Publication database

Many universities have developed large-scale interdisciplinary research centers to address societal challenges and to attract the attention of private philanthropists and federal agencies. However, prior studies have mostly shown that interdisciplinary centers relate to a narrow band of outcomes such as publishing and grants. Therefore, we shift attention to include outcomes that have been the centers mandate to influence - namely outreach to the media and private industry, as well as broader research endeavors and securing external funding. Using data covering Stanford University between 1993 and 2014, we study if being weakly and strongly affiliated with interdisciplinary centers in one year relates to and increases (1) knowledge production (publications, grants, and inventions), (2) instruction (numbers of students taught, PhDs, and postdocs advised), (3) intellectual prominence (media mentions, awards won and centrality within the larger collaboration network), and (4) the acquisition of various sources of funding in the next year. Our results indicate that interdisciplinary centers select productive faculty and increase their activity on a broad range of outcomes further, and in ways greater than departments and traditional interdisciplinary memberships, such as courtesy and joint appointments.

With permission of Elsevier

We examine how 712 executives from several countries, industries and backgrounds are willing to rely on trust (WTRT) when entering a collaborative venture where both partners are at risk. Presented with a specific partnership opportunity they were asked about the level of safeguards required to enter into an agreement. We test for the impact of contextual and demographic conditions and confirmed differences in WTRT between nationalities, but find that several contextual variables mediate this impact. Different nationalities treat three dimensions of trust (integrity, reliability, and benevolence) differently as they are shown to be time dependent. We conclude that context is as important as demography in determining an executive’s WTRT.

With permission of Elsevier

This paper advances novel theory and evidence on the emergence of informal leadership networks in groups that feature no formally designated leaders or authority hierarchies. Integrating insights from relational schema and network theory, we develop and empirically test a 3-step process model. The model’s first hypothesis is that people use a “linear-ordering schema” to process information about leadership relations. Taking this hypothesis as a premise, the second hypothesis argues that whenever an individual experiences a particular leadership attribution to be inconsistent with the linear-ordering schema, s/he will tend to reduce the ensuing cognitive inconsistency by modifying that leadership attribution. Finally, the third hypothesis builds on this inconsistency-reduction mechanism to derive implications about a set of network-structural features (asymmetry, a-cyclicity, transitivity, popularity, and inverse-popularity) that are predicted to endogenously emerge as a group’s informal leadership network evolves. We find broad support for our proposed theoretical model using a multi-method, multi-study approach combining experimental and empirical data. Our study contributes to the organizational literature by illuminating a socio-cognitive dynamics underpinning the evolution of informal leadership structures in groups where formal authority plays a limited role.

© 2018, INFORMS

We suggest foundations for the Shapley value and for the naïve solution, which assigns to any player the difference between the worth of the grand coalition and its worth after this player left the game. To this end, we introduce the decomposition of solutions for cooperative games with transferable utility. A decomposer of a solution is another solution that splits the former into a direct part and an indirect part. While the direct part (the decomposer) measures a player's contribution in a game as such, the indirect part indicates how she affects the other players' direct contributions by leaving the game. The Shapley value turns out to be unique decomposable decomposer of the naïve solution.

With permission of Elsevier

While consumers and marketers perpetuate the lay theory that indulging with a reason is more pleasurable and makes everyone happier, this research identifies a condition under which indulging without a reason “feels right” and produces a more positive emotional reaction. The authors show that indulging with or without a reason and consumers’ trait self-control interact to influence happiness felt following an indulgent purchase. While high self-control consumers are happier when they have a reason to buy indulgent products (e.g., when they can justify the indulgence), low self-control consumers are happier when they do not have a reason to indulge, compared to when they have a reason. That is, indulging with a reason is less pleasurable for consumers with low self-control. This effect on happiness has an impact on downstream judgments about the product and yields important implications for consumer welfare as well as marketing managers. Across four studies we show the effect on consumption happiness, examine consequences of the effect, and report evidence for the underlying process.

