SPEAKER

ABSTRACT

Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans tie student loan repayment to income and forgive unpaid debt after certain years of repayment. We investigate how these features affect one’s career choices through a survey where the same student is asked to select job profiles under various repayment plans. Consistent with our Ben-Porath style model, the survey results reveal that IDR is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, 36% of students underinvest in their human capital under the standard repayment plan relative to their would-be choices in a debt-free scenario; an IDR resembling the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan reduces this fraction to 20%. On the other hand, IDRs induce moral hazards: Under a SAVE-like plan, 22% of students choose job profiles with lower initial wages and higher wage growth than their choices in a debt-free scenario, leaving part of their debt forgiven. A simple calculation indicates that this type of moral hazard alone would render SAVE-like plans inviable were they carried out by private lenders; however, government-run IDRs are sustainable due to the government’s capacity to collect individuals’ lifetime income taxes.

SPEAKER

ABSTRACT

Extant research has overlooked why companies receive varying levels of criticism for not engaging with polarized social issues. Further, little is known about the consequences of engaging with these issues in the face of criticism. To understand which firms are at the highest risk of missteps, we integrate insight from expectations management and identity theory. We argue that external criticism stems from general audiences’ expectations – which vary significantly between firms – being left unmet. These expectations have two dimensions: predictive, reflecting audiences’ perceptions of the likelihood a firm will engage based on past actions and related cues; and prescriptive, based on their beliefs as to whether a firm has a moral obligation to respond. We further posit that responding to a polarized issue in the face of criticism can backfire, eliciting greater and increasingly bipartisan critique. An empirical analysis of criticism for silence and subsequent corporate responses to a controversial voting law in Georgia supports these arguments. In this context, prescriptive and predictive expectations interacted to lead to mostly Democratic-leaning critique. Firms that subsequently broke their silence received both Democratic- and Republican-leaning criticism afterwards. Post-hoc analyses revealed that early (prior to a buildup of critique) and substantive (vs. symbolic) engagement was associated with less criticism.

SPEAKER

ABSTRACT

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of creativity and innovation, revolutionizing the very processes through which ideas are conceived and brought to fruition. However, little is known about how the deployment of GenAI affects the nature of creative ideas as well as subsequent implementation efforts due to machine-colored psychological ownership. We study how to optimize the human-AI co-creation workflow for better creative outcomes. Integrating the literature on human-AI collaboration with research on the collaborative process of creativity, we propose complement and dependency AI augmentation as two distinct process structures of co-creation, which lead to different creative outcomes and implementation efforts. In two preregistered studies—an online experiment with entrepreneurs coupled with a field experiment with graphic designers—we found that both process structures surpassed human-only work by enhancing the novelty and usefulness of ideas generated, yet complement AI outperformed dependency AI in preserving the heterogeneity of ideas at the level identical to that of human-only work. Complement AI fostered a stronger sense of psychological ownership than dependency AI, which translated into a more positive indirect effect on implementation efforts. However, it was still surpassed by human-only work. The negative indirect effect of dependency AI on implementation efforts was especially salient for women (vs. men). By casting light on the process structures of human-AI co-creation and emerging subtle gender disparities, our work provides deep insights into optimizing gender-sensitive creative workflow and reconfiguring organizational innovation ecosystems in an intelligent-machine-driven economy.

SPEAKER

ABSTRACT

During the transition between technological regimes, incumbents often face a strategic choice: to enter the new market with products designed from scratch based entirely on the new technology or to transition into the new market by keeping links with the old technology via hybrid products. Hybrid products have not been extensively studied and the scant literature to date has focused on their relationship with innovation and technical performance metrics. This existing work does not provide a clear indication of what is the relationship between investments in hybrid products and performance in the market based on the new technology. To address this gap, we adopt a question-based abductive approach to explore this relationship and further identify which other factors can affect the results. Our context is the US automobile industry between 2009 and 2024, a period when the auto industry began its transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. We find that incumbents that invest in hybrid vehicles during the transition are associated with inferior market performance in the market for electric vehicles. We also find that the degree of hybridization and the type of target market moderates the magnitude of this hybrid penalty. Our findings suggest that following a hybrid product strategy entails important limitations that firms need to carefully consider during technological transitions.

SPEAKER

ABSTRACT

My research addresses the question of why women are less likely than men to occupy brokerage positions in informal social networks. In my prior work, I introduced a novel theoretical perspective—the construal approach—to understanding gender differences in returns to brokerage. Using this theoretical perspective, my previous research has shown that women benefit less than men from brokerage due to gender stereotypes, which affect how they perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others in this role. In this talk, I will share research that further advances the construal perspective by illuminating the role of construal in women’s networking behaviour and, accordingly, the circumstances under which they are likely to attain brokerage roles. I highlight the critical role of women’s sense of belonging in contexts where they are underrepresented and negatively stereotyped, and how this shapes women’s social networks. In Study 1, I examine the friendship networks of MBA students, showing that the more women feel a sense of belonging at the beginning of their tenure, the more likely they are to occupy brokerage positions in the friendship network six months later. In contrast, men’s sense of belonging is unrelated to their subsequent friendship networks. I replicate this in an online experiment, showing that women (but not men) who are assigned to think about a time when they belonged (vs. did not belong) indicate more comfort with occupying a brokerage position. In Study 3, examining a second cohort of MBA students, I demonstrate that engaging in networking behaviours mediates the link between women’s (but not men’s) early sense of belonging and their subsequent friendship network brokerage. I conclude the talk by offering insights into future directions arising from this research, highlighting opportunities, limitations, and open questions.

