Publications

While existing research has demonstrated that intrinsic motivation can increase task performance, jobs are composed of multiple tasks, and it remains to be seen how intrinsic motivation in one task affects performance on other tasks. Drawing on theories of psychological contrast, we hypothesize that high intrinsic motivation in one task reduces performance on less intrinsically motivating tasks. In a field study at a Korean department store, employees with the highest maximum intrinsic motivation in one task had lower average and minimum performance across their other tasks as well as more performance variance across their tasks. In a laboratory experiment in the United States, working on a highly intrinsically motivating initial task led participants to perform worse in a subsequent task if it was uninteresting, but not if it was interesting. This effect was mediated by boredom, but not by a range of other psychological processes. Across both studies, moderate intrinsic motivation in one task was associated with better performance in less interesting tasks than high intrinsic motivation, revealing a curvilinear cross-task effect of intrinsic motivation. Our research advances knowledge about the dark side of intrinsic motivation, the design of work, and the drivers of task performance.

(Short Case) Khalil Tawil founded a home-cooked, meal delivery service (described in Khalil Tawil and Umi (A)). This case describes his efforts to save his floundering start-up.

In most organizations, the agent has superior information about the relative costs of different products or activities. This handicaps the principal when the principal seeks to adjust the product mix. Our main conceptual finding is that there is “mix stickiness.” The agent’s superior information about the relative costs of different products or activities leads to an advantage for the status quo; that is, there is inertia (or stickiness) in the mix of products or activities pursued. The historical mix has an advantage because the asymmetric information about relative costs has less of an impact when the mix does not change. If the mix changes, the producer can extract information rents by claiming high costs on the least reduced or most expanded products. Only in the case of larger shifts in the environment will the mix change. Changing the mix comes with the advantage of making rationing cheaper. Our analysis gives new insight into several business practices. It suggests, for example, that for moderate downsizing, a reinforcement approach of proportionally cutting all activities (lawn mowing) is optimal. When more dramatic downsizing is called for, a reorientation approach of eliminating certain activities (divesting) is optimal. It also suggests that outsourcing may come at the cost of reduced adaptability, and it may help explain why most, if not all, healthcare systems struggle to control cost.

Titus Kaphar, Jonthan Brand, and Jason Price founded an organization, NXTHVN, to take an old factory building in a rundown neighborhood in New Haven and reconfigure the space into an art incubator, artists’ studios, and a community center. They enlisted Dean of Yale’s School of Architecture, Deborah Berke, to design a plan for building the new space.

The project morphed into two interrelated initiatives that would be housed together in the rehabilitated factory building. The first was an incubator for early-career artists. The program would include a yearlong fellowship that included studio space, a stipend, and a curriculum of workshops to help the artists navigate the realities of making a life in the art world.

The second initiative was a community workspace that would offer low-cost spaces such as studios, coworking offices, and a theater. NXTHVN hoped to attract a diverse group of people to this space, charging them less than they would otherwise have to pay.

The initiatives faced the challenges of all social enterprises. Price and Kaphar had to set-up governance mechanisms, find a communications strategy, and decide on a revenue model. By July 2019, construction was moving toward its conclusion and the first group of emerging artists was working in the studios.

With their newly hired Executive Director, they could begin to examine more questions: How could the programs interact with their neighbors? Could they help revitalize the existing community without displacing its residents and becoming agents of gentrification? And later, even larger questions would arise: Was this model replicable in other locales? Could art become a vehicle for redevelopment of urban neighborhoods?

We study dynamic matching in an infinite-horizon stochastic market. Although all agents are potentially compatible with each other, some are hard to match and others are easy to match. Agents prefer to be matched as soon as possible, and matches are formed either bilaterally or indirectly through chains. We adopt an asymptotic approach and compute tight bounds on the limit of waiting time of agents under myopic policies that differ in matching technology and prioritization. We find that when hard-to-match agents arrive less frequently than easy-to-match ones, (i) bilateral matching is almost as efficient as chains (waiting times scale similarly under both, though chains always outperform bilateral matching by a constant factor), and (ii) assigning priorities to hard-to-match agents improves their waiting times. When hard-to-match agents arrive more frequently, chains are much more efficient than bilateral matching, and prioritization has no impact. Furthermore, somewhat surprisingly, we find that in a heterogeneous market and under bilateral matching, increasing the arrival rate of hard-to-match agents has a nonmonotone effect on waiting times. This behavior is in contrast with that of a homogeneous dynamic market, where increasing arrival rate always improves waiting time, and it highlights fundamental differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous dynamic markets.