Knowledge that Transforms

Based on the proposition that leasing is environmentally superior to selling, some firms have adopted a leasing strategy and others promote their existing leasing programs as environmentally superior to “green” their image. The argument is that because a leasing firm retains ownership of the off-lease units, it has an incentive to remarket them or invest in designing a more durable product, resulting in a lower volume of new production and disposal. However, leasing might be environmentally inferior because of the direct control the firm has over the off-lease products, which may prompt the firm to remove them from the market to avoid cannibalizing the demand for new products. Motivated by these issues, we adopt a life-cycle environmental impact perspective and analytically investigate if leasing can be both more profitable and have a lower total environmental impact. We find that leasing can be environmentally worse despite remarketing all off-lease products and greener than selling despite the mid-life removal of off-lease products. Our analysis also provides insights for environmental groups and entities that use different approaches to improve the environmental performance of business practices. We show that imposing disposal fees or encouraging remanufacturing, under some conditions, can actually lead to higher environmental impact. We also identify when educating consumers to be more environmentally conscious can improve the relative environmental performance of leasing. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.

Organizations increasingly seek solutions to their open-ended design problems by employing a contest approach in which search over a solution space is delegated to outside agents. We study this new class of problems, which are costly to specify, pose credibility issues for the focal firm, and require finely tuned awards for meeting the firm's needs. Through an analytical model, we examine the relationship between problem specification, award structure, and breadth of solution space searched by outside agents toward characterizing how a firm should effectively manage such open-ended design contests. Our results independently establish and offer a causal explanation for an interesting phenomenon observed in design contests—clustering of searchers in specific regions of the solution space. The analysis also yields a cautionary finding—although the breadth of search increases with number of searchers, the relationship is strongly sublinear (logarithmic). Finally, from the practical perspective of managing the delegated search process, our results offer rules of thumb on how many and what size awards should be offered, as well as the extent to which firms should undertake problem specification, contingent on the nature (open-endedness and uncertainty) of the design problem solution being delegated to outside agents. This paper was accepted by Kamalini Ramdas, entrepreneurship and innovation.

This paper investigates the impact of royalty revision on incentives and profits in a two-stage (research and development (R&D) stage and marketing stage) alliance with a marketer and an innovator. The marketer offers royalty contracts to the innovator. We find that the potential for royalty revision leads to more severe distortions in the optimal initial royalty contracts offered by the marketer. We show that if the innovator plays a significant role in the marketing stage, the marketer should offer a low royalty rate initially and then revise the royalty rate up later. Otherwise, she should do the opposite. We identify two major effects of royalty revision. First, royalty revision provides the marketer with a flexibility to dynamically adjust royalty rates across the two stages of the alliance to better align the innovator's incentives. This incentive-realigning effect improves the marketer's profit. Second, royalty revision makes it harder for the marketer to obtain private information from the innovator, because the innovator worries that the marketer will take advantage of the information to revise the initial contract to a more favorable one to herself later. This information-revealing effect hurts the marketer's profit. We characterize in what kind of alliances marketers would benefit the most from royalty revision so that managers should clearly establish the expectation for royalty revision, and in what kind of alliances markerters would not benefit from royalty revision so that managers should commit not to revise the initial royalty contract. With royalty contracts that are contingent on the R&D outcome of the R&D stage, we find that contingent contract structure could be either substitutable (by fully capturing the incentive re-aligning effect) or complementary (by weakening the information revealing effect) to royalty revision, depending on whether the innovator plays a significant role in the marketing stage. Managers may need to use a contingent contract (if possible) either to replace or with royalty revision accordingly to improve profits. This paper was accepted by Kamalini Ramdas, entrepreneurship and innovation.

This paper deals with a basic issue: How does one approach the problem of designing the “right” objective for a given resource allocation problem? The notion of what is right can be fairly nebulous; we consider two issues that we see as key: efficiency and fairness. We approach the problem of designing objectives that account for the natural tension between efficiency and fairness in the context of a framework that captures a number of resource allocation problems of interest to managers. More precisely, we consider a rich family of objectives that have been well studied in the literature for their fairness properties. We deal with the problem of selecting the appropriate objective from this family. We characterize the trade-off achieved between efficiency and fairness as one selects different objectives and develop several concrete managerial prescriptions for the selection problem based on this trade-off. Finally, we demonstrate the value of our framework in a case study that considers air traffic management. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.