SPEAKER

ABSTRACT

We show that government deleveraging causes liquidity squeeze among government contractors, an unintended consequence of containing sub-national debts. Our empirical analysis exploits China’s top-down deleveraging policy in 2017 and a purposefully-built dataset of listed firms matched with government procurement contracts. We find that private contractors experience larger accounts receivable increases, larger cash holding reductions, more share-pledging activities, worse operating performance, and higher probabilities of ownership change than noncontractors. Effects are muted among state-owned enterprises, implying that local governments selectively delay payments. Our findings reveal a novel trade credit channel for a reverse crowding-in effect whereby government deleveraging amplifies financial distortions against private firms.

SPEAKER

ABSTRACT

Inspired by research on the temporal nature of opportunities, we extend the idea that financially motivated shareholder activists target firms based on opportunities. We argue that certain organizational conditions create “windows of opportunity” for these activists to intervene in companies, which, when exploited, increase their odds of success. Drawing on event-based theories of organizational change and disruption, we hypothesize that firms become more likely targets of shareholder activists after experiencing organizational events that cause internal disruption to their business. We test this in the context of litigation and leadership transitions, and find that shareholder activists are more likely to target firms shortly after they experience either event. We further show that activists are more successful in achieving their objectives when they target firms based on these opportunities. Viewing opportunities through a temporal lens, this study extends research on the drivers of shareholder activism.

SPEAKER

Prof. Sally Maitlis
Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Leadership
Saïd Business School
University of Oxford

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how senior executives with depression and/or anxiety navigate the tensions between a challenging and highly stigmatized mental health condition and the demands and expectations of their professional roles. Based on 41 in-depth interviews, I found that participants engaged in a “protective cycle” of intensive boundary work that maintained social and intrapsychic boundaries around their emotional pain. At the social boundary, executives did boundary work such as always showing up for work and strategizing for obligatory work interactions; this allowed them to function professionally while concealing their emotional pain. The executives also carried out intrapsychic boundary work, much of it unconscious, that included working very hard, using alcohol, and other practices that limited their awareness of their emotional pain. For most participants, this protective cycle was disrupted by a revelatory experience, often involving a panic attack or breakdown, that revealed the limits of their boundary work and triggered a shift in their approach to dealing with their emotional pain. This shift led to a “restorative” cycle in which the executives managed their intrapsychic and social boundaries toward greater permeability, including increasing their understanding of their pain, sharing their emotions with work colleagues, and leading others with greater care and compassion. Using psychodynamic theory to theorize the mechanisms that animate these cycles and the shift between them, this paper offers insights into the little understood experience of leading with a common mental health issue and highlights the importance of attending to unconscious as well as conscious boundary work in organizations.

SPEAKER

Prof. Oliver Hahl
Associate Professor of Organization Theory, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University

ABSTRACT

Many organizations seek to increase the role of women, but how are these attempts received? Integrating gender discrimination and tokenism theories, we argue that women’s inclusion in key roles is often penalized. However, such penalties can diminish when the macrosocial environment legitimizes women’s inclusion, provided that such inclusion is genuine and substantive (i.e., non-tokenistic) rather than superficial or performative (i.e., tokenistic). We test these predictions in a panel dataset of movie series from 1991 to 2021. Results suggest that increasing women in principal roles (i.e., female increase) may hurt film evaluations. However, these penalties diminish when societal gender equality is high. Analogous patterns emerge at the state level: female increase movies receive greater audience interest in markets where genders are more equal. Crucially, evidence suggests that when gender equality is high, only non-tokenistic (vs. tokenistic) female increase is favored by the audience, measured variedly as films (a) passing (vs. failing) the Bechdel test, (b) featuring more than (vs. fewer than) two women in principal roles, or (c) casting female actors with high (vs. low) performance credentials. Text analyses of over 140,000 movie reviews reveal that female actors receive more positive attention from audience when genders are more equal and when their engagement is non-tokenistic. Lastly, we conduct a preregistered vignette-based experiment that allows us to directly identify the negative influence of tokenism concerns on film evaluations when gender equality is salient. Collectively, these results highlight the dual expectations that arise with gender equality: engaging women and doing so meaningfully.

SPEAKER

Prof. Vijaya Venkataramani
Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Innovation
Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland

ABSTRACT

Novel ideas often do not receive positive assessments from decision-makers and, therefore, lose the opportunity to be implemented. Drawing on optimal distinctiveness theory (ODT; Brewer, 1991; Zuckerman, 2016), we propose that ideas need to be optimally distinct in order to secure support and endorsement from decision-makers. Specifically, rather than treat novelty as a monolithic construct, we identify idea functionality and design/form as distinct dimensions of novelty and argue that novelty in functionality needs to be optimally balanced with familiarity in form. We further propose that this strategy of balancing functional novelty with design familiarity is more necessary when idea creators lack legitimacy; when creators have greater legitimacy, this gives them greater leverage in selling ideas that are novel in functional as well as form. We find support for these ideas in an experimental study as well as an archival study using data scraped from Kickstarter. Both studies highlight the mediating role of perceived idea usefulness in affecting decision-makers’ willingness to support and implement these novel ideas.