学术论文

Regulators have increasingly mandated firms to promptly disclose material cybersecurity incidents upon discovering these incidents. We find suggestive evidence indicating that some firms manipulate the discovery date (“misreport”) of a cybersecurity incident to postpone the disclosure of the incident, as evidenced by a pronounced spike in insider sales before the reported discovery date. We also find that misreporting is more prevalent among firms with weak internal control systems, when firms face low litigation risk, and when firms have greater pressure to meet a disclosure deadline. Further, firms suspected of misreporting tend to disclose their remedial actions and assert the restoration of business, mitigating negative market reactions upon disclosure of incidents. Collectively, our results suggest that firms might strategically misreport information about a cybersecurity incident to delay disclosure to gain additional time for remedial actions, which helps them prevent exposing vulnerabilities to malicious actors and alleviate stakeholder anxiety.

Blockchain technologies have catalyzed the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which operate in an incentive network fueled by crypto tokens. In essence, these tokens are imbued with either payment rights (i.e., transactional tokens) or ownership rights (i.e., governance tokens). The decentralized organizational paradigm dismantles the traditional management structure and bring new research opportunities to Operations Management (OM). While the performance of DAOs has been largely examined in current OM literature, the effectiveness of their internal incentive mechanisms—specifically the one that uses ownership as rewards to promote user contributions—remains unclear. Focusing on DAO-enabled virtual communities, we seek to examine whether decentralized ownership provides stronger incentives for user behaviors, such as creation and curation, in comparison to traditional monetary rewards through the lens of psychological ownership theory. We obtained data from Steemit that captures the reward, creation, curation and transaction behaviors of 98,000 users from May 2017 to April 2019. By leveraging the “power-up” action as a shock that increases user ownership shares, we established a quasi-experimental setting. Employing the PSM-DID model, we found that the use of governance tokens is associated with enhanced creation and curation efforts but declined creation novelty, compared to the use of transactional tokens. Our additional analyses further reveal that the incentive effects of governance tokens diminish over time. However, upon the recurrence of the intended choice, these effects become reinforced. Notably, we find that governance token ownership is more strongly associated with curation efforts for users with weaker social ties. Conversely, for users with high reputation scores, their content creation behaviors are less strongly associated with governance token ownership. This study contributes to the burgeoning discourse on blockchain and cryptocurrency from an operational perspective, providing valuable insights for the design of incentive mechanisms in DAOs and advancing our understanding of operational efficiencies and stakeholder engagement in decentralized structures within Operations Management.

In the burgeoning marketplaces of digital assets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) revolutionize digital asset ownership and intellectual property (IP) protection, but high minting costs create barriers to marketplace entry and growth. This study examines the impact of “lazy minting,” a new NFT production method introduced by major NFT marketplaces to lower minting costs by deferring blockchain certification until the first sale. In response to the call for further research on emerging technologies in operations management, we explore how this policy affects the net sales performance of existing sellers in the NFT marketplaces. Based on transaction cost economics (TCE) and the literature about different IP protection methods, we distinguish between lazy- and regular-minted NFTs by their differential transaction costs and utilize the staggered difference-in-differences (DID) method to conduct our analysis. We find that lazy minting adoption significantly boosts the net sales performance of existing sellers. This is attributed to their cost-adaptive IP protection behavior. Specifically, they achieve this by minting more NFTs with a larger proportion of style-consistent NFTs through lazy minting, while strategically employing regular minting for style-breaking NFTs, which is contingent upon their reputation. Our study has important theoretical and practical implications for operations management under the emerging technological revolution.

Brands are increasingly finding themselves on the receiving end of negative labels from a variety of sources. While sometimes warranted, many of these negative labels feel like unwarranted or uncivil insults. Brands generally respond to such undeserved degradation by ignoring the insult, denying the insult, or perhaps apologizing to the insulter. This research explores another potential strategy: reappropriating the insult. We reveal that reappropriation—an intentional act of verbatim self-labeling with an externally imposed negative label—can garner unexpected benefits for brands, including greater advertisement click-through rate, interest, and more positive attitudes. The advantage of reappropriation is driven by perceptions of the brand's confidence and humor and is specific to situations in which the reappropriated insult is perceived to be unjustified and ultimately benign in nature. This work contributes to our understanding of how brands can recover from negative events and how reappropriation operates uniquely in an unexplored marketplace context. We also provide a novel recovery tactic for brand managers facing certain types of hostility.

