Collective production processes, cooperation and incentives : experimental explorations

• Main Author: Chalvignac, Benoît
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Strasbourg 2012
• Subjects: [SHS:GESTION] Humanities and Social Sciences/Business administration; [SHS:GESTION] Sciences de l'Homme et Société/Gestion et management; Cooperation; Theory of the firm; Organization theory; Experimental economies
• Online Access: http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00830965; http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/83/09/65/PDF/Chalvignac_Benoit_2012_ED221.pdf

The study of knowledge creation processes has pointed to the complexity of individual interactions within productive organizations. This complexity appears to be such that incentive-based theories of the firm, which focus on information processing issues, may fail to grasp a substantial part of the individual decision-making involved in the context of organizational learning, and more broadly in collective production processes. In this thesis we use experimental methods to study the determinants of cooperation, in order to refine the behavioral assumptions on which economic theories of collective production are based. We show that the two visions of cooperation embodied in competing theories of the firm - a behavior to be elicited from diverging interests and an emergent property stemming from social interactions among agents - find support from the laboratory experiments. Accordingly, we conclude that both approaches should be upheld and possibly combined in a broader, integrative, analytical framework.