Mack Institute Research Archives

Pivoting and Experimentation in Lean Startups

While recent scholarly and practitioner research has stressed the importance of learning in entrepreneurial settings, little scholarly work has formally examined the mechanisms through which learning drives behavior in those settings. Specifically, we investigate how an active learning process based on evaluating performance relative to an aspiration drives the pivoting and experimentation behavior of startups in environments with high degrees of uncertainty and potentially intense selection pressures.…Read More

Motivating Goal Pursuit by Normalizing Difficulty

In this research, we test a simple messaging intervention to motivate individuals struggling in their goal pursuit. Specifically, we study the impact of setting a norm about the experience of goal pursuit. We suggest that informing consumers that it is normal to struggle during goal pursuit – a “difficult goal pursuit” norm – is an effective approach to motivating struggling consumers.…Read More

Can Patients Differentiate Between Chatbots and Physicians? Using Conversational AI to Facilitate Provider to Patient Messaging

Hummy Song, Operations, Information and Decisions The Wharton School; Christian Terwiesch, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School; Hessam Bavafa, Wisconsin School of Business; David Asch, Health Care Management, The Wharton School; Xufei Liu, PhD in Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: Since ChatGPT was introduced, it has passed…Read More

Competitive Procurement in Health Insurance Market – Evidence from Medicaid Managed Care

Competitive procurement is commonly used when government contracts with private firms to provide public services, such as road and bridge construction. However, competitive procurement in health insurance marketing is rarely studied. The nature of the selection market makes the impact of competitive procurement ambiguous ex-ante because the value of winning the bid is determined by downstream competition with self-selection consumers. This project will study the welfare impact of competitive procurement in the selection market in the context of the Medicaid Managed Care market.…Read More

How Corning Leverages Its Organizational Memory to Create New Industries

Rahul Kapoor, Management, The Wharton School Abstract: The objective of this project is to document the history of Gorilla Glass―a material developed by Corning (formerly Corning Glass Works) that enables the touchscreen devices of the 21st Century. Corning started developing the predecessor technologies to Gorilla Glass in the 1960s, discontinued the…Read More

Does ChatGPT Affect International Trade? Evidence from E-Commerce Vendors

In this study, we plan to examine the business impact of ChatGPT adoption on e-commerce vendors. Our research goal is twofold. First, we examine whether ChatGPT can improve sales performance of e-commerce vendors. Second and more importantly, we study who will benefit more from adopting ChatGPT. …Read More

Lay Perceptions About Machine and Human Judgments

In today’s world, consumers and businesses frequently require expert advice to make accurate predictions. Much of this advice stems from algorithms, such as recommendation systems and AI prediction models. The goal of this project is to explore how lay people perceive the accuracy of machine predictions.…Read More

Effects of Online Dating Platforms On Marital and Health Outcomes

This project aims to estimate how the usage of online dating platforms in the United States has impacted high-level relationship outcomes (e.g., marriage and divorce rates, time to marry and stay married) as well as user mental and physical health. To estimate the causal impact of online dating platform usage on such outcomes, we use variation in the penetration of online dating apps and websites across locations (e.g., counties).…Read More

New Working Paper Finds ChatGPT A Better Innovation “Ideator” Than MBA Students

Earlier this year, Christian Terwiesch, Mack Institute co-director and Wharton Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, made headlines with his white paper showing that ChatGPT could easily pass a typical Wharton MBA exam. Now he and co-authors Karan Girotra, Lennart Meincke, and Karl T. Ulrich have released a new working…Read More

Doing Business in the Metaverse: Leveraging Innovations in Immersive Technology

Doing Business in the Metaverse: Leveraging Innovations in Immersive Technology by Shankar Parameshwaran Business use cases within the metaverse are rapidly expanding. The $200 billion global gaming industry empowers its enthusiasts to save the world by egg-bombing enemies or create their own islands. Restaurant chains allow patrons to cook virtual…Read More

Would Chat GPT Get a Wharton MBA? New White Paper By Christian Terwiesch

GPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot from OpenAI, went viral soon after its launch, drawing attention to and raising questions about the future of generative AI. But is it smart enough to pass a final exam in a typical Wharton MBA course? Mack Institute Co-Director Christian Terwiesch published his findings in…Read More

Effects of Privacy Policy in the Online Advertising Industry

This study is aimed at evaluating the impact of third party cookie elimination on brands and consumers. Our proposed study aims to examine and answer the following questions: What are the effects of the third-party cookie policy ban on consumers and brands…Read More

The Placeholder Effect: Using Break Days to Help Form Habits

This research aims to test a novel intervention to help people form healthy habits, such as exercise more. In particular, we will examine how encouraging people to have “placeholders” on their break days, or days off from pursuing their goals, affects their likelihood of reaching their goals.…Read More

Work From Home: Who Gains and Who Does Not?

In this study, considering the benefits and costs of WFM, we consider two questions: (1) who has an incentive to work from home, (2) how is team coherence and work performance impacted when individuals work from home?…Read More

Minority Entrepreneurship and Alternative Opportunities inside Established Organizations

Research has primarily focused on independently owned ventures, but individuals can also engage in startup activities via intrapreneurship—by launching and operating new ventures inside established organizations. We propose that these internal routes of new-venture formation offer a more inclusive pathway for racial minorities than external routes.…Read More

To Diversify or Not? Multi-Platform Social Media Strategy and E-Commerce Performance

Xiaoning (Gavin) Wang, PhD Candidate, Lynn Wu, Operations, Information and Decisions, and Serguei Netessine, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: As the number of social platforms has grown dramatically in the past two decades, companies face an increasing number of options to choose among for their social media resource…Read More

Artificial Intelligence, Lean Method and Startup Product Innovation

As startups are at the forefront of adopting AI tools, it is important to understand whether AI can amplify the effects of lean methods in helping startups to be even more responsive to market conditions that before. And if so, to what extent and under what conditions AI can complement lean method in developing products.…Read More

Innovation in Efficient Rate Design for Electricity Pricing

Using data over the period 2000-2020 for all seven wholesale power markets in the United States, we show that time-of-use electricity pricing schemes are poorly correlated with real-time wholesale market prices and that this phenomenon is widespread across space and time.…Read More

Does it Pay to Stand Out?

In this research project, we study how the human resource (HR) practices firms use affect how much value they capture from this innovation. Specifically, we analyze how employers and their technology workers divide the value generated when firms invest in new technologies that require workers to invest in new human capital. …Read More

Disagreement is a Short-hand for Poor Listening: How Listening Experience Shapes Communications in Organizations

Across three proposed studies, we aim to investigate 1) whether employees view colleagues/employers who disagree with them as bad listeners, despite objective signs of attentive listening; and 2) whether users are more satisfied with chatbots that signal a high level of attitude agreement with the user.…Read More