Information Ambiguity in Entrepreneurial Experimentation

Funded Research Proposal

Pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities is characterized by high uncertainty because entrepreneurs look to find unsatisfied demand with their new products or services. In an attempt to reduce uncertainty, entrepreneurs experiment with potential customers, seeking feedback through interviews or prototypes. It allows the entrepreneurs to learn about the targeted market and whether their idea can satisfy that demand.Read More

Managing Behavioral Hazard in Practice: Value-Based Health Insurance

Funded Research Proposal

Value-based health insurance plans have been introduced as an innovative policy to improve health as well as manage health care expenditures – generally through promoting high-value care and reducing low-value care. Standard theory would suggest that the more elastic the demand is for a particular medical service, cost-sharing should be set higher to curb overconsumption due to moral hazard.Read More

Understanding the Downstream Consequences of “Play to Earn”

Funded Research Proposal

This project examines the downstream consequences, both intended and unintended, of the “play to earn” experience. As the global pandemic was ravaging jobs around the world, blockchain-based “play to earn” games offered people in developing countries the opportunity to earn extra income and even make a living from playing these games.Read More

Patents: Ability or Choice?

Funded Research Proposal

This paper’s main contributions are to use a novel data set, introduce a new natural experiment, and exploit a quasi-random shock to show that patenting choices affect three important dimensions of innovation outcomes: the patent quantity, the patent quality, and the firm-level inputs (R&D, investment, and employees).Read More

Talent Market Competition and Technology Spillovers

Funded Research Proposal

This research project aims to understand how innovation propagates through the reallocation of talents, and how this innovation diffusion process is shaped by the competition structure of talent labor markets. Specifically, we exploit various heterogenous shocks to firms, including credit supply shocks, financial constraints shocks, innovation shocks, to examine how firms react in their hiring and firing decisions under different competition structures of talent labor markets.Read More

Generalization and Exploration in Novel Environments

Funded Research Proposal

This study aims to highlight the generalization problem as a core challenge in organizational learning and strategic decision-making and explore how decision-makers may address this problem via different learning and choice strategies.Read More

Measuring Strategic Behavior by Gig Economy Workers: Multihoming and Repositioning

Funded Research Proposal

Using a structural model, we show that workers are highly heterogenous in their preferences for both multihoming and repositioning. We provide counterfactual estimates on the effects of proposed firm and regulatory policies aimed at multihoming and repositioning.Read More

Welfare Effects of Common Ownership by Venture Capital Firms

Funded Research Proposal

This project aims to estimate the welfare effects of this strategy in the biotechnology industry, using a structural model of the investment decisions of VCs during the drug development process and the product market for the successful drugs.Read More

Social Media and Startup Innovation: A Human Capital Perspective

Funded Research Proposal

In this study we plan to fill this research gap by examining whether social media can help startups to access broader knowledge and subsequently facilitate innovation. Our goal is twofold in this research. First, we explore the effect of social media adoption on startup’s knowledge diversity. Second, we analyze whether startups can successfully transfer the diversified knowledge into innovations.Read More

Field Experiments to Measure the Impact of Solar Lights at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Funded Research Proposal

Providing access to cleaner and cheaper lighting solutions is necessary to lift people out of poverty. The magnitude of the economic, health, and educational impacts created by these lighting solutions as we move up the energy ladder, however, is not clear.Read More

Industry-University Collaboration and Commercializing Chinese Corporate Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

We examine how industry-university collaboration (IUC) enhances Chinese firms’ commercialization of their technologies using a comprehensive dataset of medium- sized and large industrial firms and research universities in China.Read More

Emission Targets as a Way for Tacit Coordination

Funded Research Proposal

The goal of the project is to identify cheap talk and faithful signaling in environmental reports issued by the U.S. largest firms and understand the determinants and consequences of cheap talk about firms’ climate responsibility.Read More

The Peril of Pay Variability: Determinants of Worker Aversion to Variable Compensation in Lower-Wage Jobs

Working Papers

Uber. Upwork. TaskRabbit. The world of work is transforming and my research agenda attempts to identify and explain 1) how work is changing and 2) how these changes affect workers, especially those who are marginalized or vulnerable.Read More

Towards a Causal Theory and Test of Network Effects: Structural Holes, Alliance-Network Externalities, and Organizational Innovation

Working Papers

We investigate whether the effect of network position on innovation is causal or spurious. Although empirical evidence demonstrates that certain structural positions in alliance networks (e.g. structural holes) affect firm innovation, it is hard to disentangle the factors allowing a firm to put itself in a certain position from the innovation outcomes that stem from being in that position.Read More

When Should the Off-grid Sun Shine at Night? Optimum Renewable Generation and Energy Storage Investments

Working Papers

Globally, 1.5 billion people live off the grid, their only access to electricity often limited to operationally-expensive fossil fuel generators. Solar power has risen as a sustainable and less expensive option, but its generation is variable during the day and non-existent at night.Read More

Doing Good for (Maybe) Nothing: How Reward Uncertainty Shapes Observer Responses to Prosocial Behavior

Published Research

Consumers are often skeptical of social innovation (e.g., CSR), thinking that firms undertake such innovations to increase profit rather than to “do the right thing.” How can firms convey the social and monetary benefits of investing in social innovations to consumers and stakeholders to best improve their brand image?Read More

Be an Ally: The Role of Identity in Inspiring Collective Action

Funded Research Proposal

People are frequently asked to engage in collective action—voting, protesting, signing petitions, donating—to uplift members of traditionally marginalized groups and encourage social change. Prior research suggests that minority group members who advocate for collective action are penalized for doing so, while majority group members are not. In this work, I shift focus from perceptions of people who take collective action to how effectively people are able to persuade others to engage in collective action.Read More

Understanding the Network of Websites: How Can We Improve Digital Privacy?

Funded Research Proposal

The first study aims to investigate the online data network, in which personal information flows between websites, in order to analyze which privacy policy interventions would be most effective. The second study focuses on individual household’s internet browsing behavior and analyzes vulnerability of different socioeconomic groups to privacy violating data collection activities.Read More

Using Blockchain to Insure Against Climate Risk

Funded Research Proposal

Climate change will increase extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and storms. In addition to tragic direct consequences that include deaths and physical damage to homes and businesses, climate change threatens to suppress business investments and slow economic growth by increasing the risk associated with capital investment.Read More

Mergers and Innovation: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

Funded Research Proposal

The goal for this paper is to detangle whether mergers and acquisitions occurring in the biopharmaceutical industry yield their intended effects. More specifically, how does increasing M&A activity affect different measures of innovation in the pharmaceutical industryRead More