Publication records
Subject(s)
Information technology and systems; Management sciences, decision sciences and quantitative methods; Marketing; Technology, R&D management
Keyword(s)
information design, bayesian persuasion, costly information acquisition, pilot tests,
product reviews
product reviews
We consider the information design problem of a demand-maximizing firm launching a product of unknown quality to a market consisting of customers who have heterogeneous prior beliefs about quality. The firm publicly discloses information about quality to all customers. These customers can subsequently opt to acquire additional information about the product at a cost from sources beyond the firm's control. Our study is motivated by the common practice of firms conducting public pilot tests or soliciting reviews from opinion leaders before launching a new product to inform potential customers about its quality. To analyze this problem, we construct a game-theoretic model of Bayesian persuasion between the firm and its customers. We characterize the firm's optimal information policy and show that it can range from fully disclosing quality to exaggerating or downplaying quality to not disclosing quality at all depending on market characteristics. We delineate the impact of market heterogeneity and access to additional information on the optimal information disclosure policy of the firm. Our analysis provides managerial guidance for firms in designing information provision strategies and operationalizing them for different market characteristics.
© 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Subject(s)
Economics, politics and business environment
Keyword(s)
Market Power, Search and Matching, Wages
JEL Code(s)
J31, J42
Subject(s)
Economics, politics and business environment; Ethics and social responsibility; Human resources management/organizational behavior; Management sciences, decision sciences and quantitative methods
Keyword(s)
misinformation, fake news, morality, fuzzy-trace theory, gist, verbatim, partisan politics
Volume
57
Journal Pages
101788
Subject(s)
Information technology and systems; Management sciences, decision sciences and quantitative methods; Technology, R&D management
Keyword(s)
information design, supply chain management, newsvendor model, forecast sharing
Subject(s)
Information technology and systems; Technology, R&D management
Keyword(s)
information technology, IT security law, cybersecurity, European regulation
Volume
52
Journal Pages
105927
ISSN (Online)
1873-6734
ISSN (Print)
0267-3649
Keyword(s)
strategic decisions, M&A China-Europe, hidden champions, industrial markets, entering markets abroad, managing premium products and no-frills products in one corporation
In 2013, Trumpf, a global market leader machine tools from Germany, acquired the majority shares in JFY, a smaller machine tool manufacturer from China. With this acquisition, Trumpf wanted to enter the fast-growing low-cost segment of the market. Until then, JFY had performed very well on the Chinese market, but the company's success increasingly waned after the acquistion. Other Chinese competitors performed significantly better. After JFY even had to report losses for the first time in 2019, Trumpf changed the management at JFY. Under the new management, initial successes were achieved, but even two and a half years later, JFY still did not reach the profit targets which all business units at Trumpf had to meet. In a Trumpf management meeting in October 2022, a decision was therefore to be made as to whether JFY should remain part of Trumpf or be sold off again.
Subject(s)
Strategy and general management; Technology, R&D management
Peer evaluations place organizational members in a dual role: they evaluate their peers and are being evaluated by their peers. We theorize that when evaluating their peers, they anticipate how their evaluations will be perceived and adjust their evaluations strategically to be evaluated more positively themselves when their peers assess them. Building on this overarching claim of role duality resulting in strategic peer evaluations, we focus on a dilemma that evaluating members face: they want to leverage their evaluations of peers to portray themselves as engaged and having high standards, but at the same time, they must be careful not to offend anyone as doing so may cause retaliation. We suggest that organizational members about to be evaluated resolve this dilemma by participating in more peer evaluations but carefully targeting in which evaluations they participate. We test our theory by analyzing peer evaluations on Wikipedia, supplemented by in-depth semi-structured interviews. Our study informs research on peer evaluation and organizational design by revealing how being an evaluator and evaluated can make evaluations more strategic.
© 2023, INFORMS
Subject(s)
Strategy and general management; Technology, R&D management
Keyword(s)
novelty, innovation, selection, simmelian strangers, secondments
Volume
45
Journal Pages
716–744
Subject(s)
Product and operations management; Strategy and general management; Technology, R&D management
Subject(s)
Economics, politics and business environment; Information technology and systems; Technology, R&D management
Keyword(s)
fiber optic technology, state aid, ex-post evaluation, efficiency, OECD countries
JEL Code(s)
C51, C54, H25, L52, O38