Funded Research Proposal Archives

Industrial Policy via Venture Capital

One-third of venture capital in Europe comes from government agencies. We study how government-backed VC, intermediated through private funds, affects firm and market outcomes. Matching EIF portfolio data to firm outcomes, we find that government financing boosts firm growth, especially when targeting young companies, and attracts private co-investment rather than crowding it out. Current policy, however, appears to favor older, later-stage “scale-ups.” We are developing a structural model to evaluate the impact of counterfactual allocation policies on venture capital flows and firm growth across Europe’s diverse financial markets.…Read More

Entrepreneurial Spawning Across Generations: How Organizational Experience Shapes First-Generation and Second-Generation Immigrant Entrepreneurship

This project studies how prior work experience shapes who becomes an entrepreneur, when they found companies, and how successful those ventures become. Focusing on first-generation immigrants, second-generation immigrants, and native-born workers in the US, the study compares careers that begin in large technology firms with those that start in early-stage startups. Using employment histories from Revelio Labs data linked with founding outcomes from Pitchbook & Crunchbase, the project sheds light on how different organizational pathways influence entrepreneurial activity and success across immigrant generations.…Read More

Learning to Learn: Algorithmic Design for Effective Education

Xufei Liu, PhD Candidate in Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School; Gad Allon, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School; Ken Moon, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: Long-term memory is key to deeper learning, yet students differ drastically in how they acquire and retain knowledge. Current…Read More

Value Creation in Supply Networks

The “value chain smile” posits that firms capture the most value at the upstream (R&D/design) and downstream (marketing/customer-facing) ends of the supply chain, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We argue that this ambiguity arises because existing studies rely on globally anchored, industry-level measures of upstreamness that obscure firm-specific supply network structure. This project proposes to develop and empirically test a firm-centric, local value chain framework that maps how value is created and captured across a firm’s actual suppliers and customers. Leveraging detailed supply network data and firm-level financial information, we will construct local value chain curves, characterize their shapes, and study how these configurations evolve over time. The analysis will focus on identifying the role of firm-level investments—particularly R&D and marketing—in enabling firms to attain high-value positions without changing their structural network location. By deepening measurement and expanding data coverage, this project aims to reconcile conflicting evidence on the value chain smile and provide a micro-founded understanding of value creation in supply networks.…Read More

Perceptions of Fairness in Algorithmic Decision-Making

In algorithmic decision-making, it is often mathematically impossible to satisfy competing definitions of fairness simultaneously. This impossibility makes assessing stakeholders’ fairness preferences a challenging but crucial exercise. To address this, the researchers developed an interactive tool to elicit fairness preferences by projecting the complex decision space into a simple one-dimensional choice: setting risk thresholds. This design allows participants to directly manipulate algorithm parameters and visualize the resulting tradeoffs between competing fairness metrics. Participants’ decisions enable the researchers to study (1) what Pareto-optimal settings are perceived as fair and (2) whether the design of the elicitation process itself can fundamentally shape how fairness is perceived.…Read More

Improving Decision-Making in Resource Allocation: Evidence from Inpatient Admission Decisions

Routing mechanisms are crucial for efficiently matching specialized resources to customer needs at the lowest cost. Improving allocation to these specialized resources, then, is of first-order concern for many organizations. But when human decision-makers are tasked with allocation in a complex environment, it can be challenging to understand their decision processes and design systems that enhance their decision quality. Leveraging rich data derived from electronic medical records, we explore how, in the context of physicians making routing decisions of patients from the ED to inpatient medical specialties, decision-makers incorporate new information and adapt their decision-making processes.…Read More

Cybersecurity and Gray Hat Hacking

The advance of AI is rapidly increasing cybersecurity vulnerabilties and the risks that organizations face. While working with non-exploiting hackers is recognized as key to strengthening cybersecurity, we still lack a clear understanding of the challenges and dynamics that impact whether such partnerships succeed or breakdown. In this project we aim to identify when, why, and how the collaborations between companies and non-exploiting hackers succeed or fail.…Read More

