The Cultural Engina in a Multi-Task Experiment

Abstract: As the world’s markets are becoming more integrated and companies are outsourcing to other countries to a greater extent it is important for them to take the cultural aspects into consideration. We wanted to study if the different cultures affect the agent’s behaviour in a principal-agent relationship and focus on Sweden and China. When looking for research in this field we found that the cultural aspect of the principal-agent theory had been widely neglected. We studied both the multi-tasking phenomena which is a theory closely linked to the principal-agent theory, as well as different cultural differences. We found that there were large cultural differences between China and Sweden, but also similarities. We concluded our hypotheses on the different cultural differences which we then linked to the variation of preferences in contracts. These hypotheses were used to create, the MMA-model. To test our MMA-model we conducted an experiment which we came to call the MMA-experiment. In order to test if our cultural generalizations based on the theoretical framework were true we let the participants fill out a questionnaire before the experiment. In short, the point of the experiment was to study how the cultural differences affected the choice of contracts in a multi-task environment. The result of our experiment concluded that the MMA-model was accurate. We also found that the trust contract, in the way it was designed, was best when dealing with a multi-task environment.