New Paper: Increasing AI Idea Variance

Mack Institute Research Assistant Lennart Meincke, Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick and Mack Institute Co-Director and Wharton Professor Christian Terwiesch have published the next in Terwiesch’s series of working papers on ChatGPT. The new paper evaluates how LLMs can be used for idea generation and explores methods to increase the novelty,Read More

Consumer Preferences and Firm Technology Choice

Published Research

Advances in technology change the way consumers search and shop for products. Emerging is the trend of home-shopping devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, which allow consumers to search or order products. We investigate how consumer brand and technology preferences may interact with the functionalities of technology-enabled shopping (TES) devices to determine the channel structure and market competition.Read More

Can AI Provide Ethical Advice?

Christian Terwiesch, Mack Institute co-director and Wharton Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, continues his exploration of Generative AI with a new paper entitled “Can AI Provide Ethical Advice?” Co-authored with Lennart Meincke, the paper details an experiment that pits advice from the New York Times famous “The Ethicist” columnRead More

Preparing Organizations for Greater Turbulence

Published Research

Vigilant organizations excel at seeing looming threats and embryonic opportunities sooner than rivals, which prepares them to act faster when needed. Four drivers distinguish vigilant from vulnerable organizations, which can be used to design a roadmap to improve organizational acuity and preparedness.Read More

Private Equity as an Intermediary in the Market for Corporate Assets

Published Research

We examine the role of non-venture private equity (PE) firms as intermediaries in the market for corporate assets. We argue that in order to create and capture value by acquiring established businesses and selling them to corporate buyers, PE firms must possess at least one of three potential advantages: they must be able to identify businesses that are currently undervalued (valuation advantage), they must be able to enhance the intrinsic value of the business (governance advantage), or they must be able to match the business to a more synergistic corporate owner than is immediately available (timing advantage).Read More

Examining Effects of Company Pages on Job Ad Effectiveness

Funded Research Proposal

In this study, we aim to quantify the impact of information provision on jobseeker attention and applications. We explore how firms may improve job ad effectiveness through obtaining and maintaining a “company page” on an online job search platform. We study the implications of these firm actions on job ad performance and for jobseekers’ search. We also explore if information provision yields heterogeneous effects across firms of different sizes.Read More

Algorithmic Governance: The Case of Decentralized Exchanges on Blockchains

Funded Research Proposal

This project studies how algorithmic governance affect economic coordination in the context of blockchain-based organizations. Specifically, the project studies the algorithmic governance structures adopted among decentralized exchange protocols deployed on blockchains. The project documents and develops frameworks to understand variation in the kinds of structures adopted. In addition, the project examines how the adoption of different kinds of governance structures affect the decentralized coordination among individuals.Read More

Cash or Equity? Employees’ Compensation and the Gender of the Startup Founder

Funded Research Proposal

We extend recent studies on how gender shapes subordinate-supervisor interactions by documenting that employees may, under some conditions, negatively stereotype female supervisors in ways that make them more risk averse when choosing the form of compensation. we use employer-employee matched data from Sweden for the period 1991-2021 to assess whether an employee’s chosen compensation in the form of equity (at a given pay) varies with its founder’s gender.Read More

Quality in the Generic Pharmaceutical Market

Funded Research Proposal

Asymmetric information about quality characterizes many important markets, including in healthcare, banking, real estate, and used goods. Without intervention, quality in these markets can easily deteriorate. Vertical intermediaries, such as distributors and retailers, may play a powerful role in disciplining quality when consumers are difficult to inform. I study the effects of informed intermediaries on quality and welfare in the context of US generic pharmaceuticals. This market is economically important, characterized by extreme levels of asymmetric information, and experienced a sharp increase in recalls and shortages after 2009. Read More

Opportunities and Risks in Belief Distribution Elicitations

Funded Research Proposal

Researchers and practitioners have increasingly embraced the novel practice of eliciting the entire belief distributions, as it provides a more thorough understanding of stakeholders’ beliefs. My recent paper (co-authored with Professor Joe Simmons) suggests that constructing belief distributions can sometimes inadvertently exacerbate people’s overconfidence in their predictions.Read More

Back to the familiar? How attention and rare experiences overcome local search in external technology sourcing.

