Post-Growth Innovation Lab Seminar: Samer Abdelnour (University of Edinburgh)

Abstract:
Samer Abdelnour will present a recently published paper suggesting that in contexts of violence methodological reflexivity alone is insufficient to prevent researchers from causing harms to vulnerable people and communities. Rather, researchers should embrace ‘political reflexivity’, which can equip researchers to better identify, understand and mitigate harms, and where possible, challenge structures that do the marginalizing. The paper draws on feminist standpoint epistemology and contributes to growing debates about decolonizing research methods.


ECOSOT Group Seminar: Yuan Ju (University of York)

Title: The English Housing Market Mechanism
Authors: Yuan Ju, Zaifu Yang, and Jingsheng Yu
Abstract: This paper introduces a model of typical English housing markets. In such markets, there are many first time buyers, movers, and sellers. Because of financial/locational constraints, most homeowners who wish to move are critically dependent on the sale of their current house. We formulate this problem as a multi-person game-theoretical problem and propose a novel allocation mechanism. We demonstrate that the mechanism always yields efficient assignment of houses, i.e., a core allocation, to market participants within existing constraints, and can improve welfare gains of trade considerably.

International Business and Intelectual Capital Group's Seminar: Nick Zubanov (University of Konstanz)

Anonymous and unannounced site inspections known as “Mystery Shopping” (MS) are common in multi-site service firms, but little is known about the strategic importance of this practice. We conceptualize MS as a tool firms use to implement the optimal allocation of site resources between sales- and service-related activities in the presence of cross-site reputation spillovers, which is to maximize sales while maintaining service standards. Consistent with this strategy, data from three retail chains reveal (i) low variation in MS scores, (ii) little correlation of MS scores with sales, and iii) high correlation of sites’ MS scores with the likelihood of their supervisors receiving incentive bonuses. These findings are robust to different estimation specifications and shed a new light on a ubiquitous yet little-studied management practice.