学术论文

In this paper we propose a production-cost smoothing model with Knightian uncertainty and ambiguity aversion to study the joint behavior of production, inventories, and sales. Our model can explain ten facts that previous studies find difficult to account for simultaneously including the high volatility of production relative to sales, the low ratio of inventory-investment volatility to sales volatility, the positive correlation between sales and inventory investment, and the negative correlation between the inventory-to-sales ratio and sales. Our main results extend to a model of endogenous sales. Finally, we find that the stock-out avoidance motive emerges endogenously in our model, reconciling the long debate in the inventory literature over the production-cost smoothing and stock-out avoidance models.

Data donations, where individuals are encouraged to donate their personal information, have the potential to advance medical research and help limit the spread of pandemics, among other benefits. The decision to donate data is fundamentally a privacy decision. In this research, we build on the privacy calculus, a model describing privacy risks and benefits, and examine the impact of privacy concerns on data donation decisions, highlighting the role of societal benefits in privacy decisions. Based on two randomized experiments using the general context of data donation for medical research (experiment 1) and the specific context of data donation for COVID-19 research (experiment 2), we find that individuals who are highly concerned about privacy tend to donate less data (experiments 1 and 2). This effect holds under a variety of conditions and is consistent with prevailing research. However, this effect is contingent on the privacy calculus. When implicit or explicit societal benefits are perceived, particularly in the absence of privacy controls, the association between privacy concerns and data donation decisions is less salient, highlighting the significant role that societal benefits have in privacy decisions. We discuss the theoretical, practical, social, and ethical implications of these findings.

Contemporary IT project teams engage in creative problem solving to address increasingly complex business problems, which highlights the need to promote IT project team creativity. Collaboration technologies are widely used in IT project teams, but little is known about what collaboration technology features can be used to improve IT project team creativity and the underlying influencing mechanisms. To address this important gap, the current study builds on the extended team knowledge framework to identify collaboration technology features and decodes their influencing mechanisms on IT project team creativity by drawing on the novel creative synthesis theory originating in the management literature to the IT project team context. We identify three sets of collaboration technology support features, that of awareness knowledge supports, long-term knowledge supports, and transitional knowledge supports, and posit that their use can improve IT project team creativity via facilitating the creative synthesis process which includes three sub-constructs of collective attention, similarity building, and enacting ideas. The research model is supported in general by empirical data collected through a multi-sourced survey of over 500 team members and their leaders from 62 IT project teams. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Disturbances in production along with volatile demand have raised concerns over shortfalls in the global supply chain and prompted the need to build a more diversified supply chain with competitive suppliers. This research investigates the impact of disturbances on a two-tier supply chain network with asymmetric competing firms. We establish the equilibrium in a unique structure that represents the maximum set of profitable upstream supply paths achievable through competition and exhibits stability under specific conditions. We evaluate the efficiency of the supply chain configuration by a shortfall problem and solve it with an adapted pseudoflow algorithm that efficiently identifies the mismatches between shortfalls and capacity surpluses in the multitier network. The parametric analysis reveals that the disturbance loss can be significantly offset by supplier competition, although the marginal benefit of competition decreases rapidly with the number of suppliers. Furthermore, shortfalls could be magnified by network asymmetries that increase configuration inefficiency, and supply chain performance could be improved by pushing high-cost firms to cease production. Simulation results indicate that the supply chain with a moderate level of competition and a balanced configuration can be robust against disturbance and demand volatility.

Social scope group buying has emerged as an increasingly popular promotional strategy and has served as a new customer acquisition tool. In the service industry, companies use social group buying (SGB) to recruit new customers and promote full-price products. Through SGB activities, customers can trade their social capital to form buying groups, experience SGB-offered sample products, and further alleviate uncertainty regarding expensive full-price products before making a final purchase. We investigate this novel SGB phenomenon by examining customers’ decisions throughout the “experience-conversion” process. In collaboration with a leading online educational platform, we examine customers’ grouping behavior during SGB activities and analyze their subsequent purchases. Our analysis reveals an interesting pattern in which non-grouped customers have a higher proportion of full-price product purchases than grouped customers. We postulate that, in addition to observations from operational data, unobserved social information is important for gaining a deeper understanding of the customer behaviors underlying this pattern. Employing a Bayesian learning framework, we model customers’ three-stage discrete-choice decision-making processes and quantify two influential social information factors: social cost and social learning. By incorporating social information, our Bayesian learning model demonstrates improved effectiveness in assisting companies with accurately predicting final purchases in the conversion process. We provide actionable insights into how companies can employ our model to strategically tailor SGB designs by customer segments to increase overall purchase rates. Our study sheds light on the significance of social information in enhancing customer management and refining SGB design.

We examine how the supply of talent affected financial development based on an experiment that abruptly changed the allocation of talent in historical China. Under the meritocratic civil examination system, government service was the main employment for the Chinese intellectuals. The abolition of this system in 1905 reduced the status and wealth attached to government service, which led the intellectuals to turn to modern banking as a high-status sector of employment. We find that regions where there were more candidates for the civil examination produced more financial professionals after 1905, which translated to a greater development of modern banking.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) permits managers to request the exclusion of shareholder-initiated proposals. I construct a novel data set of excluded and withdrawn proposals from the SEC’s responses to managers’ requests. An examination of announcement returns to withdrawal and exclusion decisions demonstrates that SEC-challenged proposals are value destroying. I find that special interest investors pursuing self-serving agendas and retail investors advocating for one-size-fits-all reforms explain the value-destroying nature of SEC-challenged proposals. On average, the SEC challenge benefits firm value by filtering out these harmful proposals. However, a regression discontinuity design reveals that proposals the SEC refuses to exclude may receive majority shareholder support and destroy firm value.

Big data and data technology have facilitated the widespread adoption of personalized pricing practices. While price personalization enables firms to extract greater rent from consumers, it often reduces price transparency, which can negatively impact firm profits in situations involving consumer coordination. In such contexts, a firm's commitment to pricing strategies can become essential for restoring profitability. We explore several commitment devices available to firms and discuss their implications. These devices include delegating pricing decisions to a manager who prioritizes consumer surplus, leveraging existing networks as signals for later consumers or to build reputation, and implementing uniform pricing or price caps in response to regulatory restrictions.

We find that 43% of firms that make payouts also raise capital during the same year, resulting in 31% of aggregate payouts being externally financed, primarily with debt. Most financed payouts cannot be explained by payout smoothing in response to volatile earnings or investment (rather, they are the result of firms persistently setting payouts above free cash flow). In fact, 25% of aggregate payouts could not have been paid without the firms simultaneously raising capital. Profitable firms with moderate growth use debt-financed payouts to jointly manage their leverage and cash, thus highlighting the close relationship between payout and capital structure decisions.