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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.

Our current environment has been typified as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous or VUCA (e.g., Bennett & Lemoine, 2014; Horney, Pasmore, & O'Shea, 2010) – even before largely unpredicted developments in the political arena such as Brexit and the US presidential election. It may be argued that organizations themselves become VUCA, witness the accelerating pace at which firms rise and fall (Govindarajan & Srivastava, 2016). In that context, more and more decisions may be analyzed as errors in the making, as errors refer to “unintended and potentially avoidable deviations from organizationally specified goals and standards&x201D; (Lei, Naveh, & Novikov, 2016: 2). Insofar as errors may challenge critical organizational goals and resources, strategic error management becomes a critical challenge for leaders including top executives. Errors are pervasive at all levels of organizations (Hunter, Tate, Dzieweczynski, & Bedell-Avers, 2011; Makary & Daniel, 2016; Panko, 2008), and as we are shifting from managing stable operations to managing innovation and change, errors come in increasing numbers and kinds, with opportunities to learn from them. Errors can no longer be avoided by enforcing stability on organizations; instead, they must be managed as part of the innovation, growth, learning, and change process. This thought- provoking symposium brings together international scholars who share the idea that research on organizational errors and error management may provide insights and inform leaders at the strategic level. Our panelists will offer conclusions from recent research that will interest both scholars and practitioners in this under-explored area, and spark a debate on how to better detect, report and ultimately manage errors, for the benefit of not only organizations themselves, but also hopefully the society at large."

With permission of the Academy of Management

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

This paper develops a new suggestion on how to break the sovereign-bank nexus. This nexus, which is due to significant holdings of domestic sovereign debt by Euro zone banks, endangers financial stability. Our suggestion does not involve pooling and/or tranching and is fully consistent with standard Basel capital requirements. At the same time, it does not require capital provision for sovereign portfolios held as collateral for liquidity operations with the lender of last resort (LOLR). Rather, it differentiates between the purpose of collateral for LOLR liquidity operations and the individual investment decision of which sovereign debt to hold. In this way, our methodology is market-driven and can foster financial integration in Europe.

The text of the working paper is available at SSRN.

We consider a firm buying a commodity from a spot market as raw material and selling a final product by submitting bids. Bidding opportunities (i.e., demand arrivals) are random, and the likelihood of winning bids (i.e., selling the product) depends on the bid price. The price of the commodity raw material is also stochastic. The objective of the firm is to jointly decide on the procurement and bidding strategies to maximize its expected total discounted profit in the face of this demand and supply randomness. We model the commodity prices in the spot market as a Markov chain and the bidding opportunities as a Poisson process. Subsequently, we formulate the decision-making problem of the firm as an infinite-horizon stochastic dynamic program and analytically characterize its structural properties. We prove that the optimal procurement strategy follows a price-dependent base-stock policy and the optimal bidding price is decreasing with respect to the inventory level. We also formulate and analyze three intuitively appealing heuristic strategies, which either do not allow for carrying inventory or adopt simpler bidding policies (e.g., a constant bid price or myopically set bid prices). Using historical daily prices of several commodities, we then calibrate our models and conduct an extensive numerical study to compare the performances of the different strategies. Our study reveals the importance of adopting the optimal integrative procurement and bidding strategy, which is particularly rewarding when the raw material prices are more volatile and/or when there is significant competition on the demand side (the probability of winning is much smaller when submitting the same bid price). We establish that the relative performances of the three heuristic strategies depend critically on the holding cost of raw material inventory and the competitive environment, and identify conditions under which the shortfalls in profits from adopting such strategies are relatively less significant.

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015. With permission of Springer