Asset ownership and incentives in early shareholder capitalism: <scp>L</scp> iverpool shipping in the eighteenth century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research summary : We explore captain‐ownership and vessel performance in eighteenth‐century transatlantic shipping. Although contingent compensation often aligned incentives between captains and shipowners, one difficult‐to‐contract hazard was threat of capture during wartime. We exploit variation across time and routes to study the relationship between capture threat and captain‐ownership. Vessels were more likely to have captain‐owners when undertaking wartime voyages on routes susceptible to privateers. Captain‐owned vessels were less readily captured than those with nonowner captains, but more likely to forgo voyage profits to preserve the vessel's safety. These results are consistent with multitask agency, where residual claims to asset value rather than control rights influence captain behavior. This article is among the first to empirically isolate mechanisms distinguishing among major strands of organizational economics regarding asset ownership and performance . Managerial summary : Organizations face an enduring challenge: Owners hire an executive to act on their behalf, but it is difficult to ensure that the executive indeed acts in their interests. In this study, we exploit a useful historical context—eighteenth‐century transatlantic shipping from L iverpool—to explore the cause and effect of a captain's becoming part‐owner of his vessel. Captains became part‐owners for voyages likely to encounter enemy privateers. Captain‐owners were less likely to be captured, but were more willing to forgo cargo profits to preserve the vessel's safety. Our results provide a useful analogy to modern firm owners who must determine whether to award equity to executives, and to managers who must determine whether to provide assets to employees or rely on employee self‐provision of assets (e.g., tools for tradespeople) . Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".