With permission of Elsevier

We study the capacity choice problem of a firm, whose access to capital is hampered by financial frictions, i.e., moral hazard. The firm optimizes both its capacity investment under demand uncertainty and its sourcing of funds from a competitive investor. Ours is the first study of this problem to adopt an optimal contracting approach: feasible sources of funds are derived endogenously from fundamentals and include standard financial claims (debt, equity, convertible debt, etc.). Thus, in contrast to most of the literature on financing capacity investments, our results are robust to a change of financial contract. We characterize the optimal capacity level under optimal financing. First, we find conditions under which a feasible financial contract exists that achieves first-best. When no such contract exists, we find that under optimal financing, the choice of capacity sometimes exceeds strictly the efficient level. Further, the firm invests more when its cash is low, and in some cases less when the project’s unit revenue is high. These results run counter to the newsvendor logic and standard finance arguments. We also show that our main results hold in the case of a strategic monopolist investor, and such an investor may invest more than a competitive one.

© 2017, INFORMS

Service employees frequently must enforce rules upon their customers to mitigate dysfunctional customer behavior and ensure proper service delivery (e.g., enforce “fasten seatbelt” signs on flights). However, the consequences of enforcing service rules (ESR) are not well understood. To elucidate the effect of ESR, the authors present seven studies involving > 6800 customers and consisting of cross-sectional and longitudinal data from customer surveys and company records as well as experiments. The results indicate that ESR exerts ambivalent effects: customers who experience ESR directed at other customers perceive service employees as more competent, which increases customer loyalty. However, if ESR is directed at customers themselves, they perceive a self-concept threat, leading them to devalue service employees' warmth and competence and to become less loyal. The effects of ESR hinge on a number of factors, including the harm that dysfunctional behavior potentially causes, the way ESR is communicated, and customers' experience with the service situation. Furthermore, the authors show that service employees can alleviate the negative effects of ESR by communicating service rules in advance and justifying ESR appropriately.

With permission of Elsevier

Most scientific research is performed by teams, and for a long time, observers have inferred individual team members’ contributions by interpreting author order on published articles. In response to increasing concerns about this approach, journals are adopting policies that require the disclosure of individual authors’ contributions. However, it is not clear whether and how these disclosures improve upon the conventional approach. Moreover, there is little evidence on how contribution statements are written and how they are used by readers. We begin to address these questions in two studies. Guided by a conceptual model, Study 1 examines the relationship between author order and contribution statements on more than 12,000 articles to understand what information is provided by each. This analysis quantifies the risk of error when inferring contributions from author order and shows how this risk increases with team size and for certain types of authors. At the same time, the analysis suggests that some components of the value of contributions are reflected in author order but not in currently used contribution statements. Complementing the bibliometric analysis, Study 2 analyzes survey data from more than 6000 corresponding authors to examine how contribution statements are written and used. This analysis highlights important differences between fields and between senior versus junior scientists, as well as strongly diverging views about the benefits and limitations of contribution statements. On the basis of both studies, we highlight important avenues for future research and consider implications for a broad range of stakeholders.

Public policy makers seek to enhance disclosure of firms’ sustainability performance, yet firms debate about whether, or to what extent, they should engage in sustainability reporting. This article seeks to advance current understanding about the business returns to sustainability reporting by examining the short- and long-term investor reactions. Through an event study, this research documents significant short-term stock market reaction to the release of sustainability reports. In particular, abnormal stock returns around the release of such reports are positively related to firm sustainability performance, and this positive link is smaller for firms in a strong information environment. The results show that over the long term, relative to nonreporting firms, firms that release sustainability reports enjoy higher value relevance of sustainability performance. These findings suggest that sustainability reports enhance information transparency and allow investors to incorporate sustainability information in stock valuation. This study provides strong evidence for the business case of sustainability reporting, and offers important implications for public policy makers in terms of devising policies and regulations to promote sustainability reporting.

With the permission of the American Marketing Association