Digital and Business Economics

This book examines how microeconomic reasoning can guide organizational decisions carried out by algorithms and AI. It connects strategy, incentives, risk, traceability and accountability in the design of decision systems for pricing, resource allocation and competition.

This teaching case follows VelaFi, a Mexico-based financial-technology startup offering cross-border payments using stablecoins, as it faces competition from large, well-funded firms. Its chief executive must decide how the company can defend a position after the business model has demonstrated the potential to make transfers faster and less costly than traditional correspondent banking. The case frames strategic options such as specializing in international payroll or global treasury services, serving underserved Latin American small and medium-sized businesses, or differentiating through service. It is designed for students to analyze technology-driven disruption in emerging-market financial services, stablecoins and monetary concepts, competitive strategy, and the role of regulation. It presents a decision problem for classroom discussion rather than a research study with empirical findings.

This study evaluates how organizations can communicate a code of ethics and whether explaining the code improves employees’ understanding. The authors conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial with 519 workers at a prominent Mexican pawnshop chain, comparing communication and explanation approaches against the existing program. They find no evidence that the interventions enhanced workers’ understanding of the code. The result raises the possibility that ethics programs based mainly on distributing or explaining a written code may fail to achieve their intended purpose and may use resources without changing employee comprehension. The paper also demonstrates that a cluster-randomized trial can be implemented in the business-ethics setting, providing a rigorous approach for evaluating organizational ethics initiatives and informing the design of more effective programs.

This study proposes a vignette-based field experiment in Mexico to examine whether decision-makers assess executive candidates differently according to sex, marital status, and parenthood. Participants evaluate fictitious résumés in which these characteristics are varied, allowing the study to isolate how personal attributes may influence judgments of candidates for senior-management positions. The project aims to identify discriminatory patterns in talent selection and compare them with evidence and theories from the economics of discrimination and personnel selection. Its intended contribution is to provide evidence about potential bias in executive recruitment, a setting that has received less attention than hiring for other occupations, and to inform efforts to make selection processes fairer. This record describes a conference-stage study proposal rather than reporting completed experimental results.