This paper examines renegotiation design in contracts for outsourced information technology (IT) services. Whereas prior literature in information systems has highlighted the likelihood of ex post rent seeking engendered by renegotiation, we build upon literature on incomplete contracts to posit that renegotiation can be Pareto improving by incorporating contingencies revealed ex post. Research on contract renegotiation has been hampered by two sets of challenges: the lack of appropriate data and empirical challenges in identification. We circumvent this problem both by appropriate data collection and by employing an identification strategy to address alternate causal explanations. We propose a measure, Pareto improving amendments, to assess renegotiation outcomes that enhance the value from outsourcing by hazard equilibration and by incorporating learning. Using a unique sample of 141 IT outsourcing contracts, we examine the role of decision rights delineated ex ante in enabling Pareto improving amendments and in resolving the trade-off between adaptation and rent seeking. We find that flexibility provisions, termination for convenience rights, and contractual rights whereby vendors are granted rights to reuse know-how are associated with Pareto improving amendments. The results are robust to potential endogeneity of contractual provisions when parties have feasible foresight and to the possibility of adverse selection in the sample. We also examine alternate explanations from the literature on contractual breach. Implications for practitioners and researchers are discussed. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.

The one-switch property states that the preference between any two lotteries switches at most once as wealth increases. Working within the expected utility framework, we extend the one-switch notion to the multiattribute case and identify the families of multiattribute utility functions that are one-switch. We then show that all multiattribute one-switch utility functions can be approximated by a sum of two multiattribute exponential utilities (sumex utility). Finally, we discuss how the one-switch property, when appropriate, can simplify the assessment of multiattribute utility. This paper was accepted by Peter Wakker, decision analysis.

We conduct laboratory experiments on variants of market scoring rule prediction markets, under different information distribution patterns, to evaluate the efficiency and speed of information aggregation, as well as test recent theoretical results on manipulative behavior by traders. We find that markets structured to have a fixed sequence of trades exhibit greater accuracy of information aggregation than the typical form that has unstructured trade. In comparing two commonly used mechanisms, we find no significant difference between the performance of the direct probability-report form and the indirect security-trading form of the market scoring rule. In the case of the markets with a structured order, we find evidence supporting the theoretical prediction that information aggregation is slower when information is complementary. In structured markets, the theoretical prediction that there will be more delayed trading in complementary markets is supported, but we find no support for the prediction that there will be more bluffing in complementary markets. However, the theoretical predictions are not borne out in the unstructured markets. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, Teck Ho, and Terrance Odean, special issue editors.

Online commercial interactions have increased dramatically over the last decade, leading to the emergence of networks that link the electronic commerce landing pages of related products to one another. Our paper conjectures that the explicit visibility of such “product networks”can alter demand spillovers across their constituent items. We test this conjecture empirically using data about the copurchase networks and demand levels associated with more than 250,000 interconnected books offered on Amazon.com over the period of one year while controlling for alternative explanations of demand correlation using a variety of approaches. Our findings suggest that on average the explicit visibility of a copurchase relationship can lead to up to an average threefold amplification of the influence that complementary products have on each others' demand levels. We also find that newer and more popular products “use” the attention they garner from their network position more efficiently and that diversity in the sources of spillover further amplifies the demand effects of the recommendation network. Our paper presents new evidence quantifying the role of network position in electronic markets and highlights the power of basing (virtual) shelf position on consumer preferences that are explicitly revealed through shared purchasing patterns. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.

We examine whether private feedback about relative performance can mitigate moral hazard in competitive environments by modifying the agents' self-esteem. In our experimental setting, people work harder and expect to rank better when told that they may learn their ranking, relative to cases when feedback will not be provided. Individuals who ranked better than expected decrease output but expect a better rank in the future, whereas those who ranked worse than expected increase output but lower their future rank expectations. Feedback helps create a ratcheting effect in productivity, mainly because of the fight for dominance at the top of the rank hierarchy. Our findings suggest that organizations can improve employee productivity by changing the likelihood of feedback, the reference group used to calculate relative performance, and the informativeness of the feedback message. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, Teck Ho, and Terrance Odean, special issue editors.

A large literature documents that women are different from men in their choices and preferences, but little is known about gender differences in the boardroom. If women must be like men to break the glass ceiling, we might expect gender differences to disappear among directors. Using a large survey of directors, we show that female and male directors differ systematically in their core values and risk attitudes, but in ways that differ from gender differences in the general population. These results are robust to controlling for differences in observable characteristics. Consistent with findings for the population, female directors are more benevolent and universally concerned but less power oriented than male directors. However, in contrast to findings for the population, they are less tradition and security oriented than their male counterparts. They are also more risk loving than male directors. Thus, having a woman on the board need not lead to more risk-averse decision making. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, Teck Ho, and Terrance Odean, special issue editors.