Ownership, Corporate Ambidexterity, and AI Adoption

The increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) presents firms with an important choice between using these new technologies for short-term optimization (monitoring) or long-term adaptation (innovation). This study examines how corporate ownership structures influence AI implementation patterns. We argue that governance systems that emphasize optimization and rigorous performance metrics may inadvertently trigger the “exploitation trap,” where AI-driven changes undermine the exploratory activities essential for long-term adaptation and competitive advantage. By comparing owners with short-term horizons (e.g., private equity and hedge funds) against long-term-oriented owners (e.g., dedicated institutional investors), we analyze how varying levels of owner commitment and monitoring capacity shape AI adoption patterns, as well as the resulting trade-offs between exploitation and exploration. The findings contribute to the literature on strategy, corporate governance, and technological adoption, suggesting that ownership structure is an important factor in whether and how firms adopt new technologies.…Read More

AI as a Strategic Lens on Entrepreneurial Adaptation and Scaling

Entrepreneurial firms operate in environments characterized by rapid technological change, shifting demand, and heightened uncertainty. While prior research has identified factors associated with startup growth and survival, much of this work relies on static, ex post measures and offers limited insight into how firms adapt strategically in real time. This project proposes artificial intelligence as a strategic lens for studying entrepreneurial adaptation and scaling, examining whether AI-based methods can detect early signals…Read More

From Gatekeeping to Audits: Rethinking Prior Authorization in Health Care

Prior authorization (PA) is widely used to manage utilization of high-cost health services, yet it imposes administrative burdens and can delay care. As generative AI is increasingly deployed to automate both the submission of prior authorization requests by providers and authorization decisions by insurers, raising questions about the effectiveness of gatekeeping as a utilization management strategy in the AI era. This project studies whether an alternative lever—provider-level audits—can reduce administrative burden while preserving oversight for utilization management. We examine a “gold-carding” policy that exempts providers with low historical denial rates from prior authorization while conditioning continued exemption on periodic audits of ordering behavior.…Read More

Human Capital in Startups

I am interested in understanding how 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 firms, 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. Thus, I am interested in how growing startups attract, motivate, and retain human capital.…Read More

Improving the Efficiency of Internal Opportunity Markets

Many firms have identified opportunities to innovate, but can’t connect them with potential solutions within other parts of their organization. The purpose of this project is to test the hypothesized reasons why these internal opportunity markets are inefficient and evaluate possible ways to improve them.…Read More

AI, Skills, and Competition

In this project, we aim to present theory and empirical evidence connecting firms’ movements up the AI “stack”: the series of technology innovations leading to AI-enabled prediction and comprised of prior investments in networks, databases, big data, etc.…Read More

Financial Incentives to Adopt Green Technologies

Regulators often seek to spur the adoption of green technologies (such as electric vehicles) using one of two financial subsidies: lowering the upfront cost of buying the technology (such as an electric vehicle subsidy) and lowering the marginal cost of using the technology (such as an electricity tariff subsidy). This project evaluates how the economic characteristics of a setting or technology determine which of these is more effective in terms of tons of CO2 abated per dollar of government expenditure. Between August—December 2025 we implemented a randomized study with 2,100 households in Nakuru County, Kenya to study this problem among induction stoves in Kenya, which abate approximately the same amount of CO2 per year as the switch from a gasoline vehicle to an electric vehicle. We randomly allocated loan access, fixed cost subsidies, and marginal cost subsidies to study the relative impacts on electric stove adoption. We collected more than 5 million measurements of induction stove usage (15-minute data, in Watts, for more than 600 induction stove buyers), more than 100 million temperature measurements to record charcoal cookstove usage (2-minute data, in Celsius, for more than 1,700 charcoal stove users), and more than 20,000 loan instalment payments. Over the next 12 months we will analyze these data to understand the impact of subsidy dollars on fuel…Read More

