Margaret (Meg) Meyer’s Scholarly Contributions

Professor Margaret (Meg) Meyer is a leading microeconomics theorist who has made several important and lasting contributions to organizational economics and industrial organization. First, in a series of papers on the design of dynamic incentives in organizations [e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4], Margaret (Meg) demonstrates how recognizing that agents compete over time and over multiple periods is fundamental to the design of incentives and organizations. These include whether career contests should treat workers equally or favor interim leaders, how junior and senior workers should be paired together, and whether comparative performance information improves or degrades the trade-off between insurance and incentives.

Second, Margaret (Meg)’s work on influence costs and corporate structure [5] taught us how influence costs can explain the boundaries and structures of firms and rationalizes the widespread tendency of firms to divest business units with poor growth prospects because the managers of these units would otherwise engage in actions to protect their jobs. Last but not least, her widely cited work on oligopolistic competition under uncertainty [6, 7] develops tools for analyzing oligopolistic competition under uncertainty.

Her work showed that introducing uncertainty into oligopolistic models forces each firm’s supply function to be optimal against a range of possible residual demand curves, which in turn dramatically reduces the set of equilibria in games of strategic competition that are otherwise riddled by an enormous multiplicity of equilibria. Importantly, Margaret (Meg)’s influential contributions often include junior coauthors, further highlighting her role as a sought-after generous mentor [e.g., 8, 9, 10].

References

1. Meyer, M.A. (1991) “Learning from coarse information: Biased contests and career profiles,” The Review of Economic Studies, 58(1):15-41
2. Meyer, M.A. (1994) “The dynamics of learning with team production: Implications for task assignment,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 109(4):1157-1184
3. Meyer, M.A. (1995) “Cooperation and competition in organizations: A dynamic perspective,” European Economic Review 39(3-4):709-722
4. Meyer, M.A. and J. Vickers (1997) “Performance comparisons and dynamic incentives,” Journal of Political Economy 105(3):547-581.
5. Meyer, M.A., P.R. Milgrom and J. Roberts (1992) “Organizational prospects, influence costs, and ownership changes,” Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 1(1):9-35.
6. Klemperer, P. and M.A. Meyer (1986) “Price competition vs. quantity competition: the role of uncertainty,” The RAND Journal of Economics, 17(4):618-638
7. Klemperer, P. and M.A. Meyer (1989) “Supply Function Equilibria in Oligopoly under Uncertainty,” Econometrica, 57(6):1243-77.
8. Meyer, M.A. and B. Strulovici (2012) “Increasing interdependence of multivariate distributions,” Journal of Economic Theory, 147(4):1460-1489
9. Ederer, F., R. Holden and M.A. Meyer (2018) “Gaming and Strategic Opacity in Incentive Provision,” Rand Journal of Economics, 49(4):819-854
10. Meyer, M.A., J. I Moreno de Barreda and J. Nafziger (2019) “Robustness of full revelation in multisender cheap talk,” Theoretical Economics, 14(4):1203-1235