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.

SPEAKER

Ms. Rebekah Hong
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Maryland

ABSTRACT

Employee creativity—the generation of novel and useful ideas—is crucial for the growth and survival of organizations. In encouraging such creativity, organizations often reward employees who develop successful ideas for new products and services. As a result, employees are motivated to claim ownership over their specific creative ideas in order to get recognition for these ideas. However, I argue that such idea-claiming behaviors can be a double-edged sword as they can lead to negative perceptions by coworkers, negatively affecting coworkers’ willingness to work with the focal employee. Given that creativity is a social process, coworkers’ hesitancy to collaborate with the focal employee can put these employees’ creative careers at risk. Drawing from the Dual Perspective Model of social evaluation, I propose that while claiming ownership of creative ideas would lead to positive evaluations of the focal employee’s creative potential by their coworkers, it can also lead to coworkers perceiving such individuals as being territorial. In turn, these perceptions influence coworkers’ willingness to collaborate on subsequent creative projects with the focal employee. I then identify granting credit to others’ own ideas as a behavioral moderating factor that prompts coworkers to view one’s communication of idea ownership positively versus negatively. I propose a field study and one interactive team lab experiment and report results from the exploratory pilot study to explore this research question.

SPEAKER

Mr. Kian Siong Tey
Ph.D. Candidate
INSEAD

ABSTRACT

Disputes between group representatives are both common and difficult to resolve. Although the dispute resolution literature suggests that such disputes can be resolved when third parties intervene, it does not offer evidence-based strategies for how to manage salient group identities. This is a critical void because these disputes involve very salient group identities. The social identity literature on the other hand, suggests that simultaneously activating subgroup and superordinate identities (“dual identity”) can mitigate intergroup bias and improve relations. However, this research leaves it unclear whether and how these insights can be leveraged by third parties mediating disputes because they predominantly examined hypothetical or mild conflict settings. Integrating insights from both literatures, we propose that third parties leveraging “dual-identity mediation” (DIM) are more successful in resolving disputes because DIM helps each representative understand how their subgroup identities can co-exist within a shared superordinate identity. We test these predictions in three studies of competitive negotiations and hostile disputes. Our studies show that compared to widely used alternative interventions or no third-party intervention, DIM produces (a) better economic outcomes (Studies 1 and 2), (b) better relational outcomes and (c) more positive evaluations of the outcome and the third party (Studies 1 and 2). However, we also find that DIM no longer offers these benefits when one group’s identity is more prototypical of the superordinate identity than the other group’s identity (Study 2).

SPEAKER

Dr. Chuck Eesley
Associate Professor of Management Science and Engineering
Stanford University

ABSTRACT

The financial motivation to earn advertising revenue by spreading misinformation has been widely conjectured to be among the main reasons misinformation continues to be prevalent online. Research aimed at reducing the spread of misinformation has so far focused on user-level interventions with little emphasis on how the supply of misinformation can itself be countered. In this work, we show how online misinformation is largely financially sustained via advertising, examine how financing misinformation affects the advertisers and ad platforms involved and suggest ways of reducing the financing of misinformation. First, we find that  advertising on misinformation outlets is pervasive for companies across several industries and is amplified by digital ad platforms that automatically distribute companies’ ads across the web. Using an information provision survey experiment with a representative sample of the U.S. population, we show that people decrease their demand for a company’s products or services upon learning about its role in monetizing misinformation via online ads. Across a variety of experimental conditions, our results indicate that companies advertising on misinformation websites can face substantial backlash from consumers who discover the prevalence of such ads. To shed light on why misinformation continues to be monetized despite the potential backlash for the advertisers involved, we survey decision-makers at companies. We find that most decision-makers are unaware of their companies’ ads appearing on misinformation websites but have a strong preference to avoid appearing on such websites. Moreover, those uncertain about their role in financing misinformation increase their demand for a platform-based solution to reduce monetizing misinformation upon learning about how platforms amplify ad placement on misinformation websites. Our results suggest low-cost, scalable information-based interventions that digital platforms could implement to reduce the financial incentive to misinform and counter the supply of misinformation online.

SPEAKER

Mr Jingfeng Yin
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Illinois Chicago

ABSTRACT

While previous research has predominantly focused on the socialization processes and consequences of general newcomers who are characterized by a lack of familiarity, high reliance on others, increased propensity for mistakes and errors, and heightened levels of uncertainty and stress, the socialization of star newcomers has received less attention. Unlike general newcomers, star newcomer socialization not only involves the newcomer’s adjustment and adaptation but also instigates changes and adaptations within the team. This planned research, grounded in human capital theory, explores the mechanisms and implications of star newcomer socialization. Specifically, it examines the interactive effects between team and star newcomer adaptation on team performance. The proposal includes plans to empirically test the hypotheses using a dataset of approximately 600 star newcomers and 2,000 star newcomer-season observations from North American basketball clubs in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The anticipated findings suggest that team adaptation, triggered by star newcomer performance, is positively correlated with team performance, and that star newcomer adaptation reinforces this relationship. This research aims to contribute to the existing literature on newcomer socialization, star performers, and team dynamics and performance.

