Knowledge that Transforms

This paper investigates out-of-sample performance of the naïve hedging strategy relative to that of the minimum variance hedging strategy, in which the covariance parameters are estimated from 18 econometric models. Hedging performance is compared across 24 futures markets. Our main findings suggest that it is difficult to find a strategy under the minimum variance framework that outperforms the naïve hedging strategy both consistently and significantly. Our findings are robust to different sample periods, estimation windows, and hedging horizons and can be partly explained by the effects of estimation error and model misspecification. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2028 .

We study the effectiveness of leaders for inducing coordinated organizational change to a more efficient equilibrium, i.e., a turnaround. We compare communication from leaders to incentive increases and also compare the effectiveness of randomly selected and elected leaders. Although all interventions yield shifts to more efficient equilibria, communication from leaders has a greater effect than incentives. Moreover, leaders who are elected by followers are significantly better at improving their group’s outcome than randomly selected leaders. The improved effectiveness of elected leaders results from sending more performance-relevant messages. Our results are evidence that the way in which leaders are selected affects their legitimacy and the degree to which they influence followers. Finally, we observe that a combination of factors—specifically, incentive increases and communication from elected leaders—yields near-universal turnarounds to full efficiency.

We show that the way decision makers construct risk perceptions is systematically influenced by their level of self-control: low self-control results in greater weighting of probability and reduced weighting of consequences of negative outcomes in formulating overall threat perceptions. Seven studies demonstrate such distorted risk construction in wide-ranging risk domains. The effects hold for both chronic and manipulated levels of perceived self-control and are observed only for risks involving high personal agency (e.g., overeating, smoking, drinking). As an important implication of our results, we also demonstrate that those lower (higher) in self-control show relatively less (more) interest in products and lifestyle changes reducing consequences (e.g., a pill that heals liver damage from drinking) than those reducing likelihood of risks (e.g., a pill that prevents liver damage from drinking). We also explore several possible underlying processes for the observed effect and discuss the theoretical and managerial relevance of our findings.

In reverse auctions, buyers often retain the right to bargain further concessions from the winners. The optimal form of such procurement is an English auction followed by an auctioneer's option to engage in ultimatum bargaining with the winners. We study behavior and performance in this procurement format using a laboratory experiment. Sellers closely follow the equilibrium strategy of exiting the auction at their costs and then accepting strictly profitable offers. Buyers generally exercise their option to bargain according to their equilibrium strategy, but their take-it-or-leave-it offers vary positively with auction prices when they should be invariant. We explain this deviation by modeling buyers' subjective posteriors regarding the winners' costs as distortions of the Bayesian posteriors, calculated using a formulation similar to a commonly used probability weighting function. We further test the robustness of the experimental results and the subjective posterior explanation with three additional experimental treatments. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1880 .

The centralization versus decentralization choice is perhaps the quintessential organizational structure decision. In the operations realm, this choice is particularly critical when it comes to the procurement function. Why firms may opt to decentralize procurement has been often studied and confirmed to be a multifaceted choice. This paper complements existing studies by detailing the trade-offs in the centralization versus decentralization decision in light of firms' strategic use of inventories to influence supplier pricing. In particular, we demonstrate that a firm's decision to cede procurement choices to its individual divisions can help moderate inventory levels and provide a natural salve on supply chain frictions.

We study the impact of social networks on the ability of independent directors to obtain private information from their firms' executives. We find that independent directors socially connected to their firms' senior executives earn significantly higher returns than unconnected independent directors in stock sales transactions. The network effect on independent directors' trading profitability is stronger in firms with higher information asymmetry and with more powerful executives. In addition, the trading returns of independent directors previously unconnected with firm executives increase after the arrival of a connected executive and drop after the connected executive leaves the firm. Moreover, the net stock sales by connected directors predict future negative news for up to three quarters. As a comparison, the trading returns of connected and unconnected independent directors do not differ significantly in stock purchases. Taken together, our results suggest that social connections help independent directors gain access to private bad news information from firms' senior executives.

This paper investigates how venture-backed companies are affected when others sharing the same investor suffer a negative shock. In theory, companies may be helped or hurt in this scenario. To examine the topic empirically, I estimate the impact of the collapse of the technology bubble on non-information-technology (non-IT) companies that were held alongside IInternet companies in venture portfolios. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that the end of the bubble was associated with a significantly larger decline in the probability of raising continuation financing for these non-IT companies in comparison to others. This does not appear to be driven by unobservable company characteristics such as company quality or IT relatedness; for the same portfolio company receiving capital from multiple venture firms, investors with greater Internet exposure were significantly less likely to continue to participate in follow-on rounds.

In this paper we build a theoretical model of a firm repurchasing its corporate debt. We find that firm creditors as a group sell debt to the firm only at face value. However, because of the cross-creditor externalities, buying back debt is cheaper and easier when there are many creditors, e.g., when debt is traded on the open market. We further show that repurchases contribute to flexibility in firms' capital structure and can increase ex ante firm value. The value of repurchases to the shareholders increases with the firm's ability to save cash and delay the repurchase. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1965 .

One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the extent of salary negotiations and the nature of sorting. We find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate for a higher wage, whereas women are more likely to signal their willingness to work for a lower wage. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, these differences disappear completely. In terms of sorting, we find that men, in contrast to women, prefer job environments where the “rules of wage determination” are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous.

We implement a gym-attendance incentive intervention and elicit subjects' predictions of their postintervention attendance. We find that subjects greatly overpredict future attendance, which we interpret as evidence of partial naiveté with respect to present bias. We find a significant postintervention attendance increase, which we interpret as habit formation, and which subjects appear not to predict ex ante. These results are consistent with a model of projection bias with respect to habit formation. Neither the intervention incentives, nor the small posttreatment incentives involved in our elicitation mechanism, appear to crowd out existing intrinsic motivation. The combination of naiveté and projection bias in gym attendance can help to explain limited take-up of commitment devices by dynamically inconsistent agents, and points to new forms of contracts. Alternative explanations of our results are discussed. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2091 .