Job market interview
Time: 12:30pm – 13:45 pm
Date: 22th of January 2020
Place: Room 3001
Alessandra ALLOCCA (University of Mannheim) “No Man is an Island “: An Empirical Study on Team Formation and Performance
Abstract : Many organizations rely on decentralized arrangements where employees choose their projects and teams. Most of the empirical literature on working collaborations instead focuses on teams that are exogenously formed. I develop a structural entry model with heterogeneous strategic interactions where agents decide whether to join a project. The decision depends on who else may potentially join the project, the project quality, as well as other individual and project characteristics. In turn, this decision a\u000Bffects the probability of project completion. I estimate the model using a novel dataset from an important scienti\u000Cfic collaboration. I \u000Cfind that agents’ decisions to select into projects highly depend on the pool of teammates and the size of the team whereas projects’ quality is of lesser importance. Heterogeneity in agents’ characteristics explains this selection, which needs to be accounted for to obtain unbiased estimates of teams’ performance. With a counterfactual experiment, I show that moving from a decentralized to a centralized arrangement leads to fewer completed projects.