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.

SPEAKER

Prof. Dean Xu
Professor of Management
Monash Business School
Monash University

ABSTRACT

Board chairs and party secretaries play different roles in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The former’s primary role is economic, namely, to improve the productivity and economic performance of the firm, whereas the latter’s role is mainly political, namely, to ensure that the firm stays loyal to the party line and contributes to the political causes of the party. We examine the effect of chair–secretary duality on pay gap and firm productivity by generating alternative hypotheses based on two opposing perspectives. The first perspective is agency theory, which predicts that duality increases pay gap and decreases productivity, while pay gap decreases productivity. The second perspective is stewardship theory combined with role theory, which predicts that duality decreases both pay gap and productivity, while pay gap increases productivity. Empirical analysis on data from 670 Chinese SOEs for the period 2005–2021 lends support to the stewardship and role theory-based predictions. We also find that the negative relationship between duality and pay gap is weaker when a firm has had poorer performance, and stronger when the region in which a firm is located has had more social unrest.

SPEAKER

Prof. Brian Wu
Professor of Strategy
Ross School of Business
University of Michigan

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms such as Amazon and Alibaba orchestrate e-commerce transactions between merchants and consumers, thereby amassing a vast reservoir of real-time granular transaction data. Analyzing this data with advanced AI technology, these platforms can discern unmet customer demand and provide this market intelligence to merchants. Such a platform strategy has the potential to benefit all parties involved—consumers can purchase desired products that were previously unavailable; merchants can increase revenue by offering desired items; and the platform can take a larger commission from the increase in transactions. Despite the growing traction this strategy has gained in practice, little academic research has explored the performance impacts and the processes at play. As an initial attempt to fill this research gap, we provide empirical evidence based on a field experiment involving 146,892 merchants that was conducted at one of the leading digital platforms in the world. Our findings shed new light on the role of AI in improving platform design and shaping industry evolution.

SPEAKER

Mr. Jino Lu
Ph.D. Candidate
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California

ABSTRACT

Strategy and innovation scholars have long emphasized the crucial role of demand in driving
technological progress within a domain. However, relatively less is known about how changes in
demand conditions within a domain impact the technological progress and reallocation of
innovation resources in other domains. In this study, I argue that an increase in demand for
innovation within a domain can have negative implications for the innovation progress of firms
in adjacent domains, because it intensifies competition for knowledge workers, a critical resource
for innovation. Empirically, I exploit an unexpected environmental policy shock that led to an
exogenous increase in demand for electric vehicle (EV) technologies. I find that, following an
increase in innovation activities within the EV domain, firms in adjacent technological domains
not only experienced a decline in EV innovations but also suffered a more significant decline
(twice as much) in their own core technological domains and in their ability to explore new
technological domains. This negative effect is stronger for firms in other growing (rather than
declining) technological domains (e.g., renewable energy domains, including photovoltaic
technologies), and for firms in a related technological space but farther from the EV domain in
the product market. Further analyses suggest that this occurred because firms in adjacent
technological domains were more likely to lose inventors to firms in the EV domain. These
findings, which highlight that market and technological changes in seemingly unrelated areas can
impact firms’ resources and capabilities through competition for knowledge workers, have
implications for managers and policymakers.

SPEAKER

Dr Nur Ahmed
Postdoctoral Associate
MIT Sloan & MIT CSAIL

ABSTRACT

This study examines the tension over appropriation strategy between firms and scientists, a key human capital. Whereas scientists prefer to publish, firms tend to minimize outgoing knowledge to maintain competitive advantage. This study investigates how a tight labor market, which affords scientists higher bargaining power, can influence firm publications. Using a novel dataset of 200 million job posts and 1.1 million publications from the US Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry, I show that recruitment efforts increase the number of AI publications, but primarily in the same fields of heightened demand. For identification strategy, I exploit the variation in AI exposure at the firm level, which directly influences firm-level demand for AI talents but not AI publications. A machine learning-based approach demonstrates that to balance the trade-off between knowledge leakage and recruiting, firms publish papers that are less commercially valuable. Further mechanism tests on the use of AI research in patents and the science intensiveness of AI patents bolster our theoretical explanation. Findings underscore the importance of human capital in firms’ appropriation strategies.

SPEAKER

Prof. M.K. Chin
Associate Professor of Management
Kelley School of Business
Indiana University

ABSTRACT

Using data on psychiatric diagnoses of CEOs in Finland, we examine a) whether CEOs’ substance use disorders reduce firm performance and increase the likelihood of CEO turnover and b) whether governance practices mitigate such impacts. Our data on CEOs’ psychiatric diagnoses is unique in its details as it is obtained from the official nation-wide healthcare register, containing CEOs all-life-time clinical diagnoses for substance use disorder and for other mental disorders. Our findings offer support for our hypotheses on the direct effects of CEOs’ substance abuse as well as the interaction effects of having family board members and external monitors. Our study contributes to the strategic leadership and corporate governance literatures by introducing a novel construct—CEO’s mental health and thereby expanding their theoretical scopes.