Research linking interorganizational networks to innovation has focused on spanning structural boundaries as a means of knowledge recombination. Increasingly, firms also partner across institutional boundaries (countries, industries, technologies) in their search for new knowledge.…Read More
The performance of venture capital (VC) investments load positively on shocks to aggregate return volatility. I document this novel source of risk at the asset-class, fund, and portfolio-company levels. The positive relation between VC performance and volatility is driven by the option-like structure of VC investments, especially by VCs’ contractual option to reinvest.…Read More
We describe the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using data from Facebook. We content-code 106,316 Facebook messages across 782 companies, using a combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Natural Language Processing algorithms.…Read More
Crowdfunding allows founders of for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures to fund their efforts by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet, without standard financial intermediaries. Crowdfunding has been drawing substantial attention from policy makers, managers, and entrepreneurs, but relatively little notice from academics.…Read More
Do workers have different equality preferences depending on the type of payoff? In many firms, the distribution of equity compensation is more equal than the distribution of salary. We design an experimental group production game to examine how workers respond to combinations of different distributions of equity and salary.…Read More
Firms commonly use disaggregated accounting information to facilitate efficient contracting over intangible assets. However, reliance on accounting measures creates information asymmetries and thus a role for contract audits.…Read More
We examine the role of price transparency in consumer preferences and demand. We assemble a detailed dataset on the driving school industry in Portugal to quantify how firms present the price of the course of instruction, and its individual components, to potential students.…Read More
This paper examines the relationship between the licensing of knowledge and the creation of product innovations. We consider that firms organize licensing activities in different ways and that licensees are heterogeneous with respect to the attention available to apply and transform in-licensed knowledge to create new product innovations. …Read More
University-based research is an important generator of fundamental scientific knowledge in society, and may also be the basis for valuable commercial activity. We aim to update and extend our knowledge of the processes of translating academic discoveries and inventions by studying the administrative data from Penn Center for Innovation (PCI). …Read More
In recent years, digital innovations have fundamentally changed how many services and resources are put together and deployed. These include marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb that help match decentralized supply with demand. …Read More
In this project, I am continuing to use the empirical context of the evolution of cardiac surgery regulation in New York State to understand the challenges involved using empirically-documented social science findings into public policy. …Read More
In this study, we identify a novel pattern of deal-making activity—spinoffs followed by acquisitions—that has yet to be analyzed in the corporate strategy literature. We present a set of descriptive results showing that firms undertake spinoffs followed by acquisitions at a rate that is too high to be attributable to random chance.…Read More
Word-of-mouth testimonials from consumers are effective in driving online sales. But these signals are even more powerful in communities where people have closer ties and trust each other, according to new research by Wharton marketing professor David Bell and Jae Lee. …Read More
This study investigates a recent phenomenon in the market for technology: online marketplaces for technological inventions, which support the listing, search, and exchange of technological inventions by sellers and buyers. Focusing on three salient theoretical factors that affect markets for technology—search costs, ambiguity about the underlying knowledge and its applications, and expropriation concerns—our research systematically explores which industries are served by online marketplaces.…Read More
Although knowledge assets provide multinational corporations with competitive advantages in foreign markets, it can be difficult for firms to protect their knowledge in foreign countries – especially countries with weak intellectual property (IP) protection.…Read More
We develop and apply a new set of empirical tools consistent with the tenets of value-based business strategies, leveraging the principle that “no good deal comes undone” and the methods of revealed preferences to empirically estimate drivers of value creation.…Read More
We study information aggregation in organizational decision-making for the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. We introduce a formal model of voting where agents face costly tacit information to improve their decision quality.…Read More
In this project, we explore the impact of startup firms’ social media activities on their entrepreneurial financing performance. Social media can mitigate information problems in entrepreneurial financing in two ways.…Read More
This paper considers the possibility of efficient trade in bilateral bargaining through an informed broker. I propose a cross-subsidization mechanism that implements efficient trade in dominant strategies. I provide a condition on the broker’s information such that efficient trade can be achieved.…Read More
This paper investigates how spin-offs affect capital allocation decisions in diversified firms. The sensitivity of capital expenditures to investment opportunities, representing the efficiency of capital allocation decisions, improves when firms undertake spin-offs.…Read More
