Scholars have long recognized that individuals compare their rewards to those received by similar others and that satisfaction is determined, in part, by perceptions of (un)fairness that arise from these comparisons. Extensive research has also found that individuals frequently select others as pay referents who share the same race and the same gender, suggesting that demographic similarity strongly affects equity perceptions. …Read More
The past decade has witnessed an explosion in research at the intersection of markets and social movements, with an increasing acknowledgment of social movements as key drivers of change in organizations and markets. Social movements create new products and markets, change practices in existing organizations, and can have profound impacts on the commercialization of innovation. …Read More
The translation of invention to innovation is a topic that has received significant research attention in recent times. Scholars have recognized that our understanding of the factors that shape whether and when innovative technologies arise and transform industries cannot be complete without comprehending how scientific or technological discovery evolves into commercial adoption. …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
Recent platforms, like Uber and Lyft, offer service to consumers via “self-scheduling” providers who decide for themselves how often to work. These platforms may charge consumers prices and pay providers wages that both adjust based on prevailing demand conditions. …Read More
This paper explores how key insights from highly cited and well-used frameworks that describe the strategies and structures of MNCs are reflected in the international configurations of US MNCs. I perform a cluster analysis on a comprehensive and confidential database that covers the population of US MNCs.…Read More
Businesses must develop a sustainable competitive edge in order to succeed in the long run. One way to achieve this is by leveraging technology-enabled insights with a sophisticated understanding of decision making, judgment, and reasoning to make smarter decisions in the face of uncertainty.…Read More
Knowing both how and when to embrace disruption is key to your organization’s long-term success. Wharton’s Rahul Kapoor offers key steps managers can take.…Read More
This book is a collection of essays about the emergence of routines and, more generally, about getting things organized in firms and in industries in early stages and in transition. …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
We explore the relationship between competition among downstream commercializing firms (e.g. incumbent pharmaceutical firms) and upstream innovative firms (e.g. startup biotechnology firms). We find that in an alliance regime, common in high technology industries, competition among the commercializing firms can reduce the productivity of the innovators, resulting in a net loss of societal welfare (e.g. less drugs invented and brought to market). …Read More
As much as prior research has shed light on the boundary-spanning processes of global organizations and their (positive) impact on an MNC’s performance, whether, when and how past performance ultimately shapes an MNC’s boundary-spanning activities remains an open question in management research.…Read More
Studies have shown that actors who affiliate with multiple categories generally do so at their own peril. Still, category spanning is routinely observed, although it is less understood. We address this gap by a longitudinal study of category spanning among nanotube technology inventors. …Read More
Getting an innovative technology to market can be a challenge for an established company when the technology runs counter to the company’s current business model. But the right organizational design can help.…Read More
Endogenous characteristics of alliance network structure have repeatedly been shown to predict future alliance ties in the strategic management literature. Specifically, the concepts and measures of relational, structural, and positional embeddedness (per Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999), as well as interdependence, are foundational for many studies.…Read More
Mack Institute Co-director Harbir Singh discusses his new book, The Strategic Leaders’ Road Map, co-authored with Wharton professor Mike Useem.…Read More
This paper investigates how “dual directors” enable firms that undertake corporate spinoffs to manage their post-spinoff relationships with the firms they divest, as well as the performance implications of dual directors serving simultaneously on these companies’ boards.…Read More
Organizing for interdisciplinary research must overcome two challenges to collaboration: the cognitive incommensurability of knowledge and the political economy of research based in the disciplines. Researchers may not engage in interdisciplinarity because they would have to invest in new knowledge unrelated to their discipline or risk losing career-related rewards.…Read More
Betting on the most promising new ideas is key to creativity and innovation in organizations, but predicting the success of novel ideas can be difficult. To select the best ideas, creators and managers must excel at “creative forecasting”—i.e., predicting the outcomes of new ideas.…Read More
We study the processes through which multinational corporations (MNCs) identify and make use of external sources of knowledge. Based on a seven year longitudinal study of one MNC’s overseas scouting unit, we show how a simple one-directional “channelling” process gradually gave way to three higher value-added processes, labelled “translating”, “matchmaking” and “transforming.”…Read More
