Erina Ytsma
Carnegie Mellon University

Ytsma

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(Tuesday, 24th May 2022)

Title : The organization of work in the knowledge economy

Knowledge work is an important pillar of present-day economies. It has become rapidly more prevalent over the last four decades and has exhibited consistent growth in occupational employment share (Autor, 2019). Furthermore, knowledge creation has long been considered an important driver of economic growth (Romer, 1986; Lucas 1988). Understanding how to organize and manage knowledge work is therefore of great economic importance. The very nature of knowledge work, however, makes its organization far from straightforward. For instance, knowledge work comprises multiple, complex tasks – often with hard to measure outputs. This makes it difficult to devise incentive schemes that incentivize not just more, but also high quality output. Furthermore, there can be large spillovers or complementarities in knowledge creation. This means that team composition and network structure may have a large impact on knowledge output. This workshop intends to provide an overview of the literature on the personnel and organizational economics of innovation and knowledge creation. It will cover i.a. research on the knowledge production function, incentives for knowledge creation, knowledge production teams, and careers in knowledge creation. Special attention will be paid to open questions and possible directions for future research.