Data-analytics technology can accelerate the innovation process by enabling existing knowledge to be identified, accessed, combined, and deployed to address new problem domains.…Read More
Data Analytics Supports Decentralized Innovation
Innovation Opportunities and Risks
An Experiment to Enhance Narrative Feedback to Improve Quality of Health Care
This project consists of a field experiment to assess a two-stage intervention intended to enrich healthcare professionals’ learning from patient experiences, as recounted in patients’ own words.…Read More
In the Shadow of the Valley: Private Equity Firms’ Increased Prominence in High-Tech Acquisitions
Why and how do private equity (PE) firms engage in technology acquisitions, and how do they create and capture value in these transactions? Observational data shows initial evidence that not only are PE firms engaging in an increasing number of technology buyouts, they are also seemingly behaving in distinct ways from both corporate acquirers, as well as PE firms in industries other than high-tech.…Read More
What is the Importance of Pivoting for Firm Growth?
Does pivoting matter? How does it affect investment in innovation and firm performance? My goal is to analyze the relevance of pivoting for the development of a small firm into a mature one and to provide a better understanding of what constitutes a small firm.…Read More
Being Innovative Pays Off, But When?
The research objective is to determine how quickly product innovation translates into higher stock market valuations. The novelty in the research approach is using online consumer reviews on websites including Amazon, eBay; combined with stock market data.…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
Impact Investing and Information Disclosure as Tools of Environmental Governance
Climate change remains a grand challenge of our time. Numerous actors relevant to business—both public and private—have worked to reduce or otherwise mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and to focus management attention on the issue of climate change.…Read More
Strategies for Dynamic Experimentation
In this project, we seek to update the statistical paradigm for conducting A/B tests in the 21st century. In particular, we plan to develop a statistical framework that takes the guesswork out of deciding when to stop an experiment and to calibrate a firm’s decision thresholds based on their own historical data.…Read More
FDA Regulation and Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Standard economic theory recognizes a trade-off inherent in intellectual property protection between increased incentives for firms to innovate due to potential monopoly rights and the deadweight loss from those rights.…Read More
Failed Disruption: A Cross-National Analysis of Books and Wines
Over the last two decades many categories of services have shifted from the traditional to the digital format, including music, news, job postings, and dating, among many others. Meanwhile, the sale of products has shifted significantly from physical to online channels, including clothing, toys, cosmetics, and even food.…Read More
Cryptoregulation
The project analyzes the regulatory and governance implications of cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based systems, and distributed ledger technologies. …Read More
Using a Company’s Own Words to Assess Its Risks
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
Big Pushes, Little Hollywoods: Local Economic Development Effects of Film Tax Credit Lotteries
The extent to which local incentive policies (such as subsidies and tax credits) are effective at spurring new centers of innovation, and whether these incentives induce overall productivity growth or just a shift of production from one region to another, is the subject of this proposal.…Read More
Firm Responsiveness to Location Subsidies: Regression Discontinuity Estimates from a Tax Credit Formula
In 2011, California Governor Jerry Brown recognized several of the state’s existing firm incentive policies aimed at catalyzing innovative activity in the state, to be ineffectual, citing poor incentive design.…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
Pursuing the New While Sustaining the Current: Incumbent Strategies and Firm Value During the Nascent Period of Industry Change
This study considers the nascent period of industry change when the prevalent business model is being threatened by a new model, but there is significant uncertainty with respect to whether and when the new model will dominate. …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
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
Pipes or Shackles? How Ties to Incumbents Shape Startup Innovation
Startups are increasingly turning to the incumbent firms in their industries for venture capital. However, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of how these relationships influence the way they innovate. …Read More
Better Sales Forecasting: Why the Crowd Outperforms the “Expert with the Eye”
The ability to predict consumer preferences for new fashions by clothing manufacturer executives seems rather low. This is confirmed by secondary data on inventory markdowns and our pilot interviews with major manufacturers. …Read More