The Impact of Decision Rights on Innovation Sharing

49 Pages Posted: 12 May 2017 Last revised: 2 Jan 2019

See all articles by Ruth Beer

Ruth Beer

City University of NY, Baruch College, Zicklin School of Business

Hyun-Soo Ahn

University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business

Stephen Leider

University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business

Date Written: December 2018

Abstract

While innovation sharing between a supplier and a buyer—a common practice in the automotive industry—can increase the efficiency of a supply chain, many suppliers are reluctant to do so. Sharing innovations leaves the supplier in a vulnerable position if the buyer exploits the information and re-shares the supplier’s innovation with competing suppliers. Anecdotal evidence from automotive suppliers tells that in some occasions the buyer’s decision is in the hands of a long-run focused employee (“engineer”), while in other occasions it is a short-run focused employee (“procurement manager”) who has more control. To examine how the allocation of decision rights to employees with different time horizons affects collaboration between the two firms, we model a buyer-supplier relationship where the buyer is a dual decision maker, consisting of long-run and short-run focused employees. We characterize the equilibrium of this model and show that the frequency of collaborative outcomes increases from a case where the decision is made by an employee with a short-term objective, to a case where the decision is made jointly, to a case where a decision is made by an employee with a long-run objective. Our experimental results verify this prediction, for the most part. An important result not predicted by the theory is that in the joint control case, both employees become significantly less trustworthy. With an additional treatment which allows for free-form communication, we identify social interaction effects in the form of a “bias to agreement” as a plausible driver of the more competitive behavior.

Keywords: behavioral operations, innovation sharing, trust and trustworthiness, collaboration in supply chains

Suggested Citation

Beer, Ruth and Ahn, Hyun-Soo and Leider, Stephen, The Impact of Decision Rights on Innovation Sharing (December 2018). Ross School of Business Paper No. 1369, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2967525 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2967525

Ruth Beer (Contact Author)

City University of NY, Baruch College, Zicklin School of Business ( email )

One Bernard Baruch Way
New York, NY 10010
United States

Hyun-Soo Ahn

University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business ( email )

701 Tappan St
R5456
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1234
United States

Stephen Leider

University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business ( email )

701 Tappan Street
Ann Arbor, MI MI 48109
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~leider/

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