 5. Juli 2023
• 1. Bericht­erstatter:in: Englmaier, Florian