Wharton doctoral candidate Alejandro Lopez-Lira used machine learning to analyze companies’ annual reports and assess the top four systematic risks that affect most firms. …Read More
Using a Company’s Own Words to Assess Its Risks
Innovation Opportunities and Risks
Risk Factors That Matter: Textual Analysis of Risk Disclosures for the Cross-Section of Returns
Using unsupervised machine learning, I introduce interpretable and economically relevant risk factors that characterize the cross-section of returns better than the leading factor models, furthermore, I do not use any information from the past returns to select the risk factors. …Read More
The Role of Organizational Sponsorship in Pioneering New Technology
Organizational sponsors foster young entrepreneurial firms by providing resources to increase survival rates. Sponsorship can be financial as with tax incentive structures, public and private grant programs, or early stage private investment. …Read More
The Downside of Applying Lean Startup Principles
Lean startup principles have fueled a revolution in business and entrepreneurship, but there is a downside to early market testing, according to new Wharton research.…Read More
Responses to Rival Exit: Product Variety, Market Expansion, and Preexisting Market Structure
This study investigates incumbent responses to a main rival’s exit. We argue that long‐time rivals have developed an equilibrium by offering a mix of overlapping and unique products and by choosing geographic proximity to each other. A rival’s exit, however, disrupts this equilibrium and motivates surviving firms to expand in both product and geographic spaces to seek a new equilibrium. …Read More
Physician Organization and Incentives in Childbirth: Evidence from Physician Practice Management Companies
A challenge of mergers and acquisitions is how to align incentives between the target firm and the existing organization. In the health care industry, Physician Practice Management Companies (PPMCs) acquire physician practices to gain market power and leverage economies of scale. …Read More
New Barriers to New Work? Evidence from Job Transitions in the Innovation Economy
The modern knowledge economy depends crucially on innovation, but adaptation to innovation has been linked to economic ills such as wage inequality, skill polarization, and geographic divergence. Between 2000 and 2016 alone, the U.S. shed approximately 6 million manufacturing jobs largely as a result of increasing pressure from automation and international trade.…Read More
New Technologies in Elder Care
This study of new technologies in elder care is a multi-faceted project designed to better understand technological adoption both by elder-care institutions such as Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) and elderly individuals in their homes. …Read More
Adoption of Predictive Analytics: Impact of Model Interpretability
One of the most important trends in business in recent years has been the growth of Big Data and predictive analytics. The trend started with traditional analytics and the emergence of decision support systems. With advances in machine learning (ML), systems can now take in large amounts of data, learn how human decision-makers have made decisions in the past, and make decisions autonomously (achieving human-level or superhuman performance in many activities). …Read More
Network Externalities and Firm Innovation
We propose a novel theory of network externalities to explore the causal relationship between a firm’s position in an alliance network and its innovation outcomes. We posit that the network position a focal firm occupies can be unexpectedly and suddenly reshaped by the acquisitions of other firms. …Read More
The Impact of Funding Sources on the Rate and Direction of Academic Biomedical Innovation
Given the large and growing role of academic entrepreneurs and inventors via patents, start-up development, and university-industry relationships, understanding how funding sources may impact academic scientists’ incentives is a crucial area for innovation research, particularly in the biomedical sciences. …Read More
Economic Nationalism, Productivity and Innovation: Evidence from a Developing Country
Economic nationalism is an ideology which favors policies that emphasize domestic control of the economy. Previous work has documented that firm innovation/investment and firm productivity are important for economic growth. Hence, understanding how barriers to firm innovation/investment and restrictions on firm productivity is crucial to the study of development. …Read More
Frenemies: The Influence of Competitors’ Cooperation on Technological Adoption
The development and adoption of new innovative technologies confront firms into making decisions in highly uncertain environment. Past experience and the available public information are seldom sufficient to support firms in their decision process; firms ability to experiment and produce new information is then paramount. …Read More
Vigilant Leadership and Disruptive Innovations
In 2004 the Mack Institute sponsored a conference on “Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals that can Make or Break Your Company,” that led to a book of the same title with Paul Schoemaker, and seven further articles. During the past decade our approach has been applied to dozens of companies and spawned two major research initiatives. …Read More
Is FDI Good News for Local Entrepreneurs? Evidence from China
In opening their markets, governments in developing countries hope to receive foreign direct investment. In addition to direct wage and employment benefits, they also hope that foreign investment can facilitate the growth of local businesses. …Read More
The Effects of Message Ephemerality on Communicators
Most digital communication platforms store content and allow users to see it multiple times. Despite the benefits that recording content holds for both users and companies, many applications delete it after it was seen by the receiver (i.e., ephemeral communication channels). …Read More
Why Do Firms Offer Dicey Perks? The Case of Unlimited Vacation
The use of employee perks is becoming increasingly important to organizational competitiveness. Consequently, innovating along the human resource dimension has become a strategy imperative for many firms. Typically, firms introduce perks that are complementary to work. However, another set of perks that makes it easier for people to leave the workplace has gain more popularity over time. …Read More
How Data Analytics can Improve Innovation Quality post IPO
This proposal explores how the new generation of information technologies (IT) including AI, automation and data analytics, affect how firms innovate. In particular, we focus on the effect of innovation after a firm went through an IPO. …Read More
Blockchain and the Value of Operational Transparency
The project aims to explore the extent to which blockchain technology can be ported to alleviate information asymmetry issues in the context of supply chain financing. In particular, firms seeking the capital needed to efficiently run their operations are often impeded by severe information asymmetry issues. …Read More
Homophily and Consolidation in Intra-Firm Collaboration Networks and their Impact on Innovation Output
Research in management science has long posited that network structures, specifically the patterns of informal interactions among people, affect information flows and knowledge recombination. Yet, how do different network topologies affect the production of new knowledge and ideas? …Read More