Sophia Pink, PhD Candidate, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School; Jose Cervantez, PhD Candidate, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School; Katy Milkman, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: When people want to build multiple habits, is it better to start them all at once or to…Read More
Tiantian Yang, Management, The Wharton School Abstract: Female-led ventures in female-focused industries (e.g., FemTech) face a unique tension between authenticity and perceived legitimacy in the eyes of potential employees. While identity-based lived experience can signal market insight and mission alignment, it may also conflict with gendered norms about who leads…Read More
The private equity industry has grown significantly in the past decades, and this explosive growth has generated much interest on the impact of private equity’s footprint on the economy and the labor market. Using career history data from nearly 11 million employees at 16,137 private equity-backed firms from 2000 to 2024, I find that firms controlled by private equity recruit specialized managerial workforce. Post-deal, newly hired senior executives and middle managers are more likely to have previously worked at a private equity-backed firm. Moreover, they are also more likely to have worked at a firm backed by the same private equity owner. I find evidence that some private equity firms facilitate managerial mobility within their portfolio, creating an “internal” network of senior and middle managers that mirrors the way public corporations have traditionally groomed executives internally. Altogether, my results suggest that private equity firms rely on specialized managerial workforce who are familiar with private equity operations and with a specific owner’s playbook.…Read More
Corporate reputation is a vital strategic asset for organizations. Yet, its socially constructed nature has made it challenging for scholars to agree on a precise definition or develop a reliable measurement strategy for it. Historically, scholars have relied on measures that are useful for assessing reputation earned but fail to capture its dynamic nature or identify emerging threats in real time, exposing a critical blind spot in both theory and practice. To address these limitations, I propose Cumulative Abnormal Media Sentiment (CAMS), a novel approach for identifying and analyzing reputational risks and opportunities by tracking abnormal volatility in stakeholder sentiment. To validate this construct, I conduct a quasi-replication of Caroline Flammer’s 2013 event study, extending her analysis of corporate news coverage of environmental events for U.S. publicly traded organizations through 2024. Using this expanded dataset, I measure reputational signals surrounding coverage of eco-friendly and eco-harmful corporate behavior. My analysis reveals a direct relationship between reputational risk from eco-harmful events and stock price volatility. This research offers new insights into the established relationship between reputation and financial performance, while introducing a replicable and adaptable measurement tool for event study analyses, equipping future researchers with a robust framework for examining the dynamic interplay between reputation and financial outcomes.…Read More
This proposal presents two innovative research projects designed to harness the transformative power of AI to enhance healthcare outcomes. In close collaboration with the Somaliland Ministry of Health and Development (MoHD), the Taiwan International Cooperation Development Fund (ICDF), and Penn researchers, we aim to tackle critical healthcare challenges in Somaliland, one of East Africa’s most impoverished regions. Our main goal is to develop effective and safe AI methodologies to improve healthcare accessibility, quality, and efficiency. These projects will deepen our understanding of how AI can be applied in safety-critical scenarios and resource-constrained environments, facilitating healthcare advancement on a global scale.…Read More
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into daily life, understanding how humans and machines achieve mutual understanding has become a crucial scientific challenge. Our research addresses this challenge by developing a digital web platform that studies how humans and AI systems communicate and build shared understanding in real-time. While machines can now model our preferences and predict our behavior, they struggle to genuinely understand human meaning and intention. Our platform will generate novel data about human-AI interaction, with direct implications for improving AI systems and enhancing human-machine collaboration. By integrating insights from psychology, computer science, computational linguistics, and organizational behavior, our work builds an essential bridge between human and artificial minds—a critical need for organizations seeking to effectively deploy AI technology.…Read More
