About

Avner Ben-Ner is a professor in the Department of Work and Organizations at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. His research focuses on how organizations are designed and how they perform in relation to ownership type, workforce composition, technology, and other variables. He investigates individual and group behavior concerning social preferences and cognition, employing both theoretical and empirical methods. Current projects include studying the impact of new technologies such as robotics and additive manufacturing on employment and skills, as well as examining behavioral aspects of principal-agent relationships through experiments. Additionally, he explores the determinants of social and political polarization. Ben-Ner holds a Ph.D. in economics from Stony Brook University and has an extensive academic background, including positions at Yale University, University of California at Davis, University of Haifa, Tel-Aviv University, and Central European University. He is affiliated with multiple institutions, including the Law School and the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota, and is a Senior Fellow at Rutgers University. His scholarly contributions include numerous publications in prominent journals, co-editing influential books on nonprofit organizations and economics, and serving in leadership roles such as President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies and Program Chair of the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management. His work spans topics like organization structure, behavior, performance, social preferences, and the role of ownership in service provision.

Selected publications

• <span><b>Robots and Work</b></span>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Sharing Is Caring: Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Well-Being in U.S. Manufacturing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Sharing is Caring: Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Well-Being in U.S. Manufacturing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Difficult Intubation Alert Is Associated With a Reduced Incidence of Difficult Intubation

  Cureus · 2024-10-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  INTRODUCTION: Difficult or failed intubation significantly increases the risk of morbidity and mortality. Documentation of a prior difficult or failed tracheal intubation is a strong predictor of future difficult intubation. METHODS: We undertook a quality improvement project to create a redesigned difficult intubation alert with increased visibility in our electronic health record. We sought to determine whether this redesigned alert would be associated with a reduced incidence of difficult intubations. After reviewing many intubation procedure notes, we chose the following criteria to define a predicted future difficult intubation: requiring an awake technique, ease of intubation procedure charted as "difficult" or "unable", procedure requiring flexible bronchoscopy, a procedure requiring three or more attempts, and intubation with a grade three or four view during laryngoscopy. Patients meeting one or more of the above criteria were included in our study. An intervention was implemented which consisted of the introduction of a new difficult intubation alert that could easily be applied to a patient's chart by anyone on the anesthesia team. Further, if the anesthesia clinician filling out the intubation procedure note charted an intubation procedure as "difficult" or "unable", they were prompted by a pop-up asking if difficult intubation should be added to the patient's problem list. If yes was clicked, the electronic alert was activated, and a large red banner appeared. Outcomes included the number of patients who had the difficult intubation label in the pre-intervention period, the number of patients who had the new difficult intubation alert in the post-intervention period, the number of records with ease of intubation procedure charted as "difficult" or "unable", the number of records requiring three or more attempts at intubation, and the number of records with grade three or four view charted at intubation. RESULTS: There was an expected increase in the application of the difficult intubation alert from 9% of patients with a difficult intubation label in the pre-intervention period to 38% with the redesigned alert in the post-intervention period which was statistically significant (p<0.001). In the 21 months prior to the introduction of the alert, our screening process identified 988 records as predicted difficult intubations. Of these, 672 (68%) were charted by the intubating clinician as actual difficult intubations with 32% not being recorded as difficult. During the 20 months after the end of the interim period, the screening process identified 976 predicted difficult intubations with intubating anesthesia clinicians charting 416 (42%) of them as actual difficult intubations and 58% found not to be difficult. This reduction in monthly median percent of actual difficult intubations was statistically significant (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The introduction of a difficult intubation alert at our institution was associated with a reduced incidence of difficult intubation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Effects of Robots on the Workplace

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  This paper examines the effects of robots across various occupations in US manufacturing plants, extending extant research conducted at the firm and industry levels. We use a difference-in-differences approach matched on industry, commuting zone, and plant size to estimate how employment and skill demand for various occupations change after robot adoption. We find that the introduction of robots is associated with 150 percent increase in the number of job postings and an increase in employment of 15 percent; the increase is larger in production jobs than in support jobs. Comparing effects across plants within adopting firms, we show that the expansion only occurs in the robotic plants, suggesting that prior firm-level studies overlooked the distinction between adopter and (majority) nonadopter plants within firms, underestimating the robotization effect. We find a negligible employment effect at the industry level as the positive effect in adopters is counterbalanced by the lost of workers in nonadopters. The majority of jobs do not change skill composition following the adoption, but the robotized part of the plant requires more design, production, maintenance, repair, and programming skills. We provide credible evidence that the productivity and robot-human complementarity effects dominate any displacement effect and that loss of employment is limited to outcompeted nonadopters.

  PublisherDOI

• Sharing is Caring: Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Satisfaction in U.S. Manufacturing

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Do employees fare better in firms they partly own? By examining workers' reviews of their employers on the website Glassdoor, we offer the first expansive comparison of employee satisfaction between firms in which workers own company shares through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and conventional firms in which they do not. Focusing on production workers and managers in an industry-labor market matched sample within U.S. manufacturing, we find that employees report greater satisfaction in employee-owned firms overall and within specific aspects of jobs such as their firms' culture. Such differences in job quality cannot be rationalized by differences in skill demand and are greater when the ESOP is the product of collective bargaining. This work highlights how match quality can differ by ownership arrangement.

  PublisherDOI

• Comparative Macroeconomics

  2023-04-28

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Technical-Administrative and Agency Problems in Organizations

  2023-04-28

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Types of Organizations: Households, Firms, and Government Organizations

  2023-04-28

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Coalitions in Organizations: Labor Unions

  2023-04-28

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

Awards & honors

• President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studie…
• Program Chair and Chair of the Public and Nonprofit Division…
• Member, Graduate Faculty in Applied Economics, University of…
• Senior Fellow, Rutgers University School of Management and L…
• Two articles reprinted in The International Library of Criti…