arXiv subjects

Jonathan Bendor

Publications and source records attributed to Jonathan Bendor.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Interactions across multiple games: cooperation, corruption, and organizational design

Teamwork is vital in many settings, and it is socially beneficial for teams to cooperate in some situations (``good games'') and not in others (``bad games;'' e.g., those that allow for corruption). A team's cooperation in any given game depends on expectations of cooperation in future iterations of both good and bad games. We identify when sustaining cooperation on good games necessitates cooperation on bad games. We then characterize how a designer should optimally assign workers to teams and teams to tasks that involve varying arrival rates of good and bad games. Our results show how organizational design can be used to promote cooperation while minimizing corruption.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2005

Management Fads, Pedagogies and Soft Technologies

We present a model for the diffusion of management fads and other technologies which lack clear objective evidence about their merits. The choices made by non-Bayesian adopters reflect both their own evaluations and the social influence of their peers. We show, both analytically and computationally, that the dynamics lead to outcomes that appear to be deterministic in spite of being governed by a stochastic process. In other words, when the objective evidence about a technology is weak, the evolution of this process quickly settles down to a fraction of adopters that is not predetermined. When the objective evidence is strong, the proportion of adopters is determined by the quality of the evidence and the adopters' competence.

physics.soc-ph↗