Funded Research Proposals

Regulators often seek to spur the adoption of green technologies (such as electric vehicles) using one of two financial subsidies: lowering the upfront cost of buying the technology (such as an electric vehicle subsidy) and lowering the marginal cost of using the technology (such as an electricity tariff subsidy). This project evaluates how the economic ...Read More

Tiantian Yang, Management, The Wharton School Abstract: Female-led ventures in female-focused industries (e.g., FemTech) face a unique tension between authenticity and perceived legitimacy in the eyes of potential employees. While identity-based lived experience can signal market insight and mission alignment, it may also conflict with gendered norms about who leads high-growth ventures. This project explores how ...Read More

Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare is growing rapidly. Because medical-technology firms shape healthcare innovation, spending, and quality—and rely heavily on public insurance reimbursements—PE ownership in this sector could have substantial long-term implications for innovation, costs, and patient outcomes. Yet most existing research on PE in health care focuses on care delivery, despite 63% of ...Read More

We propose and test a novel decision-making bias called “outlier neglect.” In general, when evaluating people, places, and opportunities with many features, people focus on the average of those features. For example, when hiring a team, people want the average performance of the team to be high, so they try to hire individuals who perform ...Read More

Consumers who want access to renewable energy have two main options: install renewable energy generation equipment “behind” the electrical meter (e.g., solar panels on the roof) or buy energy from a utility company, which would then source energy from generation companies. The first approach has obvious diseconomies of scale. It is only available to ...Read More

Grid-scale electricity storage technologies play a vital role in balancing electricity supply and demand, particularly as renewable energy sources like wind and solar introduce greater variability into power systems. Lithium-ion batteries, accounting for 90% of U.S. electricity storage capacity, are widely regarded as essential to the clean energy transition. By storing excess electricity during periods ...Read More

The private equity industry has grown significantly in the past decades, and this explosive growth has generated much interest on the impact of private equity’s footprint on the economy and the labor market. Using career history data from nearly 11 million employees at 16,137 private equity-backed firms from 2000 to 2024, I find that firms ...Read More

Corporate reputation is a vital strategic asset for organizations. Yet, its socially constructed nature has made it challenging for scholars to agree on a precise definition or develop a reliable measurement strategy for it. Historically, scholars have relied on measures that are useful for assessing reputation earned but fail to capture its dynamic nature or ...Read More

This proposal presents two innovative research projects designed to harness the transformative power of AI to enhance healthcare outcomes. In close collaboration with the Somaliland Ministry of Health and Development (MoHD), the Taiwan International Cooperation Development Fund (ICDF), and Penn researchers, we aim to tackle critical healthcare challenges in Somaliland, one of East Africa’s most ...Read More

Consumers are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) as an aid to everyday writing (i.e., email, text). While it is clear that LLMs can enhance the grammatical and syntactical structure of written communication, might they also lead people to communicate things that depart from their original intentions? We explored this question through an experimental ...Read More