We investigate how investments that allow firms to better understand their customers’ preferences interact with a firm’s ability to compete.…Read More
Cutting through the Fog of Demand: The Competitive Value of Customer Information
Capturing Economic Value from Innovation Investments
The Economics of Patient-Centered Care
The Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) is a widely-implemented model for improving primary care, emphasizing care coordination, information technology, and process improvements. However, its treatment as an undifferentiated intervention obscures meaningful variation in implementation. …Read More
Scope versus Speed: Team Diversity, Leader Experience, and Patenting Outcomes for Firms
How does the organization of patenting activity affect a firm’s patenting outcomes? We investigate how the composition of patenting teams relates to both the scope of their patent applications and the speed with which their patents are approved. …Read More
Effort Momentum
This paper examines how past effort can impact subsequent effort, such as when effort is reduced following an interruption. I conducted 3 incentivized real-effort experiments in which both piece rates and leisure options were manipulated and find effort displays significant stickiness, even in the absence of switching costs.…Read More
Networks and Innovation: Accounting for Structural and Institutional Sources of Recombination in Brokerage Triads
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
Volatility and Venture Capital
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
Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook
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 as a Font of Entrepreneurship: Outcomes of Reward-Based Crowdfunding
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
Inequality Aversion When the Reward is Scarce: The Case of Salary vs. Equity Compensation
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
External Verifiability of Accounting Information and Intangible Asset Transactions
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
Do Consumers Value Price Transparency?
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
Standard vs. Partnership-Embedded Licensing: Attention and the Relationship Between Licensing and Product Innovations
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
Commercializing University Technology
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
Bilateral Rating Systems in Online Marketplaces: Design and Impact
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
Volume-Outcome Relationship in Cardiac Surgery
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
Make Room! Make Room! A Note on Sequential Spinoffs and Acquisitions
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
To Boost Online Sales, Focus on Close-Knit Communities
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
Which Industries Are Served by Online Marketplaces for Technology?
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
Managing Valuable Knowledge in Weak IP Protection Countries
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
Estimating Value Creation from Revealed Preferences: Application to Value-Based Strategy
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