Mack Institute Research Archives

Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Index (CCCI or C3i)

The Consumer Cryptoconfidence Index offers the first ongoing, consumer-centered data source specifically intended to capture sentiment related to this market exchange tool. Offering both a novel “snapshot” understanding of the typical consumer’s perception of and interaction with cryptocurrency as well as data that may be fruitfully connected to other marketplace changes, the C3i index will allow us to build our knowledge as the cryptocurrency market evolves. By developing this understanding, we hope to support decision-making among consumers, regulators, investors, and entrepreneurs, while also laying the groundwork for ongoing consumer-centered research in this domain.…Read More

AI Decision Aids and Metacognition

The proposed research focuses on how people use and perceive innovative decision aids, for example, AI tools like ChatGPT. Individuals and organizations are increasingly outsourcing part of their labor or decision-making process to these tools. The proposed research aims to investigate the perception around using AI decision aids, both in terms of its impact on individuals’ metacognitive assessments and observers’ social judgments. …Read More

Evolution of Internet Retailing and Buy vs. Make Decisions

We have obtained data from Digital Commerce 360 which publishes pertinent statistics on top 1000 internet retail sites. One interesting aspect of this data is detailed information regarding outsourcing/insourcing decisions including web hosting, search engine optimization services, product delivery etc. This is a pretty unique data spanning hundreds of companies and a last decade. We wish to use this data to analyze outsourcing decisions of internet retailers and how these choices affect their performance. The data shows variation across time and industries, and it is supplemented with many quantitative metrics for internet retailers including number of visitors, conversion rate and basket size etc. We believe this unique data will allow us to gain unique insights into make vs buy decisions by internet retailers.…Read More

Risk in Discovery-Stage Biotech Innovation

The main goal of this project is to enhance our understanding of what drives firm decisions in discovery-stage drug development, when risk of failure and variance in outcomes are highest. Specifically, this project contributes to existing literature on biopharmaceutical innovation, by testing whether the theory that larger firms pursue novel drugs is valid in the earliest phase of the drug development pipeline. Using data on early-stage VC funding and FOIA’ed biopharmaceutical alliances across thirty years, I use data-driven methods to examine the relationship between the novelty of biotech innovation and investor decisions at the earliest stage of drug development and contextualize its magnitude against other innovation characteristics. In doing so, I resolve a potential discrepancy between academic findings and industry observations.…Read More

Innovate or Excavate? A Raw Resource View of Induced Innovation

This project aims to quantify the effect of innovation on commodity price reversions. Commodity prices tend to be stationary with occasional deviations and then revert to their mean prices. There are two big forces behind this reversion. First, there are firms that invest in research that allows them to substitute away from the expensive commodity. Secondly, the commodity producers will expand extraction capacity in response to increased profitability. The former affects the demand side and the latter the supply side. The goal of this project is to estimate the magnitude of the effect of price reversion due to innovation.…Read More

Upward Digitization and Downward Novelty in Book Industry

Digitization has fundamentally changed how content is produced, distributed, and consumed in cultural industries where novelty is an essential and necessary ingredient for success. Using the book publishing industry as a setting, we investigate whether and how digitization impacts content novelty.…Read More

Instant Payment Systems and Competition for Deposits

How do instant payment technologies impact financial intermediation? I use municipality-level data on the development of Pix in Brazil and combine it with branch-level banking data to provide evidence that instant payments positively impact deposit market competition—Pix usage increases checking, saving, and time deposits of small banks relative to large banks.…Read More

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

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

A laptop on a wooden table displays a webpage titled "100 ChatGPT audience building prompts." A cup of coffee sits nearby.

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

A person wearing virtual reality glasses interacts with a futuristic transparent screen displaying various digital holographic data and icons.

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

A person in a suit and checkered shirt is smiling and standing in a hallway with large windows. The setting appears professional and modern.

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