SPEAKER

Prof. Ilya Cuypers
Associate Professor of Strategic Management
Lee Kong Chian School of Business
Singapore Management University

ABSTRACT

Following extensive investigations into the implications of political ties for firms, researchers have more recently started to study how such ties also impact society. This direction reflects broader changes in the world at large and in management research, where grand challenges are receiving greater attention. We advance this vital area of inquiry by proposing an integrative framework to synthesize the mechanisms that link political ties to firms’ polluting behavior (i.e., bridging, buffering, and binding) and identifying an important contingency (i.e., level of the government). We then apply this general framework to the context of China to derive hypotheses that predict contrasting implications of a firm’s political ties for its pollution, depending on the level of the government to which these ties connect the firm. In line with our hypotheses, we find a positive association between having high-level political ties and firm pollution, but a negative association between having low-level political ties and firm pollution. Our study advances the political ties literature by synthesizing the implications of political ties in multi-tiered governments and contributes to the growing research on grand challenges.

SPEAKER

Prof. Sun Hyun Park
Professor of Strategy and International Management
College of Business Administration
Seoul National University

ABSTRACT

We reconcile prior managerial career imprinting perspectives with managerial experiences, learning, and the development of cognitive frameworks in a fast-changing, cyclical industry. We investigate CEO career imprinting and counter-cyclical investment strategy in the U.S. semiconductor industry. We theorize that CEOs who began their careers in downcycle periods are more likely to implement counter-cyclical strategies when they encounter subsequent industry downcycles in their career. This imprinting effect is reinforced through their individual accumulation of contrarian experiences, i.e., positive performance outcomes following previous counter-cyclical strategies, and the development of a cognitive framework valuing industry downturns as opportunities for long-term investment. Our empirical study of the entire career history of 311 unique CEOs since 1977 and counter-cyclical investment records between 2001 and 2020 supports our hypotheses.

SPEAKER

Prof. Ingrid Haegele
Professor of Economics
Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich

ABSTRACT

Addressing female underrepresentation in leadership positions has become a key policy objective. However, little is known about the extent to which the leadership ladder appeals differently to women relative to men. Collecting new data from a large multinational firm, I document the existence of a broken rung: women at lower hierarchy levels are 27% less likely to apply for early career promotions. Both realized application patterns and large-scale surveys at the firm reveal the role of an understudied feature of promotions—having to assume responsibility over a team—which is less appealing to women. This gap is not accounted for by standard explanations, such as family constraints, risk preferences, confidence, or differences in perceived success likelihood. Instead, my findings suggest that organizations can increase female applications by providing more information about what team leadership entails.

SPEAKER

Prof. Nuno Barros De Oliveira
Associate Professor
Tilburg University

ABSTRACT

Trust is among the most critical factors in buyer−supplier relationships. In an effort to understand the origins of trust, power has become the focus of a burgeoning literature. However, research about the influence of power on trust have been plagued by inconsistencies as to whose power and whose trust is being examined, which has led to confusion and hindered cumulative progress. We address this issue by disentangling the effect of the focal organization (the actor effect) from the effect specific to its partner (the partner effect) and accounting for both simultaneously. We further theorize and show that the partner’s level of self-promotion about its own achievements and credentials moderates both the actor and the partner effects, thus adding knowledge about a contingency that accounts for considerable variation in the linkage between power and trust. Using multi-informant, dyadic survey data paired with archival information scraped from firms’ webpages, we find that (i) actors low (vs. high) in power tend to place more trust (ii) while simultaneously engendering higher levels of their partners’ trust, (iii) but these effects differ markedly depending on the partner’s level of self-promotion. Our study offers a novel, integrative perspective of power and trust, and we elaborate its important implications for understanding buyer−supplier relationships.

Keywords: Trust, Trustworthiness, Survey, Interorganizational relationships, Supply chain management.

SPEAKER

Mr. Bo Yang
Ph.D. Candidate in Strategy, International Business
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California

ABSTRACT

This study examines how firms integrate political strategy with supply chain strategy to address protectionism within the context of the United States–China trade war. By assembling firm-level data on political lobbying, global supply chains, and international shipping, I find that U.S. firms exposed to U.S. tariff actions increased their domestic lobbying to influence the formulation and implementation of relevant trade policies. Firms’ lobbying activities were influenced by their preexisting market strategies—those impacted lobbied more intensively if they sourced more specialized inputs from China or had made greater commitments to the Chinese market. Firms’ lobbying efforts also facilitated their concurrent supply chain strategies: firms that lobbied engaged more actively in precautionary stockpiling and diversifying supply chains from China, reflecting the information advantages of lobbying.