Trust represents a key social mechanism facilitating collaboration in interorganizational relationships. Yet, the concept of interorganizational trust is still surrounded by substantial ambiguity, especially as it pertains to the levels of analysis at which it is located. Some scholars maintain that trust is an inherently individual-level phenomenon, whereas others insist that organizations constitute the central sources and referents of trust in interorganizational relationships. Our article addresses this controversy, aiming to reduce conceptual ambiguity and foster cumulative progress. Using a micro-sociological approach, we advance knowledge of the meaning and context-specific relevance of individual- vs. organizational-level trust. Specifically, we apply the notion of organizational actorhood to both the trustor and the trustee in an interorganizational relationship. We then build on micro-institutional and entitativity theory to offer a model of the antecedents of organizational actorhood that identifies a set of contextual conditions explaining the degree to which an organization rather than individuals within it constitutes the focal origin and target of trust. The contingent account we propose here helps bridge disparate traditions of scholarship on interorganizational trust by highlighting that trust can, but need not always, reside to a substantial extent at a supraindividual level of analysis.

This paper studies a large majority election with voters who have heterogeneous private preferences and exogenous private information about an unknown state of the world. We show that a Bayesian persuader can achieve any state-contingent outcome in some equilibrium by providing additional information. In this setting, without the persuader’s additional information, a version of the Condorcet jury theorem holds, in the sense that outcomes of large elections satisfy full-information equivalence. Persuasion does not require detailed knowledge of the voters’ private information, preferences, or the voting rule. It also requires almost no commitment power on the part of the persuader.

We examine changes in bank loan contracts after borrowers experience a nearby local newspaper closure. Compared to a sample of control firms, we find that the closure of a local newspaper leads to higher interest spreads for borrowers. This effect is more pronounced when there are fewer related lenders in the syndicate, when lenders have less prior lending experience in the local area, when the closed local newspapers are associated with increases in misconduct cases, and for institutional lenders who rely more heavily on others for monitoring. In addition, we observe that loan contract amendments become less frequent, while covenant strictness increases following newspaper closures. Our main findings are robust to various research design specifications and are not driven by deteriorating local economic conditions. Our findings suggest that local media still plays a significant role in the debt markets, even as society moves deeper into the internet era.

Problem definition: Inventory management problems with periodic and controllable resets occur in the context of managing water storage in the developing world and dynamically optimizing endcap promotion duration in retail outlets. In this paper, we consider a set of sequential decision problems in which the decision maker must not only balance holding and shortage costs but discard all inventory before a fixed number of decision epochs with the option for an early inventory reset. Methodology/results: Finding optimal policies for these problems through dynamic programming presents unique challenges because of the nonconvex nature of the resulting value functions. Moreover, this structure cannot be readily analyzed even with extended convexity definitions, such as K-convexity. Managerial implications: Our key contribution is to present sufficient conditions that ensure the optimal policy has an easily interpretable structure, which generalizes the well-known (𝑠,𝑆) policy from the operations management literature. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, under these rather mild conditions, the optimal policy exhibits a four-threshold structure. We then conclude with computational experiments, thereby illustrating the policy structures that can be extracted in various inventory management scenarios.

Problem definition: We consider the dynamic pricing problem of multiple products under (asymmetric) reference effects over an infinite horizon. Unlike existing literature, which is mostly focused on the single-product setting, our multiproduct setting takes into account the cross-product effects among substitutes and incorporates the memory-based reference prices into the multinomial logit (MNL) demand model. Even with the single-product logit demand, the structure of the optimal pricing policy is intractable. Therefore, we focus on the long-run patterns of the optimal pricing policy and also discuss the performance of the myopic pricing policy. Methodology/results: We first provide a comprehensive characterization of the myopic pricing policy, including its solution, long-run convergence behavior, and optimality gap. For the optimal pricing policy, we show an intricate connection between its long-run dynamics and types of reference effects. We demonstrate that the presence of any gain-seeking product renders a long-run constant pricing policy suboptimal. Conversely, the constant policy (or optimal steady state) can exist in both loss-neutral and loss-averse scenarios, where we provide a sufficient condition for such existence and give the analytical expression for the optimal steady state. We further show that when pricing perfect substitutes, the true optimal policy under the multiproduct framework is more likely to yield a long-run cyclic pattern than the policy derived from the single-product framework, a phenomenon that aligns well with the periodic discounts in real-world markets. Managerial implications: This discrepancy in the long-run behaviors between multi- and single-product-based policies highlights the importance of employing the multiproduct framework and addressing the cross-product effects, as sticking to the single-product framework while managing multiple substitutes can misrepresent long-run dynamics and result in suboptimality. In the multiproduct domain, our model suggests that retailers are more likely to benefit from appropriate price variations than maintaining a constant pricing policy.