Introduction
What are the motivations that drive the behaviour of agents within organizations and institutions, and in particular those that are more conducive to building up individual and organizational knowledge and competence?
Economic theory has traditionally assumed that the pursuit of self-interest (such as utility maximization) was the essential driver of human agency, and that also cooperative behaviour should be eventually explained by self interest. This assumption has been very influential and lies behind the design of incentives for managers and workers in private and public organizations, the design of institutional mechanisms for the production of knowledge, such as the intellectual property rights system, and the design of governance and incentives structures in organizations of all kinds (from business firms to universities).
This assumption has been recently questioned by research in psychology and economics that has shown that human behaviour is much more complex and that agents seem to be driven indeed by self-interest but also by other motives that are compatible with self interest. Different motives co-exist in the same agents and interact in complex and hard to predict ways.
This workshop will gather some scholars from different disciplines (economics, psychology and economic history) to examine some frontier themes of research in the understanding of human motivation and in particular of how such new understanding should impinge on the way we design institutions and organization for knowledge creation.
Program
Friday 13th November
- 9:30-11:00 Chair Pierre Garrouste
- Edward Deci (Rochester University)
A self-determination theory view of rewards and motivation
- Ulrich Witt (Max Planck Institute, Jena)
Entrepreneurship and organizational change in growing Firms (paper)
- 11:30-13:00 Chair Alessandro Nuvolari
- Liam Brunt (Bergen Business School)
Inducement prizes and Innovation (paper)
- Debrah Meloso (Bocconi University, Milano)
Promoting intellectual discovery: patents vs markets (paper)
- 14:30- 16:00 Chair Margrit Osterloh
- Massimo Egidi (Luiss, Rome)
TBA
- Agnes Festré and Pierre Garrouste (Nice and Paris I)
Your brother is watching you (paper)
- 14:30- 16:00 Chair Agnes Festré
- Benoît Chalvignac (Strasbourg)
Voluntary participation and cooperation in a collective-good game (paper)
- Luigi Marengo (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa)
How to get what you want when you do not know what you want (paper)
Saturday 14th November
- 9:30-11:00 Chair Luigi Marengo
- Margrit Osterloh and Bruno Frey (University of Zurich)
Are there alternatives to academic rankings? (paper)
- Marco Piovesan (Copenhagen University)
Social preferences and strategic uncertainty: an experiment on markets and contracts (paper)
- 11:30-13:00 Chair Ulrich Witt
- Alessandro Nuvolari (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa)
The anatomy of collective invention processes (paper)
- Francesca Sgobbi (University of Brescia)
Do high performance work practices induce learning?
- 13:00-14:30 Buffet Lunch and Farewell
Date and Location
The meeting takes place on November 13-14, 2009 at the Sant'Anna
School of Advanced Studies in Pisa (Italy)
Organizers
- Luigi Marengo, LEM Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa
- Pierre Garrouste, Université Paris I
