- 04 Jan 2019
- Working Paper Summaries
The Digital Commons: Tragedy or Opportunity? A Reflection on the 50th Anniversary of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons
Garrett Hardin’s Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons” 50 years ago focused on a physical world where common goods are finite and rivalrous. By contrast, this paper explores the digital commons, calling for better understanding of its long-term impact and for government policies supporting benefits while mitigating costs.
- 03 Jan 2019
- Working Paper Summaries
Financing the Response to Climate Change: The Pricing and Ownership of US Green Bonds
Green bonds are used for environmentally friendly purposes like renewable energy. Complementing previous research, this paper explores the US corporate and municipal green bond and shows that a subset of investors is willing to give up some return to hold green bonds.
- 27 Dec 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Team Learning Capabilities: A Meso Model of Sustained Innovation and Superior Firm Performance
In strategic management research, the dynamic capabilities framework enables a “helicopter view” of how firms achieve sustainable competitive advantage. This paper focuses on the critical role of work teams, arguing that managers must leverage the knowledge generated by teams to support innovation and strategic change. It matches types of team learning to innovation activities.
- 19 Dec 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Find and Replace: R&D Investment Following the Erosion of Existing Products
This study sheds light on how product outcomes shape the direction of innovation and markets for technology. In the drug development industry in particular, negative product shocks appear to spur investment changes both within the directly affected firm and in competing firms in the same R&D markets.
- 10 Dec 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Platform Competition: Betfair and the U.K. Market for Sports Betting
Since the early 2000s, online betting exchanges have had a new relationship with customers relative to traditional bookmakers, providing a platform to match individuals willing to lay and back the same outcome. This study shows how exchanges’ platform design choices have major implications for their likelihood of success.
- 07 Dec 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Oral History and Writing the Business History of Emerging Markets
Oral history is a valuable resource to explore how businesses developed and functioned in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, regions with a growing share of global economic activity and the majority of the world’s population. While oral history is not uncritical, it provides openings for opinions, voices, and judgements on events on which there was often silence.
- 05 Dec 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information
Barriers to the diffusion of salary information have implications for a wide range of labor market phenomena. This study of employees of a real organization shows that individuals significantly misinterpret their peers’ salaries, partly due to pervasive preferences for concealing own salary, and a potentially strategic decision of high earners to withhold their personal information.
- 04 Dec 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Work from Anywhere or Co-locate? Autonomy versus Learning Effects at the United States Patent Office
Managers often ask whether worker productivity rises or falls with work-from-anywhere (WFA) policies. This study of a real firm presents robust econometric evidence that WFA regimes can have positive effects on net worker output, especially for experienced hires working interdependently. For new hires, however, colocation is often needed to facilitate their learning.
- 26 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Demand Estimation in Models of Imperfect Competition
The study shows how knowledge about firm behavior can be modeled to better predict demand. Firms tend to raise prices in response to higher demand, so observed relationships between price and quantity can be quite misleading. The authors provide an adjustment that can be used when price experiments or instrumental variables are not available.
- 20 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Reverse the Curse of the Top-5
Scholars and those who evaluate them for promotion can overweight publications ranked in a discipline’s five top journals. This paper explains the origins of journal rankings, the errors and distortions when journal rankings are used to evaluate faculty research, how they inhibit innovative research on emerging practice issues, and possible reforms to reduce their perverse incentives.
- 19 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Lazy Prices
The most comprehensive information windows that firms provide to the markets—in the form of their mandated annual and quarterly filings—have changed dramatically over time, becoming significantly longer and more complex. When firms break from their routine phrasing and content, this action contains rich information for future firm stock returns and outcomes.
- 15 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Do Fire Sales Create Externalities?
This paper contributes to our understanding of the role of large institutional investors in securities markets, providing evidence that the structure of the mutual fund industry increases the risks of costly "fire sales."
- 12 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence
This study empirically explores Google’s decision to tie its new reviews product to the top of its search results, excluding competitors. Results suggest that such "tying" can facilitate dominant platforms’ entry into adjacent markets, even when the tied product is of worse quality compared to existing options.
- 08 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Arbitration with Uninformed Consumers
Using data on securities disputes, this study of information advantages in consumer arbitration finds that industry-friendly arbitrators are 40 percent more likely than consumer-friendly arbitrators to be selected to take on arbitration cases. Limiting respondents’ and claimants’ inputs over the selection process could improve outcomes for consumers.
- 08 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct
Despite committing misconduct less often and less severely than men, female advisers in the financial adviser industry face more severe punishment in the labor market, a finding strongly correlated with the gender composition of the managerial team. A similar punishment gap and mitigating factors affect ethnic minority men.
- 05 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Pioneer (Dis-)advantages in Markets for Technology
When and how to enter a new market is central to firms’ innovation strategies, including in the medical device industry. The authors show how to evaluate early-mover advantage vs. disadvantage when the primary option to monetize an innovation lies in selling it in an intermediate “market for technology” rather than in a final product market.
- 01 Nov 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Forecasting Airport Transfer Passenger Flow Using Real-Time Data and Machine Learning
Passengers arriving at international hubs often endure delays, especially at immigration and security. This study of London’s Heathrow Airport develops a system to provide real-time information about transfer passengers’ journeys through the airport to better serve passengers, airlines, and their employees. It shows how advanced machine learning could be accessible to managers.
- 30 Oct 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 2: Technical and Strategic Bottlenecks as Guides for Action
This paper presents analytic tools to formulate strategy in large, evolving technical systems. It explains how value-enhancing technical change comes from the effective management of technical and strategic bottlenecks in conjunction with module boundaries and property rights. The analytic tools are used to explain the evolution of three historic technologies: early aircraft, machine tools, and container shipping.
- 30 Oct 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 6 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 1: Mapping Functional Relationships
Technology shapes organizations by influencing the search for value—something that someone perceives as a good—in an economy made up of free agents. To understand the organizations that will develop and implement particular technologies we must first understand the technologies’ value structure, including three main issues that make it difficult to value technologies.
The Creation and Evolution of Entrepreneurial Public Markets
Since 1990, new stock exchanges geared toward fast-growing, entrepreneurial companies have proliferated around the world. This analysis shows that exchanges in countries with better shareholder protection allowed younger and less profitable companies to raise more capital. These markets alone cannot boost entrepreneurial activity but need enabling institutions.