Spousal cofounding teams are common, yet we know little about how they affect startups’ ability to attract new hires. While prior work highlights internal advantages of spousal teams, such as trust, cohesion, and resilience, we propose that they may trigger concerns among external audiences by blurring professional and personal roles. Focusing on prospective employees, we predict that startups led by spousal cofounders face an “illegitimacy discount” in hiring, attracting fewer applicants, especially when the lead founder is male. We test these claims using a preregistered field experiment embedded in a live early-stage recruitment process. We find that candidates are less likely to apply to a startup cofounded by spouses and that this penalty is asymmetric: it is pronounced when the lead founder is male but weaker when the lead founder is female. Analysis of the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (PSED II) corroborates external validity: spousal cofounding teams are prevalent but hire less than comparable non- spousal teams. Together, the results extend research on founding team composition and gender disparities in entrepreneurship by showing how spousal cofounding affects talent attraction and how gendered expectations condition perceptions of legitimacy in early startup hiring.…Read More
Companies often encourage their customers to share their progress toward personal goals, such as their fitness journey, on social media. In this research, we investigate how doing so impacts motivation. While documenting goal pursuit online may increase motivation through immediate social rewards (likes, comments), accountability, and social support, it could also have no effect of even backfire—especially if people focus on social media engagement rather than the underlying goal, or become discouraged by lower-than-expected feedback. We test these possibilities through a preregistered field experiment (N = 500) in which participants are assigned to either document their goal progress by posting on Instagram or by completing a private survey. Over a three-month period, we measure their gym attendance and social media engagement. The findings of this paper would provide theoretical insight into how social media interacts with goal pursuit and potentially offer practical implications for designing scalable, low-cost interventions to promote goal achievement.…Read More
Thinking about a future positive experience can be enjoyable and exciting. However, we suggest that thinking too much about a future positive experience can backfire. In particular, we investigate whether people would become less excited initially when they are reminded more (vs. less often) about a future positive experience. We suggest that people can adapt to the thought of a future experience and thus would become less excited about the experience. We examine how people’s anticipatory enjoyment changes over time and how many (vs. few) reminders affect this trajectory. Further, we will also explore the downstream consequences of many (vs. few) reminders, such as a reduction in enjoyment of the planned activity and a greater likelihood of changing the planned activity.…Read More
This study explores how firms’ search strategies shape innovation outcomes in the context of emerging general-purpose technologies (GPTs), with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI). GPTs, defined by their broad applicability and undefined market needs, challenge traditional search theories by requiring firms to balance advancing technological capabilities (supply-side innovation) with identifying practical use cases (demand-side innovation).…Read More
We explore a form of post-acquisition integration where inventors from the target and acquiring organizations share and integrate technological and organizational knowledge while performing joint research and development. We refer to this phenomenon as “inventor commingling.” Grounded in the knowledge-based view, we posit that commingling enhances the target firm’s innovation performance by enabling the transfer of the acquirer’s organizational knowledge while preserving the target’s existing knowledge base. We explore how commingling differs from structural integration and how the two forms of integration can be combined for post-acquisition management. We posit that commingling diminishes the negative effects of structural integration, while structural integration may enhance the efficacy of commingling. Since organizational knowledge is firm-specific and cumulative, commingling efficacy should increase with acquirer commingling inventors’ tenure. To test these predictions, we assemble a large sample of acquisitions to study the effect of these forms of post-acquisition integration on acquired entity innovation outcomes. Our results support a positive commingling innovation effect, which is more pronounced under structural integration. A high degree of commingling can mitigate the negative effects of post-acquisition structural integration documented in the literature. We use direct flights between the acquisition party locations as an instrument to address the potentially endogenous process of inventor commingling. We find consistent results. Our study raises the possibility of inventor commingling as a distinct form of post-acquisition integration, which holds the potential of effectively transferring organizational knowledge and supporting post-acquisition innovation output, while sidestepping the classic post-acquisition integration-autonomy tradeoff.…Read More
