Knowledge that Transforms

This research builds on the complementary corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures in strategy and marketing to provide insight into the efficacy of CSR as a challenger's competitive weapon against a market leader. Through an investigation of a real-world CSR initiative, we show that the challenger can reap superior business returns (i.e., more positive attitudinal and behavioral outcomes) among consumers who had participated in its CSR initiative, relative to those who were merely aware of the initiative. Specifically, participant consumers demonstrate the desired attitudinal and behavioral changes in favor of the challenger, regardless of their affective trust in the leader, whereas aware consumers' reactions become less favorable as their affective trust in the leader increases. Furthermore, participant consumers, but not aware ones, form a communal, trust-based bond with the challenger.

We formalize the idea that when managers require external investment to expand, higher-skilled firms will be more likely to diversify in equilibrium, even though managers can exploit asymmetric information about their ability to raise capital from investors. We exploit the timing of new fund launches in the hedge fund industry to distinguish between agency and capability effects in firm product diversification decisions, using a large survivor-bias-free panel data set on the hedge fund industry from 1994 to 2006. Empirically we show that diversifying firms' excess returns are high relative to those of other firms prior to diversification and fall within firm following diversification, but are six basis points higher per month per unit of risk ex post compared to a matched sample of focused firms. The evidence suggests that managers exploit asymmetric information about their own ability to time diversification decisions; yet, the discipline of markets ensures that better firms diversify, on average. The results provide large-sample empirical evidence that agency effects and firm capabilities jointly influence diversification decisions.

This paper investigates the capacity investment decision of a supplier who solicits private forecast information from a manufacturer. To ensure abundant supply, the manufacturer has an incentive to inflate her forecast in a costless, nonbinding, and nonverifiable type of communication known as “cheap talk.” According to standard game theory, parties do not cooperate and the only equilibrium is uninformative—the manufacturer's report is independent of her forecast and the supplier does not use the report to determine capacity. However, we observe in controlled laboratory experiments that parties cooperate even in the absence of reputation-building mechanisms and complex contracts. We argue that the underlying reason for cooperation is trust and trustworthiness. The extant literature on forecast sharing and supply chain coordination implicitly assumes that supply chain members either absolutely trust each other and cooperate when sharing forecast information, or do not trust each other at all. Contrary to this all-or-nothing view, we determine that a continuum exists between these two extremes. In addition, we determine (i) when trust is important in forecast information sharing, (ii) how trust is affected by changes in the supply chain environment, and (iii) how trust affects related operational decisions. To explain and better understand the observed behavioral regularities, we also develop an analytical model of trust to incorporate both pecuniary and nonpecuniary incentives in the game-theoretic analysis of cheap-talk forecast communication. The model identifies and quantifies how trust and trustworthiness induce effective cheap-talk forecast sharing under the wholesale price contract. We also determine the impact of repeated interactions and information feedback on trust and cooperation in forecast sharing. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our results for developing effective forecast management policies.

This paper investigates the pricing and restocking fee decisions of two competing firms selling horizontally differentiated products. We model a duopoly facing consumers who have heterogeneous tastes for the products and who must experience a product before knowing how well it matches with their preferences. The analysis yields several key insights. Restocking fees not only can be sustained in a competitive environment, but also are more severe when consumers are less informed about product fit and when consumers place a greater importance on how well products' attributes fit with their preferences. We compare the competitive equilibrium prices to a scenario in which consumers are certain about their preferences and find conditions defining when consumer uncertainty results in higher equilibrium prices. Comparison to a monopoly setting yields a surprising result: Equilibrium restocking fees in a competitive environment can be higher than those charged by a monopolist.

Prior research hypothesizes managers use “real actions,” including the reduction of discretionary expenditures, to manage earnings to meet or beat key benchmarks. This paper examines this hypothesis by testing how different types of marketing expenditures are used to boost earnings for a durable commodity consumer product that can be easily stockpiled by end consumers. Combining supermarket scanner data with firm-level financial data, we find evidence that differs from prior literature. Instead of reducing expenditures to boost earnings, soup manufacturers roughly double the frequency and change the mix of marketing promotions (price discounts, feature advertisements, and aisle displays) at the fiscal quarter-end when they have greater incentive to boost earnings. Our results confirm managers' stated willingness to sacrifice long-term value in order to smooth earnings and their stated preference to use real actions to boost earnings to meet different types of earnings benchmarks. We estimate that marketing actions can be used to boost quarterly net income by up to 5% depending on the depth and duration of promotion. However, there is a price to pay, with the cost in the following period being approximately 7.5% of quarterly net income. Finally, a unique aspect of the research setting allows tests of who is responsible for the earnings management. Although firms appear unable to increase the frequency of aisle display promotions in the short run, they can reallocate these promotions within their portfolio of brands. Results show firms shifting display promotions away from smaller revenue brands toward larger ones following periods of poor financial performance. This indicates the behavior is determined by parties above brand managers in the firm. These findings are consistent with firms engaging in real earnings management and suggest that effects on subsequent reporting periods and competitor behavior are greater than previously documented.