SPEAKER

Dr. Waverly Ding
Associate Professor of Management & Organization
Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland

ABSTRACT

Young technology firms grow by adding human capital, yet large-scale, longitudinal studies of how young technology firms grow their human capital capabilities remain scare. We combined Crunchbase data of young technology firms with the LinkUp data of 3.2 million historical job postings of these firms to construct a dataset of 1,826 firms founded between 2007 and 2021 (with firm-year observations spanning 2009 to 2022). We analyzed these firms’ job postings to understand antecedents of young firms’ internal capability growth strategy though the hiring of human capital. Young firms may follow a focused strategy to grow their capabilities when they concentrate their resources to hire in one or a few functional areas. In contrast, young firms may also follow a broad-scoped strategy to add human-capital capabilities in broader functional areas and grow their organization in a more balanced way. We propose a three-pronged framework for understanding where young firms fall in this spectrum. Empirical analysis reveals suggestive evidence for the influence of serial entrepreneurs, though the stronger and more robust antecedent factor appears to be related to the characteristics of the firms’ lead VC investors. Firms backed by more pro-IPO-exit VC investors are more likely to utilize a broad-scoped internal capability growth strategy via hiring while firms backed by more pro-acquisition-exit VC investors are more likely to follow a focused strategy and hire people into narrow functional areas. Financial market conditions (whether or not a young firm is operating in a hot versus cold financial market) do not have any direct effect on the firm’s capability growth scope, though they moderate the effect of VC investors.

Speaker on 15 June, 2023

Prof. Anthea Zhang
Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Professor of Management
Jones Graduate School of Business
Rice University

Title
Caught Between Female Tokenism And Female Dominance: Examining The Impact Of Female Representation On Evaluations Of Entrepreneurial Projects In The Technology Field

ABSTRACT

It has been well noted that relative to their male counterparts, female entrepreneurs encounter disadvantages in seeking financial resources in the technology field. We examine how the level of female representation in technological projects—token female representation, substantive female representation, vs. no female representation—may affect how female and male evaluators evaluate the projects. We propose that compared to male evaluators, projects with token female representation are more likely to remind female evaluators of their own token status, and such an identity threat may lead them to give lower evaluations. We also propose that compared to female evaluators, projects with substantive female representation are more likely to be viewed by male evaluators as a liability of capability, leading them to give lower evaluations. Conducted in a unique setting wherein panels comprising female and male evaluators rated funding applications, our study supports these predictions. Moreover, we find that female evaluators’ lower evaluations of projects with token female representation are mitigated if the evaluators have a non-tech background, the entrepreneurs present their projects with languages consistent with a muscular style, or the ventures have received external investment. Our research can make important contributions to the literature on technological entrepreneurship and gender research.

Speaker on 16 June 2023

Prof. Amy Hillman
Professor & Rusty Lyon Chair in Strategy
W. P. Carey Management and Entrepreneurship
Arizona State University

Title
Help the poor? Governing corporate investment in poverty alleviation

ABSTRACT

Today both scholars and practitioners increasingly pay attention to a firm’s role in tackling grand societal challenges. We explore why and when some firms invest in solving grand challenges by specifically examining the role of governance in poverty alleviation. Poverty alleviation is an important societal challenge notable in its distal nature from the day-to-day activities of the firm. Focusing on a key institutional infrastructure, governments, we show two external governance mechanisms—local political pressure and local extractive power—important to our understanding of a firm’s investments in poverty alleviation. We also explore the role of two important internal governance mechanisms—firm ownership and political connections—and find interesting results regarding the level of ownership and connections and a firm’s efforts to address poverty alleviation. We build our understanding of the connection between institutional theory and corporate governance and develop the nexus between internal (ownership and political connections) and external (political pressure and extractive power) governance mechanisms as an important part of a firm’s commitment to this grand challenge.

SPEAKER

Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics
Postdoctoral Fellow at J-PAL
Harvard University and MIT

ABSTRACT

An influential explanation for global productivity differences is that frontier technologies are adapted to the high-income, research-intensive countries that develop them and “inappropriate” elsewhere. We study this hypothesis in the context of global agriculture by using mismatch in the presence of crop-specific pests and pathogens (CPPs) as a shifter of technology’s inappropriateness and investigating its effect on global innovation, technology diffusion and productivity. We find that (i) technology development is biased toward CPP threats in high-income countries; (ii) CPP mismatch reduces plant-variety transfer at the crop-by-country-pair level, particularly from innovation-intensive origins; and (iii) CPP mismatch with innovation-intensive countries reduces crop production, both statically in the modern cross-section and dynamically in response to historical events that have altered the geography of agricultural innovation. Our estimates, combined with a model, imply that the inappropriateness of technology reduces global productivity by 58% and increases cross-country disparities by 15%. We use our framework to explore how global productivity gaps would be affected by counterfactual changes to both the geography of innovation, for example from the rise of R&D in emerging markets, and environmental differences across countries, for example due to climate change. Together, these findings provide support for each pillar of the inappropriate technology hypothesis and demonstrate how the direction of innovation underlies disparities in global agricultural productivity.

SPEAKER

Dr. Tianxu Chen
Associate Professor
John Chambers College of Business and Economics
West Virginia University

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the attentional perspective and the awareness-motivation-capability framework in competitive dynamics, this study provides a theoretical framework linking a focal firm’s public display of executive attention breadth to a rival’s subsequent volume of competitive actions. We argue that a wider executive attention breadth displayed by the focal firm will motivate its rival to engage in more aggressive attacks. We also argue that the focal firm’s level of visibility and market dominance will moderate the impact of its executive attention breadth on a rival’s competitive actions. Based on a unique sample of competitor dyads from duopoly industries composed of Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 1500 firms, we found a positive association between a focal firm’s expressed executive attention breadth and its rival’s subsequent volume of competitive actions. We also found that when a focal firm’s visibility is high, the relationship between the focal firm’s expressed executive attention breadth and a rival’s action volume is stronger; whereas, when a focal firm’s market dominance is high, the relationship between the focal firm expressed executive attention breadth and a rival’s action volume is weaker.