Evolving and Leading for Innovation

We investigate the impact of several different recommender algorithms (e.g., Amazon.com’s “Consumers who bought this item also bought”), commonly used in ecommerce and online services, on sales volume and diversity, using field experiment data on movie sales from a top retailer in North America. Read More

This study evaluates how having multiple kinds of relations – multiplexity – affects diffusion by word-of-mouth information transmission. The study uses data from a field experiment in 49 remote villages in Karnataka, India. Read More

Although the relationship between competition and firm innovation has long been of scholarly interest, prior research has predominantly considered changes in internal research and development (R&D) as a strategic response to competitors’ actions. Read More

We will examine the cost of inventor mobility from a talent poaching perspective. It is either prohibitively costly or impossible to contract over all states of the world (Grossman and Hart, 1986; Tirole, 1999). Read More

In this paper, we argue that an innovation’s influence is shaped by the social structures that it is embedded within; specifically, the categories that are used to organize items in a given domain. Read More

Skilled immigration restrictions may have secondary consequences that have been largely overlooked in the immigration debate: multinational firms faced with visa constraints have an offshoring option, namely, hiring the labor they need at their foreign affiliates. Read More

How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? Although access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity of inventor-held knowledge within a given knowledge production team. Read More

High skill labor demand is infrequent but firms cannot adjust perfectly due to several adjustment costs. Professional Business Services (PBS) sector help alleviate this problem by allowing high skill labor to move across firms, reducing idiosyncratic part of labor demand risk. Read More

Prior research has argued and shown that firms with centralized R&D produce broader innovations relative to decentralized firms, but the organizational mechanisms underlying this relationship are underexplored. This gap limits our understanding of whether and how formal R&D structure can be used as a lever to influence research outcomes. Read More

A recent rapid-automation movement has been displacing routine labor and has sparked a series of discussions about taxation on automation such as a robot tax. However, the government’s dilemma is that the planner may want to tax such physical capital that displaces routine labor for redistributive motives but does not want to tax other physical ...Read More