Leadership Composition and Personal Narrative Framing in Female-Focused Ventures: A Hiring Experiment

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 Impact of Private Equity Ownership on Medical Technologies

Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare is growing rapidly. Because medical-technology firms shape healthcare innovation, spending, and quality—and rely heavily on public insurance reimbursements—PE ownership in this sector could have substantial long-term implications for innovation, costs, and patient outcomes. Yet most existing research on PE in health care focuses on care delivery, despite 63% of PE healthcare investments involving medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. Our study will provide, to our knowledge, the first causal evidence on how PE ownership affects innovation, pricing, financial performance, and product safety among medical-technology firms.…Read More

Outlier Neglect: A Decision-Making Bias with Implications for Hiring, Investment, and Consumer Choices

We propose and test a novel decision-making bias called “outlier neglect.” In general, when evaluating people, places, and opportunities with many features, people focus on the average of those features. For example, when hiring a team, people want the average performance of the team to be high, so they try to hire individuals who perform well on average. But in many cases, the relevant metric is not the average, but the best – for example, when a pharmaceutical company tests different types of malaria drugs, their success depends on the best-performing drug (not the average) because they can scale up the best and ignore lesser performers. We propose that evaluators neglect the importance of outliers in such cases and instead focus on portfolio averages. In some cases, this leads to suboptimal outcomes (e.g. in the drug scenario above, or it may be better to hire someone to join a team who is amazing at one specialized task than someone who is higher on average). We test this bias and show that across many contexts – including personnel selection, creative idea generation, consumer decisions, and investment strategy – people neglect outliers in favor of the average, leading to suboptimal decisions.…Read More

Business Model Innovation for Renewables

Consumers who want access to renewable energy have two main options: install renewable energy generation equipment “behind” the electrical meter (e.g., solar panels on the roof) or buy energy from a utility company, which would then source energy from generation companies. The first approach has obvious diseconomies of scale. It is only available to homeowners, while the second approach requires over-reliance on utility companies, which may not contract with renewable suppliers or may offer an expensive mix of renewable and nonrenewable energy. We study an alternative innovative business model, “community solar,” whereby consumers subscribe to own a portion of the energy generated by a large solar plant. We partner with Origo Energy, a Brazilian company that pioneered this model in South America, and we analyze the behavior of consumers who switch from the traditional business model to Origo’s subscription to understand boundary conditions for community solar.…Read More

Grid-Scale Mobile Battery Energy Storage Systems

Grid-scale electricity storage technologies play a vital role in balancing electricity supply and demand, particularly as renewable energy sources like wind and solar introduce greater variability into power systems. Lithium-ion batteries, accounting for 90% of U.S. electricity storage capacity, are widely regarded as essential to the clean energy transition. By storing excess electricity during periods of low demand, and thus low prices, and releasing it when demand, and thus price, is high, storage technologies smooth fluctuations in generation and earn significant revenues from arbitrage. Battery operators strategically locate systems in areas with high nodal price variability, but current practices often fail to adapt to changing market conditions, risking inefficient investments with diminishing price spread at selected locations.

Mobile Energy Storage Systems (MESS) present a transformative innovation, enabling both temporal and geographic flexibility in energy storage. Unlike existing Stationary Energy Storage Systems, MESS can be relocated to provide storage services at different points in the grid as market dynamics evolve with rapid addition of transmission and renewable generation capacity. Although MESS technologies currently find niche applications, such as disaster relief, advancements in material technology and declining battery costs make utility-scale adoption plausible. This study addresses a critical gap by modeling MESS fleet operations, analyzing their feasibility, and comparing their financial performance against stationary systems in renewable-rich grids. Our findings aim to guide developers and grid operators in leveraging MESS for enhanced energy flexibility and resilience in renewable-rich grids.…Read More

Private Equity Ownership and Human Capital Acquisition Strategy

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