Examining Effects of Company Pages on Job Ad Effectiveness

Funded Research Proposal

In this study, we aim to quantify the impact of information provision on jobseeker attention and applications. We explore how firms may improve job ad effectiveness through obtaining and maintaining a “company page” on an online job search platform. We study the implications of these firm actions on job ad performance and for jobseekers’ search. We also explore if information provision yields heterogeneous effects across firms of different sizes.Read More

Back to the familiar? How attention and rare experiences overcome local search in external technology sourcing.

Working Papers

In this paper, we develop and test a theoretical framework that considers how established firms forming partnerships with startups may be subject to spatial and temporal myopia and how these tendencies are moderated by the established firms’ histories of experiencing essential failures and successes in solving R&D problems. Read More

Leveraging Analytics to Maximize Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

Academics and practitioners will log onto an intuitive user interface and type in features of their own company (e.g., its size and industry). They will immediately be greeted with an “instant meta-analysis” that summarizes decades of academic findings related to the most important predictors of creativity and innovation in organizations.Read More

Decision-Aware Learning for Global Health Supply Chains

Funded Research Proposal

Tsai-Hsuan (Angel) Chung, Phd Candidate at the Wharton School; Osbert Bastani, Penn School of Engineering; Francis Smart, PhD Candidate at the University of Montana; Jatu Abdulai*; Patrick Bayoh*; Musa Komeh*; Vahid Rostami* Abstract: This proposal aims to develop and deploy novel methods that integrate machine learning and optimization to improveRead More

Artificial Intelligence, CEO Turnover, and Directional Change in Firm Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

In this project, we aim to investigate the extent to which acquiring AI capabilities can ease firms’ transition of innovation directions in uncertain times of leadership change. To achieve this goal, we plan to identify the challenges that firms face when they attempt to pivot the innovation direction during CEO turnover. Furthermore, we plan to examine how AI can help mitigate these challenges and provide new opportunities for certain types of innovation development. Our study will provide a roadmap for firms to make optimal decisions when allocating AI resources for strategic changes in innovation.Read More

Exclusivity in the Video Streaming Market

Funded Research Proposal

The main goal of this project is to enhance our understanding of the role that exclusive contracts play in shaping market structure, consumer demand, and innovation. The effect of exclusivity on consumer welfare is ambiguous.Read More

Strategies For Creating Value in Base of the Pyramid Markets: Evidence From a Field Experiment in India

Funded Research Proposal

In contexts with high poverty, impact-driven for-profit firms often take market-based approaches to drive inclusive growth while being financially sustainable. Even with the alignment between “doing well” and “doing good” that these firms supposedly seek to achieve, successful business strategies in these contexts have been associated with breadth of reach (reaching maximum number of beneficiaries) with little or no attention to depth of reach (repeated engagement with each beneficiary). However a focus on breadth alone may lead to tunnel vision when it comes to social impact. This paper draws the distinction between the two approaches and examines their implications for the outcomes for the different actors involved in BoP markets– the organization, its agents and the end beneficiaries. Read More

Algorithmic Pricing and Transparency in the Gig Economy

Funded Research Proposal

Algorithms control pricing and match customers and workers in the gig economy. However, algorithms face several critiques: they lack transparency, can be biased, and can be inefficient. We empirically analyze these issues and show that algorithms lose efficiency from two sources: competition between platforms and misaligned worker incentives. We model workers’ strategic responses to variation in pricing and estimate counterfactuals on the effects of minimum wage and transparent pricing policies.Read More

Are Startups More Innovative than Incumbent Counterparts? Evidence from AI Companies

Funded Research Proposal

I plan to study whether AI startups are more innovative than their incumbent counterparts. Although the extant literature highlights startups’ initial innovation capacities that help them identify and leverage market and technology opportunities, startups’ innovation competency at the founding stage no longer properly explains differences in competitive advantages in the digital era. Compared to traditional industries, companies in the digital era, such as AI firms leveraging big data, do not require capital-intensive manufacturing facilities to commercialize their ideas because the end products and services are digitized. Hence, the source of entrepreneurial innovation built upon the foundation-based explanation becomes obscure in the digital era, while it remains unclear what types of innovation startups vs. incumbents are better at during the post-foundation stages of startups. I argue that AI startups have competitive advantages in innovation against their incumbent counterparts based on different types of tech-based strategies for algorithm innovation. Read More

Evolution of Internet Retailing and Buy vs. Make Decisions

Funded Research Proposal

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

Silence Helps Men but Hurts Women: The Differential Gender Effects of Silence in Negotiation

Funded Research Proposal

Current literature consistently shows a gender gap in people’s performance in negotiation. In this research, we aim to use a GPT Negotiation Bot to understand whether men and women may be perceived differently when they use silence — a common and important conversation strategy — in negotiation.Read More

Instant Payment Systems and Competition for Deposits

Funded Research Proposal

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

Funded Research Proposal

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

Funded Research Proposal

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

Lay Perceptions About Machine and Human Judgments

Funded Research Proposal

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 Privacy Policy in the Online Advertising Industry

Funded Research Proposal

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 brandsRead More

The Placeholder Effect: Using Break Days to Help Form Habits

Funded Research Proposal

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?

Funded Research Proposal

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

Funded Research Proposal

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

Funded Research Proposal

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 resourceRead More