In our endeavor to grasp the driving forces behind cryptocurrency prices, we have developed the Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Index (c3i), derived from a set of questions asked monthly to consumers across the United States. Our analysis has uncovered several initial results and pointed to an extensive, exciting research program on consumer behavior that shapes the cryptocurrency markets. Firstly, we are rigorously validating to what extent the c3i can accurately predict changes in cryptocurrency prices as a leading indicator by exploring whether this relationship is merely correlation or potentially causal. Furthermore, we are investigating if consumer characteristics such as age, gender, and political leanings can enhance the accuracy of our index in predicting cryptocurrency prices. We are also examining if the relationship observed between c3i and cryptocurrency prices extends to broader stock market indices like the S&P…Read More
Algorithms play an increasingly important role in today’s digital economy. An emerging view highlighted the viability of utilizing algorithms as a governance device. With innovations in blockchain infrastructure and smart contracts algorithms, platforms can delegate formal authority to exchange partners and involve them in organizational decision-making processes. While some are optimistic that this governance innovation can bring about a more collaborative and democratic digital economy, this paper highlights potential challenges associated with decentralized governance systems. I argue that decentralized governance shifts the locus of opportunism from platform owners to a body of diffuse exchange partners. Appropriation no longer come…Read More
Philip Nichols, Legal Studies & Business Ethics, The Wharton School Abstract: An in depth, qualitative and descriptive examination of India’s digital infrastructure and the e-governance functions it enables. The research should produce (1) a descriptive white paper, with an intended audience of (a) policymakers in other emerging economies, (b) scholars…Read More
New ventures are grappling with the rising costs of capital (both debt and equity). As a result, investors of high-growth, technology-based startups are shifting focus to companies that can generate immediate cash. That is, investors are prioritizing cash flow positivity over growth. A recent report has documented that high-growth, technology-driven startups that are bootstrapped outperformed those that are VC-backed on both profitability and growth. Yet, the reason for this performance differential is poorly understood given that bootstrapping is an underexplored phenomenon due to the unavailability of large datasets to answer important questions. Through this study, we first seek to build a large, novel dataset that can facilitate research on bootstrapping. In addition, we immediately respond to two important questions pertaining to why bootstrapped startups may be better able to manage the balance between cash flow positivity and growth…Read More
How do high-growth, knowledge-based startups acquire human capital against the backdrop of the challenges and dilemmas that come with rapid organizational expansion? Human capital is a critical resource for these startups, allowing for increased production, knowledge, and resources. However, the dynamic nature of high-growth periods also poses significant challenges. Against the backdrop of a growing firm’s temporal change, these firms face dilemmas in who and when to hire. In my dissertation, am interested in understanding how growing startups attract, motivate, and retain human capital.…Read More
Vertical integration in the video streaming market has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. Notable examples include Amazon’s merger with MGM, Walt Disney’s acquisition of Hulu, and the launch of streaming platforms by various studios such as Paramount and NBCUniversal. Many studios now license most of their shows to their vertically integrated streaming platforms, which has led to consumer complaints about the need for multiple subscriptions to access content that they…Read More
This study explores the commercialization and growth strategies of deeptech startups. Deeptech or Hardtech start-ups are a unique set of ventures whose offerings are grounded in breakthrough science and/or engineering innovation (MIT report, 2023). They typically span sectors such as the life sciences, clean technology, advanced materials, robotics, chemicals and quantum computing.…Read More
Advertising supports a significant fraction of the internet, enabling free web search and news services. These ads are intermediated by advertising networks, which assign ad slots to potential advertisers through auctions. In this project, we will collaborate with a large mobile advertising intermediation network to investigate (i) to what extent a reduction in available data (e.g., due to Apple’s new privacy policies) lowers the value created by mobile advertising and (ii) whether more decentralized markets are desirable after accounting for the trade-off between this decrease in value and having a more competitive market.…Read More
Recently in the gifting industry, websites allow consumers to set up cash registries (e.g., honeymoon and baby fund registries) to elicit gifts in different ways. For example, consumers may set up a cash registry that lists a lump sum expense (e.g., $5,000 for a honeymoon). Alternatively, they may set up an itemized registry, that breaks up the total expense into smaller expenses, such as travel, lodging, and activities during the honeymoon.…Read More
