Innovation in medical technology has played a large role in the growth in welfare benefits and monetary costs due to health care over the last half century. Like many industries that rely on innovation, medical technology has an active market for corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A). …Read More
On-demand or gig economy has been growing dramatically in the past decade and is starting to become an everyday feature of modern society. Although independent contractors have been around for centuries, recent technologies allow workers to quickly connect with customers online and create new work arrangements. …Read More
Gig economy firms benefit from labor flexibility by hiring independent self-scheduling workers. Such flexibility poses a great challenge in terms of planning and committing to a service capacity. Understanding the motivations that drive gig economy workers is thus of great importance.…Read More
In 2011, California Governor Jerry Brown recognized several of the state’s existing firm incentive policies aimed at catalyzing innovative activity in the state, to be ineffectual, citing poor incentive design.…Read More
Managers have no shortage of advice on how to achieve organic sales growth through innovation. Prescriptions range from emulating the best practices of innovative companies like Amazon, Starbucks, and 3M to adopting popular concepts such as design thinking, lean startup principles, innovation boot camps, and co-creation with customers. …Read More
Many companies create and manage communities where consumers observe and exchange information about the effort expended by other consumers. Such communities are especially popular in the areas of fitness, education, dieting, and financial savings. …Read More
Do workers have different equality preferences depending on the type of payoff? In many firms, the distribution of equity compensation is more equal than the distribution of salary. We design an experimental group production game to examine how workers respond to combinations of different distributions of equity and salary.…Read More
It’s one of the paradoxes of being human: even when we know what’s good for us, we often make choices that are less than optimal. Wharton Professor Iwan Barankay researches how incentives can be used to create positive behavioral changes even after the incentive goes away.…Read More
We study optimal contracting in a setting that combines experimentation and adverse selection. In our leading example, an entrepreneur (agent) is better informed than the investor (principal) about both the quality the project (risky arm’s distribution) and the entrepreneur’s outside option (payoff of the safe arm).…Read More
This article investigates how corporate spinoffs affect managerial compensation. These deals are found to improve the alignment of spinoff firm managers’ incentive compensation with stock market performance, especially among spinoff firm managers that used to be divisional managers of the spun-off subsidiary, and particularly when the spun-off subsidiary performs better than or is unrelated to its parent firm’s remaining businesses.…Read More
The burden of oral disease in the U.S. is high, and in need of novel approaches to improving preventive oral health behaviors. Almost half of U.S. adults have periodontal disease, while 92% of adults and 50% of children experience dental caries. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) put new emphasis on financial incentives in which financial rewards for patients and providers are linked to health decisions and outcomes.…Read More
The issue of the failure of incumbent firms in the face of radical technical change has been a central question in the technology strategy domain for some time. We add to prior contributions by highlighting the role a firm’s existing set of complementary assets have in influencing its investment in alternative technological trajectories.…Read More
Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment designed to evaluate the impact of rank incentives and tournaments on the productivity and composition of teams.…Read More
