040220 SE Seminar Organization and Personnel (MA) (2024S)

The focus of this seminar is on the concept of bounded rationality and its impact on the design of organizations. We will review concepts of bounded rationality, their relationship to institutions in general and their relationship to specific variables of organizational design. In addition to this substantive element, the seminar also serves as a training in writing scientific papers, to prepare you for writing the Master thesis.

The student will achieve knowledge on issues in incentive design and performance evaluation in various business contexts with a focus on how financial compensation affects behavior. She/he will read scientific literature on the subject assigned to her/him and write a paper on the topic. During seminar sessions, the student will present her/his paper and participate in discussions about the findings of her/his and other participant’s papers.
Contents: Topics come from three subject areas (with four topics in each area), addressing selected topics in research that have been popular in the last two decades. The first area is about how incentives can be designed to positively affect task performance in tasks that are not reflected in the standard economic models of incentive design. The second area is about the choice of performance measures in incentive design, the third area is about executive compensation.
Method: Scientific writing of papers, presentations, interactive group discussions