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Markush structures are molecular skeletons containing not only specific atoms but also placeholders to represent broad sets of chemical (sub)structures. As genus claims, they allow a vast number of compounds to be claimed in a patent application without having to specify every single chemical entity. While Markush structures raise important questions regarding the functioning of the patent system, innovation researchers have been surprisingly silent on the topic. This paper summarizes the ongoing policy debate about Markush structures and provides first empirical insights into how Markush structures are used in patent documents in the pharmaceutical industry and how they affect important outcomes in the patent prosecution process. While not causing frictions in the patent prosecution process, patent documents containing Markush structures have an increased likelihood to restrict the patentability of follow-on inventions and to facilitate the construction of broad patent fences.

With permission of Elsevier

We illustrate conditions under which a trade platform selling its own products alongside third-party sellers benefits or harms consumers. This benefits consumers by lowering prices in a suite of models: a gatekeeper platform facing a competitive fringe of sellers, when fringe sellers also have their own channels perfectly or imperfectly substitutable to the platform; when the gatekeeper platform with fringe sellers competes against a big seller with market power on a differentiated alternative channel; and when the gatekeeper platform hosts only a big seller with market power. Platform product entry might harm consumers when a big firm sells both on the platform and on its alternative channel. The platform selling its own products harms consumers when consumers have heterogenous tastes for variants of products and the platform can control the access of fringe sellers via its commission and own product price. We also review the recent literature to highlight other channels via which benefits and harm arise from the platform selling its own products in its marketplace.

With permission of Elsevier

Even if we strive for an organizational learning culture that does not punish mistakes and failure, implementation is difficult. Especially when damage has been done, people are quick to talk about "culprits" and "sanctions," but this benefits no one. Analysis of the failure usually reveals that several factors played a role. Talking openly about this requires that the employees feel psychologically safe.
In aviation, openly dealing with mistakes is not only tolerated, but actively demanded. There, it is not the error that is the problem, but the unrecognized – or worse – the unreported error. This leads to the seemingly paradoxical result that, in the area of a high-risk organization of all places, the open, non-punitive handling of errors is the norm. The focus is on learning from mistakes in order to be able to avoid them henceforth. This principle should also apply to companies that want to reduce the errors that occur in their projects and processes.

Extant research in organizational networks has provided critical insights into understanding the benefits of occupying a brokerage position. More recently, researchers have moved beyond the brokerage position to consider the brokering processes (arbitration and collaboration) brokers engage in and their implications for performance. However, brokering processes are typically measured using scales that reflect individuals’ orientation toward engaging in a behavior, rather than the behavior itself. In this article, we propose a measure that captures the behavioral process of brokering. The measure indicates the extent to which actors engage in arbitration versus collaboration based on sequences of time stamped relational events, such as emails, message boards, and recordings of meetings. We demonstrate the validity of our measure as well as its predictive ability. By leveraging the temporal information inherent in sequences of relational events, our behavioral measure of brokering creates opportunities for researchers to explore the dynamics of brokerage and their impact on individuals, and also paves the way for a systematic examination of the temporal dynamics of networks.

With permission of SAGE Publishing

Arrow et al. (1949) introduced the first sequential search problem, “where at each stage the options available are to stop and take a definite action or to continue sampling for more information." We study how time pressure in the form of task accumulation may affect this decision problem. To that end, we consider a search problem where the decision maker (DM) faces a stream of random decision tasks to be treated one at a time, and accumulate when not attended to. We formulate the problem of managing this form of pressure as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process, and characterize the corresponding optimal policy. We find that the DM needs to alleviate this pressure very differently depending on how the search on the current task has unfolded thus far. As the search progresses, the DM is less and less willing to sustain high levels of workloads in the beginning and end of the search, but actually increases the maximum workload she is willing to handle in the middle of the process. The DM manages this workload by first making a priori decisions to release some accumulated tasks, and later by aborting the current search and deciding based on her updated belief. This novel search strategy critically depends on the DM's prior belief about the tasks, and stems, in part, from an effect related to the decision ambivalence. These findings are robust to various extensions of our basic set-up.

© 2019, INFORMS

With the growing interest in employer attractiveness, research is unsystematic on how this phenomenon can be conceptualized and studied. Studies tend to make little conceptual differentiation regarding for whom employers should be attractive, and therefore, address the perspectives of potential as well as current employees, who work in organizations for long periods of time. In this study our arguments relate to the phenomenon’s conceptual clarity as well as its differentiation from other related concepts. By focusing on employer attractiveness for current employees, we have systematically reviewed 48 studies published in business and management journals, and categorized findings into the Inputs-Mediators-Outputs model. This approach allowed us to depict significant limitations in the existing knowledge about employer attractiveness from the current employees’ perspective, and offer avenues for future research. Next, to delineate the future research agenda, we have concluded this study with a discussion on what our findings mean for managers and organizations.

Cash flows to hedge funds are highly sensitive to performance streaks, a streak being defined as subsequent quarters during which a fund performs above or below a benchmark, even after controlling for a wide range of common performance measures. At the same time, streaks have limited predictive power regarding future fund performance. This suggests investors weigh information suboptimally, and their decisions are driven too strongly by a belief in continuation of good performance, consistent with the “hot hand fallacy.” The hedge funds that investors choose to invest in do not perform significantly better than those they divest from. These findings are consistent with overreaction to certain types of information and do not support the notion that sophisticated investors have superior information or superior information processing abilities.

© 2021, INFORMS