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 examines how risk preferences differ over goods and in-kind monetary rewards. I study incentivized experiments in which subjects allocate bundles of either Amazon.com goods or Amazon.com gift credit (which must be spent immediately) across uncertain states. …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
In this project, we explore the impact of startup firms’ social media activities on their entrepreneurial financing performance. Social media can mitigate information problems in entrepreneurial financing in two ways.…Read More
Grand Innovation Prizes are contests where a prize is given for the first team to achieve a radical technical goal–such as reaching space with a commercial passenger rocket. The phenomenon of GIPs have become an important topic for study in recent years.…Read More
Emerging markets firms in high-technology industries have long been thought of as laggards. We argue that this paradigm needs to be reassessed. Using biotechnology as an example for a radical technology we argue that emerging market, compared to developed markets, are well positioned to pursue such technologies.…Read More
The product life cycle, or time path of sales, of many high-tech goods and services is bell-shaped. I show that product life cycles endogenously arise in markets with rapid technological innovations, are heterogeneous across products, and are affected by the level of market competition.…Read More
Why do some transformative technologies dominate the market quickly, while others take decades to catch on? It’s a function not just of the technologies themselves, say the authors, but also of their broader ecosystems (electric cars, for example, need a network of charging stations).…Read More
By learning to effectively manage a diverse organizational ecosystem, the NGO North Star Alliance is driving health care innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. Mack Institute researcher Aline Gatignon interviews its former executive director about getting organizational culture right.…Read More
No skills, no cooperation. That is the core finding of this book, which seeks to explain international inter-agency cooperation in the protection of the environment and the development of nuclear technology across the Global South.…Read More
The disruptive impacts of technological innovation on established industrial structures has been one of the distinguishing features of modern capitalism. In this book, four leading figures in the field of Schumpeterian and evolutionary economic theory draw on decades of research to offer a new, ‘history-friendly’ perspective on the process of creative destruction.…Read More
This article examines the importance of plasticity and diversity in organizational adaptation and with respect to dynamic capabilities. It begins by conceptualizing what elements comprise a dynamic capability within an evolving organization using the contrast between templates (genotypes) and realized practices (phenotypes).…Read More
It is a familiar observation that entrepreneurship is not easily accommodated within the framework of neoclassical economic theory. Drawing inspiration from an ancient critique of neoclassicism by Veblen (Q J Econ 12(4):373–397, 1898), this paper attributes the difficulty to the tension between normative accounts of decision making (as in mainstream theory) and ideas of causation that are standard in the sciences.…Read More
Venture capitalists often choose to form syndicates (groups of VCs) which jointly invest in projects instead of one VC funding the project individually. What are the determinants of who chooses to syndicate with whom?…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
We study the impact of changes in the position of competing listings in organic search results on the performance of sponsored search advertisements. Using data for several keywords from an online retailer’s ad campaign, we measure the impact of organic competition on both click-through rate and conversion rate of sponsored search ads for these keywords.…Read More
In recent years, online retailers (also called e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that e-tailers are facing: When should they use an agency selling format instead of using the more conventional reselling format?…Read More
Mack Institute senior fellow Charlotte Ren researches how a firm’s past experience can impact their present performance. In her article “Does Experience Imply Learning?” with Louis Mulotte and Jaideep Anand, Ren emphasizes that activities which led to previous success, while tempting for firms to repeat, may actually prove detrimental. This so-called “competency trap” distracts firms from exploring new opportunities.…Read More
Wendy Ham’s research asks whether there’s a better way to make predictions. By examining event characteristics and forecasting methods, she argues that it’s possible to create a cheat sheet that tells us which forecasting approach is the best for a given problem.…Read More
If you’ve ever thought that the quest for more clicks is affecting the sorts of articles that get published in the media, Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim wants you to know that you’re right. But it’s not quite the overarching impact that you might expect. …Read More
