UCLA

The service sector represents the dominant part of the U.S. economy, accounting for over 80% of employment as well as GNP (Apte et al. 2011). Although much scholarly work has been done on services, research on professional or white collar services is still in its infancy. What makes these services distinctive is that they are knowledge-intensive and project-based. In addition, they are collaborative by nature; that is, their value is created from the combined effort of individuals (Hopp et al. 2009). For example, IBM Corporation discovered that their Request For Proposal (RFP) process for outsourcing services, instead of being linear, well sequenced, and deterministic, was information-intensive, collaborative, iterative, and stochastic. Improving their understanding of how the work actually took place led them to improve the efficiency of their work processes (Kieliszewski et al. 2010).

This dissertation focuses on the study of the dynamics of collaboration in knowledge-based work processes such as new product or service development, management and IT consulting, technical projects, and education. It consists of three chapters respectively addressing the effect of contracting, team organization, and learning in

collaboration, so as to generate insights for advancing strategic decision-making both across organizations and within them. In each chapter, collaboration is modeled as a dynamic double moral hazard game. Specifically, these models have the following features in common: (i) the collaborative project is subject to a tight deadline, (ii) the work dynamics are studied with respect to both time and project progress, and (iii) the transitions between states are stochastic and depend on the collective amount of effort exerted.