Kellogg School of Management

While much of economic sociology focuses on the stabilizing aspects of markets, the social movement perspective emphasizes the role that contentiousness plays in bringing institutional change and innovation to markets. Markets are inherently political, both because of their ties to the regulatory functions of the state and because markets are contested by actors who are dissatisfied with market outcomes and who use the market as a platform for social change. Research in this area focuses on the pathways to market change pursued by social movements, including direct challenges to corporations, the institutionalization of systems of private regulation, and the creation of new market categories through institutional entrepreneurship. Much contentiousness, while initially disruptive, works within the market system by producing innovation and restraining capitalism from destroying the resources it depends on for survival.

The borrowing and application of concepts and theories from underlying disciplines, such as psychology and sociology, is commonplace in organization theory. This article critically reviews this practice in organizational research. It discusses the borrowing of theoretical perspectives across vertical (cross-level) and horizontal (cross-context) boundaries and makes an associated distinction between theories in organizations and theories of organizations. It also explicates several unintended consequences and metatheoretical challenges associated with theory borrowing and highlights the legitimate reasons and ways for borrowing theories. By way of example, this article reviews how theories and concepts have been borrowed and applied in organizational research from two different literatures: individual identity and social movements. Overall, it is argued that treating organizations as social actors is the key to appropriate horizontal and vertical theory borrowing in organizational studies, in that it highlights the distinctive features of the organizational social form and organizational social context.

The origin of market value has not been sufficiently explored in the social sciences. While there is a tendency among economists and sociologists to see value as imported to the market from external sources (eg culture, internal preferences), I argue that shifts in market value are often endogenous to the market setting. Perceptions of value, or collective beliefs that specific sets of assets will yield benefits for the owner, are most malleable when markets are unstable.

Drawing hypotheses from resource mobilization and resource partitioning theories (RMT and RPT), this article examines how interorganizational competition and social movement industry (SMI) concentration affect the level of tactical and goal specialization of protest organizations associated with the peace, women's, and environmental movements. Additionally, the article examines how specialization affects the survival of these organizations.

Abstract Drawing hypotheses from resource mobilization and resource partitioning theories, this paper examines how inter-organizational competition and social movement industry concentration affect the level of tactical and goal specialization of protest organizations associated with three different social movements: the Peace, Women's, and Environmental Movements. Additionally, the paper examines how organizational tactical and goal specialization affect survival of these organizations.

Abstract: While much is known about how groups maintain control over established areas of expertise, how do occupational groups establish new claims to expertise? We address this question by analyzing how different occupational groups within manufacturing firms tried to establish expertise with respect to the introduction of the business computer.

Comparative organizational research means different things to different people and encompasses a variety of research programs, some focused on specific methodologies and others exploring more substantive issues.''Comparative''is often used to describe research that is cross-national or cross-cultural, but more generally, comparative research explains contextual variation in social phenomena (Azumi & Hull, 1981; Ragin, 1987) including variation in organizational contexts.

Zusammenfassung: Previous work shows that reputation results may fail in repeated games between two long-run players with equal discount factors. We restrict attention to an infinitely repeated game where two players with equal discount factors play a simultaneous move stage game where actions of player 2 are imperfectly observed. The set of commitment types for player 1 is taken as any (countable) set of finite automata. In this context, for a restricted class of stage games, we provide a one sided reputation result.

Abstract. Previous work shows that reputation results may fail in repeated games with long-run players with equal discount factors. Attention is restricted to extensive-form stage games of perfect information. One and two-sided reputation results are provided for repeated games with two long-run players with equal discount factors where the first mover advantage is maximal.

Zusammenfassung: We model a long-run relationship as an infinitely repeated game played by two equally patient agents. In each period, the agents play an extensive-form game of perfect information. There is incomplete information about the type of player 1 while player 2's type is commonly known. We show that a sufficiently patient player 1 can leverage player 2's uncertainty about his type to secure his highest payoff in any perfect Bayesian equilibrium of the repeated game.

We study a market where k identical and indivisible objects are allocated using a uniform-price auction where n> k bidders each demand one object. Before the auction, each bidder receives an informative but imperfect signal about the state of the world. The good that is auctioned is a common-value object for the bidders and a bidder's valuation for the object is determined jointly by the state of the world and an action that he chooses after winning the object but before he observes the state.

Summary. This paper explores sufficient conditions for a continuous stationary Markov optimal policy and a concave value function in stochastic dynamic programming problems. Also, the paper addresses conditions needed for the differentiability of the value function. The paper uses conditions such as first order stochastic dominance, second order stochastic dominance and concave stochastic dominance that are widely applied in economics.

Abstract: This paper considers a frictional market where buyers and sellers, with unit demand and supply, search for trading opportunities. The analysis focuses on explicit search frictions, allows for two-sided incomplete information, and puts no restriction on agent heterogeneity.

Reading: Stokey, Lucas, and Prescott (1989), ch. 3 (3) Deterministic and countable state dynamic programming with discounting (a) Bellman's functional equation and the principle of optimality (b) Value iteration and policy improvement (c) Linear programming solution (d) Contraction mapping theorem, Blackwell's sufficient conditions for a contraction