Working Papers

In this paper, we develop and test a theoretical framework that considers how established firms forming partnerships with startups may be subject to spatial and temporal myopia and how these tendencies are moderated by the established firms’ histories of experiencing essential failures and successes in solving R&D problems. Read More

Capability-Enhancing Foreign Investments, and Evolution of Corporate Scope In Software Services Offshore Outsourcing: Market Reactions and Implications for Competitive Advantage

Working Papers

How does the stock market react to competitive actions by firms and their rivals? In this study we empirically explore capability-seeking investments by firms from different strategic groups within an industry and examine their impact on rival firms in the competitive context of global software services.Read More

Are ETFs better than Mutual Funds?

Working Papers

I study investors’ trade-off between ETFs and open-ended mutual funds in the presence of idiosyncratic liquidity risk and aggregate uncertainty. Based on a portfolio choice model, I show that ETFs and mutual funds provide liquidity at different maturities.Read More

Learning by Monitoring: The Impact of Monitoring on VC Re-Investment Performance

Funded Research Proposal

This project aims to investigate the impact of monitoring on VC reinvestment performance. Using novel data sources, I construct a proxy for monitoring and test the causal relationship between monitoring and investment outcomes. To address the endogeneity issue regarding monitoring, I use the traveling population as an instrumental variable for VC’s monitoring intensity.Read More

Leveraging Analytics to Maximize Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

Academics and practitioners will log onto an intuitive user interface and type in features of their own company (e.g., its size and industry). They will immediately be greeted with an “instant meta-analysis” that summarizes decades of academic findings related to the most important predictors of creativity and innovation in organizations.Read More

Decision-Aware Learning for Global Health Supply Chains

Funded Research Proposal

Tsai-Hsuan (Angel) Chung, Phd Candidate at the Wharton School; Osbert Bastani, Penn School of Engineering; Francis Smart, PhD Candidate at the University of Montana; Jatu Abdulai*; Patrick Bayoh*; Musa Komeh*; Vahid Rostami* Abstract: This proposal aims to develop and deploy novel methods that integrate machine learning and optimization to improveRead More

Differentiation in Microenterprise: A Field Experiment in Zimbabwe

Funded Research Proposal

In explaining variation in productivity in microenterprise, research has focused primarily on the adoption of effective business practices and access to capital, with little focus on strategic positioning. In archival evidence, we find that offering a differentiated product or service is strongly correlated with firm performance. Using a combined sample of nearly 10,000 microenterprises across eight developing countries, we estimated that a standard deviation increase in differentiation is associated with approximately an 11 percent increase in revenues and an eight percent increase in profitRead More

The Impact of Healthcare Price Transparency Rules

Funded Research Proposal

The US government recently required healthcare price transparency from hospitals and insurers in an attempt to control spiraling healthcare costs. On the one hand, price transparency and online search tools have been very effective in increasing competition for other products in the e-commerce space. On the other hand, healthcare is a complex product, often bought through insurance, which makes it unclear how much transparency will affect realized prices. Further, public disclosure of prices might allow healthcare providers to better negotiate with insurance companies, which might even lead to an increase in healthcare prices. Our project uses a large-scale nationwide dataset of healthcare insurance claims to analyze the potential benefits and impact of these regulations, and inform policymakers and the public about the values and risks of these reforms.Read More

Artificial Intelligence, CEO Turnover, and Directional Change in Firm Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

In this project, we aim to investigate the extent to which acquiring AI capabilities can ease firms’ transition of innovation directions in uncertain times of leadership change. To achieve this goal, we plan to identify the challenges that firms face when they attempt to pivot the innovation direction during CEO turnover. Furthermore, we plan to examine how AI can help mitigate these challenges and provide new opportunities for certain types of innovation development. Our study will provide a roadmap for firms to make optimal decisions when allocating AI resources for strategic changes in innovation.Read More

Reality Check: Subjective Well-being and the Value of the Metaverse

Funded Research Proposal

In this project, we adapt a classic philosophical method (Nozick’ 1974 “experience machine”) to understand the ways in which people think about the types of alternate realities presented by the metaverse, and with it, the type of value it may offer in the marketplace.Read More