SPEAKER

Prof. Abhinav Gupta
Professor of Management
Foster School of Business
The University of Washington

ABSTRACT

Prior research suggests focal firms are likelier to imitate some industry-peer firms than others. We extend this research to argue that the imitability of firms’ strategic actions will also be influenced by the gender of the CEOs leading those firms. Integrating insights from gender research, we hypothesize that the female CEOs’ strategic actions will be imitated at a lower rate than their male counterparts. We further posit that the focal CEO’s gender and political ideology will moderate the effect of the referent CEO’s gender. Using a longitudinal sample of S&P 1500 firms, we find broad support for our theory. Moreover, this differential rate of imitability suggests a “hidden female advantage”; our supplementary analyses show that lower imitation proneness predicts higher firm performance among female-led firms.

(This is a joint seminar organized by the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and HKU Business School’s academic area of Management and Strategy.)

SPEAKER

Prof. Matt Marx
Professor of Management & Organizations
SC Johnson College of Business
Cornell University

ABSTRACT

We analyze more than 70 million scientific articles to characterize the gender dynamics of commercializing science. The 15-25% gender gap we report is explained neither by the quality of the science nor its ex-ante commercial potential, and is widest among papers with female last authors (i.e., lab heads) when publishing high-quality science. We verify this in a subset of approximately 30,000 “twin” discoveries, for which papers we hand-code the gender of every PI. Results hold whether we define twins via adjacent co-citation or identical biological sequence and structure.

What drives this gap? Prior literature pointed to supply-side factors including reluctance on the part of women to patent or otherwise engage in commercial activity, but we cannot recover evidence for these. Rather, demand-side factors appear to play a key role. First, no gender gap is apparent when women self-commercialize their own discoveries instead of cooperating with existing firms. Second, the gender gap is larger at firms with a higher percentage of male inventors. Third, an increase in accessibility of scientific articles during the Obama administration does not close but rather widens the gender gap. Fourth, consistent with bias we find that discoveries by women that are cooperatively commercialized are of greater value, both using a crude proxy for “marginal” discoveries as well as when instrumenting for the likelihood of cooperative commercialization.

SPEAKER

Prof. Arijit Mukherjee
Professor
Michigan State University

ABSTRACT

Platform-run marketplaces may exploit third-party sellers’ data to develop competing products, but potential for future competition can deter sellers’ entry. We explore how this trade-off affects the platform’s referral fee and its own entry decision. We first characterize the platform’s optimal referral fee under full commitment on entry decision and study its economic implications. We then analyze the extent to which the platform’s own information sharing policy substitutes for its commitment to entry. We characterize the platform’s optimal information policy and examine how it interacts with the platform’s fee structure. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the platform’s fee structure as a regulatory response in the policy debates on marketplace regulation.

SPEAKER

Prof. Giacomo Negro
Professor of Organization & Management
Goizueta Business School
Emory University

ABSTRACT

Cultural production – and artistic careers in cultural fields – rarely involves only the work of a lone genius. It is natural to ask whether artists show different work processes (e.g., reliance on self-versus-others for music writing and production) and different partnerships (e.g., collaborations with other types of talent) in their field. In this study, we address these questions by focusing on the strategies artists undertake to produce cultural products, paying special attention to work released after receiving award-based recognition. Treating awards as demarcation points enables us to examine production strategies over time. The careers of award recipients can be contrasted with those of non-recipients. We study the context of popular music and analyze patterns of artistic differentiation following artists’ Grammy award recognition. Panel regression analyses using an extensive dataset on music recording artists from 1967 to 2018 examine whether being nominated for or winning an award subsequently results in distinct strategies of artistic autonomy and of production collaborations.

SPEAKER

Prof. Greta Hsu
Professor of Management
Graduate School of Management
University of California, Davis

ABSTRACT

When standardized tests like the SAT and ACT were initially introduced to higher education in the United States, they were viewed as systematic, neutral measures of students’ intellect—and thus a means by which talented individuals of all backgrounds could receive the training that would propel them to leadership positions. Over time, standardized testing became central to the college admissions process.  However, these tests have become increasingly criticized for unintentionally favoring the structurally advantaged, leading a number of colleges to abandon them.  Prior research has shown mixed results regarding the impact of going test-optional on enrolled student diversity; some studies find a small increase in representation from marginalized backgrounds, while others find non-significant effects. In this study, we explore the role that local cultural beliefs and values regarding merit play in the relationship between abandonment of standardized testing requirements in admissions and enrollment of underrepresented minority students on college campuses.  Our analyses suggest that abandoning testing requirements generally leads to an increase in underrepresented minority students, but this effect is reduced if universalistic measures remain highly valued in the admissions process.  We consider the implications of our findings for organizational scholarship related to practice dynamics as well as contemporary discussion of how standardized test scores influence college admissions decisions.