Management Research Seminar Series, conducted by the Department of Economics and Business, aims to bring accomplished researchers in the Management field to share their current research projects to facilitate an academic discussion, enhance knowledge, and discover potential connections. The series is designed for the academic audience, i.e., the Faculty and MA, PhD students; however, anyone interested in the series is welcome to attend.
On February 23, Dr. Gábor Békés from Central European University will join the Management Research Seminar Series. The event will be on Zoom. For details and the zoom link, please email senyuza@ceu.edu or Attri_Pardeep@phd.ceu.edu.
Title: Collaboration and Homophily in Global Teams (with Gianmarco Ottaviano)
Abstract: How do barriers related to nationality and culture affect collaboration in multinational teams? We address this question by creating and exploiting an exhaustive dataset recording all 10.7 million passes by 7 thousand professional European football players from 132 countries fielded by all 154 teams competing in the top five men leagues over eight sporting seasons, together with full information on players’ and teams’ characteristics. We measure collaboration as the average number of passes per minute between a pair of players in a half season. We use a discrete choice model of players’ passing behavior as a baseline to separately identify excess collaboration within nationality or language due to preferences (‘choice homophily’) from collaboration due to opportunities (‘induced homophily’). Our dataset allows us to estimate the model using a rich set of player and play characteristics as well as player fixed effects. We find strong evidence of choice homophily: conditioning on players’ and teams’ characteristics, player pairs of same nationality exhibit an average number of passes per minute that is 2.5 percent higher than player pairs of different nationality. Same nationality is about as likely to lead to more passes as doubling the player pair’s valuation, which is a consensus measure of players’ skills. Beyond nationality, we find that shared culture derived from colonial history matters, but shared language alone has negligible effect. Pairs of same nationality are also more likely to engage in deeper collaboration, disproportionately participating in more complex pass sequences. These findings show that homophily based on nationality, and shared culture is pervasive even in teams of very high skill individuals with clear common objectives and aligned incentives and involved in interactive tasks that are well-defined and not particularly language intensive.