To remain relevant, IB research must address the increasing pressure being applied to multinational enterprises (MNEs) to address equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). In this first systematic review of EDI in international business (IB), we evaluate the extent to which IB research on EDI addresses current and future demands for global equality and social justice. Our text analysis of 1618 articles indicates that EDI research within IB focuses on similar diversity categories (e.g., gender) and rationales for addressing EDI (e.g., performance) as mainstream EDI research from outside IB, but that IB research does not leverage the global aspects of the MNE, and is slower to shift its goal from firm or team performance to the inclusion of underrepresented groups. Our subsequent narrative review of 101 articles within IB indicates that IB excels at theorizing mechanisms related to heterogeneity, but avoids moral arguments for EDI, and that findings are often blind to power or status differences, postcolonial legacies, and other inequalities. We call for more moral-based and power-laden analysis that could mitigate international resistance to EDI, while maintaining an interest in EDI’s relationship to organizational performance. At the intersection of IB and EDI research, we see the opportunity to lead societal change.

Airfares evolve dynamically, giving rise to a so-called price path. This price path is controlled via two levers: (i) a fare ladder, which defines a set of airfares before the selling season, and (ii) revenue management algorithms, which control how fares evolve along the ladder during the season. We hypothesize that the current policies to control both levers—which do not account for quality differences between competing airlines—give rise to an inefficient price path and, accordingly, a loss of potential revenue. We substantiate this hypothesis via a field experiment. By partnering with an airline, we introduced quality considerations in the design of fare ladders, across 5,000 itineraries, to show that current ladder-design policies indeed lead to a suboptimal price path. We also show that this inefficiency can be mitigated by incorporating quality differences between competing airlines. This creates a smoother (and more profitable) price path. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

This paper aims at linking the work presented in Dauzère‐Pérès et al. (1998) and more recently in Kasapidis et al. (2021) on the multiresource flexible job‐shop scheduling problem with nonlinear routes or equivalently with arbitrary precedence graphs. In particular, we present a mixed integer linear programming (MIP) model and a constraint programming (CP) model to formulate the problem. We also compare the theorems introduced in Dauzère‐Pérès et al. (1998) and Kasapidis et al. (2021) and propose a new theorem extension. Computational experiments were conducted to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of all propositions. Lastly, the proposed MIP and CP models are tested on benchmark problems of the literature and comparisons are made with state‐of‐the‐art algorithms.

We study the effects of positive and negative advertising in presidential elections. We develop a model to disentangle these effects on voter turnout and candidate choice. The central empirical challenges are highly correlated and endogenous advertising quantities that are measured with error. To address these challenges, we construct a large set of potential instruments, including interactions with incumbency that we demonstrate provide the critical identifying variation, and apply machine-learning causal inference methods. Using data from the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections, we find that positive and negative ads play fundamentally different roles. Negative ads are more effective at driving relative candidate shares, whereas positive ads stimulate turnout. These results indicate that a candidate geographically targeting tone trades off local relative share gains and local increases in turnout for localities with a strong base. Counterfactual simulations, where the candidates adjust the quantity of positive and negative advertising while budgets remain fixed, indicate that ad tone alone can impact the outcome of close elections. Our analysis also provides potential explanations as to why past studies have produced mixed findings on both ad-tone and turnout effects. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing. Supplemental Material: The data and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4347 .

Managing multinational enterprise subsidiaries is a core facet of international business research. A shifting reality on the ground has triggered concerns around the waning relevance of the subsidiary because the MNE and its structure and processes have become increasingly complex. Consequently, more decentralized, responsive, and fluid organizational designs are now at the core of IB research. Juxtaposing recent arguments questioning subsidiary research altogether, we argue that IB scholars can explore and explain complex realities in the contemporary MNE without unnecessarily restricting the breadth of the field and giving up links to established research and theory. We reframe conversations around inward- and outward-looking perspectives, providing a path forward that emphasizes the importance of embracing the subsidiary concept in research reflecting today's complex business environment.

This paper adapts real options theory to explain how executives create and maintain real options portfolios within leadership pipelines. Hypotheses flowing from our theorizing predict that executives often make seemingly risky staffing decisions for leaders who occupy stepping-stone positions. Focusing on their option (future potential) rather than project (current productivity) value, executives laterally transfer leaders in stepping-stone positions frequently, despite it resulting in lower short-term job performance, but often promote these leaders at lower levels of performance and sooner. Once leaders are promoted to destination positions where they may stay indefinitely, executives tend to transfer high-performing leaders more often but not when they are still improving the effectiveness of their current unit. We present evidence suggesting that executives make these decisions to improve other units and maintain a flexible system, possibly recapturing previous investments in developing those leaders. We provide empirical support for our hypotheses using eight years of data in a large retail organization (n = 25,004) where executives overseeing thousands of units made internal mobility decisions. These findings refine real options theory, show that it explains these phenomena better than existing theories, and provide important and immediately usable practical implications for executives. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1608 .

Not all older adults with dementia-related neuropathology in their brains experience cognitive decline or impairment. Instead, some people maintain relatively normal cognitive functioning despite neuropathologic burden, a phenomenon called cognitive resilience. Using a longitudinal, epidemiological, clinical-pathologic cohort study of older adults in the United States ( N = 348), the present research investigated associations between well-being and cognitive resilience. Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, results showed that higher eudaimonic well-being (measured via the Ryff Psychological Well-Being Scale) and higher hedonic well-being (measured via the Satisfaction with Life Scale) were associated with better-than-expected cognitive functioning relative to one’s neuropathological burden (i.e., beta-amyloid, neurofibrillary tangles, Lewy bodies, vascular pathologies, hippocampal sclerosis, and TDP-43). The association of eudaimonic well-being in particular was present above and beyond known cognitive resilience factors (i.e., socioeconomic status, education, cognitive activity, low neuroticism, low depression) and dementia risk factors (i.e., apolipoprotein E [ ApoE] genotype, medical comorbidities). This research highlights the importance of considering eudaimonic well-being in efforts to prevent dementia.

In 2017, “The Big Three” institutional investors launched campaigns to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. We estimate that their campaigns led American corporations to add at least 2.5 times as many female directors in 2019 as they had in 2016. Firms increased diversity by identifying candidates beyond managers’ existing networks and by placing less emphasis on candidates’ executive experience. Firms also promoted more female directors to key board positions, indicating firms’ responses went beyond tokenism. Our results highlight index investors’ ability to effectuate broad-based governance changes and the impact of investor buy-in in increasing corporate-leadership diversity.