This paper examines a unique selling strategy, Group Buying, under which consumers enjoy a discounted group price if they are willing and able to achieve a required group size and coordinate their transaction time. We argue that Group Buying allows a seller to gain from facilitating consumer social interaction, i.e., using a group discount to motivate informed customers to work as “sales agents” to acquire less-informed customers through interpersonal information/knowledge sharing. We formally model such an information-sharing effect and examine if and when Group Buying is more profitable than (1) traditional individual-selling strategies, and (2) another popular social interaction scheme, Referral Rewards programs. We show that Group Buying dominates traditional individual-selling strategies when the information/knowledge gap between expert and novice consumers is neither too high nor too low (e.g., for products in the midstage of their life cycle) and when interpersonal information sharing is very efficient (e.g., in cultures that emphasize trust and group conformity, or when implemented through existing online social networks). We also show that, unlike Referral Rewards programs, Group Buying requires information sharing before any transaction takes place, thereby increasing the scale of social interaction but also incurring a higher cost. As a result, Group Buying is optimal when interpersonal communication is very efficient or when the product valuation of the less-informed consumer segment is high.

When firms recruit inventors, they acquire not only the use of their skills but also enhanced access to their stock of ideas. But do hiring firms actually increase their use of new recruits' prior inventions? Our estimates suggest they do, quite significantly in fact, by approximately 219% on average. However, this does not necessarily reflect widespread “learning by hiring.” In fact, we estimate that a recruit's exploitation of her own prior ideas accounts for almost half of the above effect, with much of the diffusion to others being limited to the recruit's immediate collaborative network. Furthermore, although one might expect the recruit's role to diminish rapidly as her tacit knowledge diffuses across her new firm, our estimates indicate that her importance is surprisingly persistent over time. We base these findings on an empirical strategy that exploits the variation over time in hiring firms' citations to the recruits' premove patents. Specifically, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to compare premove versus postmove citation rates for the recruits' prior patents and corresponding matched-pair control patents. Our methodology has three benefits compared to previous studies that also examine the link between labor mobility and knowledge flow: (1) it does not suffer from the upward bias inherent in the conventional cross-sectional comparison, (2) it generates results that are robust to a more stringently matched control sample, and (3) it enables a temporal examination of knowledge flow patterns.

This paper reports on the results of an experimental elicitation at the individual level of all prospect theory components (i.e., utility, loss aversion, and weighting functions) in two decision contexts: situations where alternatives are described as probability distributions and situations where the decision maker must experience unknown probability distributions through sampling before choice. For description-based decisions, our results are fully consistent with prospect theory's empirical findings under risk. Furthermore, no significant differences are detected across contexts as regards utility and loss aversion. Whereas decision weights exhibit similar qualitative properties across contexts typically found under prospect theory, our data suggest that, for gains at least, the subjective treatment of uncertainty in experience-based and description-based decisions is significantly different. More specifically, we observe a less pronounced overweighting of small probabilities and a more pronounced underweighting of moderate and high probabilities for experience-based decisions. On the contrary, for losses, no significant differences were observed in the evaluation of prospects across contexts.

This paper examines the drivers of adoption of Internet banking and the linkages among adoption drivers and outcomes (product acquisition, service activity, profitability, loyalty). We relate Internet banking adoption to customer demand for banking services, the availability of alternative channels, customers' efficiency in service coproduction (“customer efficiency”), and local Internet banking penetration. We find that customers who have greater transaction demand and higher efficiency, and reside in areas with a greater density of online banking adopters, are faster to adopt online banking after controlling for time, regional, and individual characteristics. Consistent with prior work, we find that customers significantly increase their banking activity, acquire more products, and perform more transactions. These changes in behavior are not associated with short-run increases in customer profitability, but customers who adopt online banking have a lower propensity to leave the bank. Building on these observations we also find that the adoption drivers are linked to the postadoption changes in behavior or profitability. Customers who live in areas with a high branch density or high Internet banking penetration increase their product acquisition and transaction activity more than Internet banking adopters in other regions. Efficient customers and those with high service demand show greater postadoption profitability.

It is well known that transaction-specific investments (TSIs) made in customers by account managers makes them vulnerable to opportunism by customers (i.e., the targets of the investments). The present research shows that TSIs made in customers by account managers can also lead them to be concerned about internal opportunism by nontargets of the investments (e.g., information technology or finance specialists in their own teams). Furthermore, it shows that concern about internal opportunism leads account managers to engage in internal blocking of their own team members (i.e., restricting their access to customers and to customer information), which results in lower performance with customers. This phenomenon is a conundrum in that account managers interested in stronger performance with customers appear to block the very functional specialists who can help them attain better performance. This research also identifies two types of continuities (account manager–customer continuity and specialist–customer continuity) that moderate the relationship between TSIs and concern about internal opportunism. Building on the literature in economics and organization theory, our research suggests that cross-functional teams that are designed to bring different functional areas together are more complex to manage than previously believed.